The Mysterious Planet: читать книгу онлайн полностью и бесплатно

Commander Griffith cut their own acceleration to a minimum, until their weight seemed no greater than it had been on Mars. “Prepare proton rifle!” he called.

“Proton gun ready.” The reply came back at once.

Griffith called down the co-ordinates of the other ship’s location. It was a tiny thing now, but still visible in the radar screen. “Fire!” he ordered, when the co-ordinates were checked.

Almost instantaneously, a terrific burst of fire seemed to erupt in the telescope screen where the black ship had been. Then it faded, and the black ship was a tiny spot, surrounded by a blue haze that turned red and disappeared. Again the proton gun fired, and again. The results were the same.

Something seemed to kick at the Lance of Deimos. Bob suddenly was tossed back of his seat as the ship jerked sharply, its nose tilting sharply. The kicks came again, one for each blast that had been fired from the proton gun.

This time it was Bob who took a wild guess, culled out of all the fantastic stories and articles he had read. “Pressor rays!” he gasped. Nobody had ever figured out what tractor and pressor rays were, beyond the fact that they pulled or pushed, but that hadn’t stopped writers from speculating on them.

Hoeck snorted, but Commander Griffith nodded doubtfully. “It’s as good an explanation as any. Something pushed against us, anyhow—and it wasn’t an accident. I might guess some kind of rebound, but the jolts came faster than we fired the proton gun. That was a warning!”

Then abruptly the pip that marked the black ship on the radar screen disappeared. It had been shrinking to a point, but this was different. It was as if someone had drawn a curtain across space, cutting off the ship from them.

Another miracle! Now the ship could neutralize the radar beam. That meant it either had to absorb the beam or become completely transparent to it—and one was as impossible as the other.

“Delayed reaction from the proton blasts,” Anderson said doubtfully. “Maybe he blew up.”

Commander Griffith shook his head. For the first time Bob could remember, his father looked completely unsure of himself. “No—you know that couldn’t explain it. The fragments would show up on the radar just as strongly as the ship did. He just neutralized our beam.”

He sat staring at the controls and the screen, obviously hating to give up, and yet with nothing to do.

They couldn’t locate the ship; if they did, they couldn’t catch up with it. Even if they were right beside it, their best weapons were harmless, while it could play games with them by sending harmless little jolts to tell them to go away and stop being bothersome.

Finally Griffith sighed heavily, and shook himself. “I guess we write ourselves off as failures,”

he summed it up. “Plot me a course back to the rest of Wing Nine, Hoeck. We’d better stop chasing hobgoblins and get back to our mission.”

There was nothing else to do, Bob realized, but it didn’t end bis disappointment. He’d grown up with the idea that any Navy ship was a match for any number of pirates and one of the favorite games at the Academy had been based on elaborate movements of pieces on a board where all were pirates except one Navy cruiser. Now, in his first encounter, he was going down heavily in defeat—hopelessly outclassed by a single pirate ship.

It wouldn’t make a pretty story to tell! And it wasn’t good to think about Hoeck was just looking up from his calculations when a signal buzzed from the intercom.

The Commander pressed down one of the buttons automatically. “Control.”

“Sparks,” the voice said quickly. “Commander, I’ve just got another message from the Ionian!”

“The what?”

“The Ionian, sir. It was full of static, but someone was yelling for help and complaining about being stranded by pirates without air. He didn’t know the standard code at all, sir, and his power was fading pretty fast.” Sparks was obviously doubtful about it himself. “I tried to call back, but I got no answer.”

“Could anyone still be on board?” Griffith asked Anderson.

The Leftenant nodded slowly. “I suppose so. It would take days to examine every hiding place there; we just looked in every logical place. But how would he send out a voice message without air?”

“Snap open his helmet, toss in the mike, and close it again. If he held his breath, the suit would fill almost at once, and he’d be unhurt,” Bob answered, and again he was borrowing from some of the adventure fiction he had read. “There’d be some leak near the wires, but he could send a message, pull out the mike, and close down tight again.”

Griffith nodded approvingly at Bob. “I did it myself once, just to test it. The same story you read, Bob, I’ll bet. Sparks, keep sending out assurances—in case his receiver has a light—to tell him we’re answering. Hoeck, you’d better give me another course.”

“Already done,” the navigator said. He passed it over.

This time deceleration was held to six gravities pressure, but it lasted longer. The hulk of the Ionian had been drifting along at a constant speed, while the Lance had built up to a much higher speed and then drifted on at that greater rate. The distance between the two ships was considerable.

But matching course and speed was routine, now that pirates didn’t have to be considered.

They snapped out of high drive almost beside the derelict ship, and with only a slight tendency to drift apart. Commander Griffith corrected this with a few quick blasts of the little steering rockets. Through the viewport Bob could just see some of the crew getting the rubbery tube ready to connect the two ships again.

He looked inquiringly at his father as Anderson got ready to go across, and the Commander nodded. This time Anderson was buckling a heavy automatic pistol outside his suit. He gave one to Bob. “We don’t take chances. If there’s anything funny, shoot first and then get back to the Lance; we have to figure it might be a trap.”