作者：Galouye, Daniel F.
格式: AZW3, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT
Spillthrough试读：
SPILLTHROUGH
By Daniel F. Galouye[Transcriber Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy January 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Ships switching from hyper to normal space had to do it in a micro-second—if the crews were to live. But it would take Brad suicidal minutes!
Like the sibilant, labored breathing of a dying monster, the tortured ship wailed its death sobs as it floundered in deep hyperstellar space.
Clank-sss, clank-sss, went the battered safety valve of the pile cooling system.
BOOM ... boom ... BOOM ... boom. A severed and dangling piston rod crashed in monotonous rhythm against a deck beam as the rest of the auxiliary compression unit strained to satisfy its function.
An off-beat bass viol strum added its depressive note to the symphony of destruction's aftermath—throom-throom ... throom-throom. It was the persistent expansion of plate metal reacting to heat from a ruptured tube jacket.
Forward, in the control compartment of the cargo craft, the sounds were muted. But the intervening bulkheads did not lessen their portent.
Brad Conally ran a hand over the stubbles on his cheek and swayed forward in the bucket-type seat, his head falling to rest against the control column.
Somewhere aft the ship groaned and metal scraped against metal with a sickening rending sound.
There was a lurch and Brad was jerked to one side, his head ramming against the inclination control. The ventral jet came to life in unexpected protest and fired once.
His hand shot out instinctively to return the loose, displaced lever to neutral. But the force of the single burst had already taken effect and the lower part of his stomach tied itself in a knot.
Centrifugal force reeled him to the fringe of consciousness. He struggled to reach the dorsal-ventral firing lever, praying that the linkage was not severed and the mechanism was still operative. His hand found the lever and jerked. The dorsal jet came to life with a roar. He jockeyed the control back and forth across neutral position. The two jets fired alternately. The sickening, end-over-end gyration became gentler.
The ship steadied itself again into immobility. But a snap sounded from back aft. It was followed by a grating noise that crescendoed and culminated in a terrific crash. His ears popped. A clang reverberated, evidence of an automatic airlock sealing off another punctured section of the vessel.
Shrugging fatigue from his body, he looked up at the panel. The massometer showed a decrease of six tons. The explanation was simple, Brad laughed dryly: A good one-quarter of his load of crated inter-calc audio retention banks had rammed through the hull and floated into space.
He glanced at the scope. The twenty odd crates, some of them taking up an orbital relationship with the vessel, were blips on the screen.
Twisting the massometer section selector, he read off the figures. Hold One showed full cargo of inter-calc equipment. Hold Two, with its thirty bins of hematite, was intact. The third cargo compartment, containing more crated inter-calc units, was the damaged one. The massometer reading for that hold accounted for the missing weight.——————————
"How're you doing, Brad?" the receiver rasped feebly. He recoiled at the unexpected sound.
"She's still in one piece, Jim," he shouted to compensate for the strength the signal would lose in traveling the distance to the fleeing lifecraft. "Have you cleared through your second hyperjump yet?"
"Getting ready to go into the third. There won't be any more communicating after that ... not with this short-range gear and your faulty transmitter. Find out the trouble yet?"
Brad ignored the question. "How long, Jim?" His voice was eager. "How long before you get to port?"
"Three jumps in one day. Seven more to go. That figures out to a little over two more days. I'm making better time than we expected with this peanut. Allow two more days for the slow tows to return.... Still think it'll hold together?"
Brad was silent.
"Brad," Jim's voice went into low gear. "I've still got enough juice to come back and pick you up. After all, one ship and one load of cargo ... it's just not worth it."
Brad listened to the ominous convulsions of the ship for a moment. "Your orders are to continue to Vega IV. I'm sticking."
"But, skipper! Dammit! There's always the chance of spilling through into normal! That's a torturous way to go!"
Brad's lips brushed roughly against the bulkhead mike. "If I fall through it's just me, isn't it?"
Although the sound level was too low, he knew there was a sigh on the other end. "Okay," the speaker whispered. "If I can't convince you...."
Brad leaned against the bulkhead and shivered. He'd have to see whether he couldn't get more output from the heat converter—if he could chance going past the leaking pile again. Or was it the cold that was causing him to tremble?—If he entered normal space at less than minimum breakthrough speed.... He didn't complete the distasteful mental picture.
He thought of his only functioning hyperdrive tube. Its gauge showed a power level that was only high enough to boost the craft back onto the hyperspace level when it started to conform with the normal tendency to fall through. How many times the tube could be counted on to repeat the performance he couldn't guess. It might be painful if he should let the drop gain too much momentum before correcting—human beings were built to cross the barrier in nothing longer than a micro-second. But, he resolved, he would worry about that when the time came.
"Why don't you let it go, Brad?" the voice leaped through the grating again.
Brad started. He thought Jim had cut the communication.
"You know the score. If we swing this we can get all of West Cluster Supplies' work. We'll need an extra ship—several of them. But with the contract we'll be able to borrow as much as we want."
Jim laughed. "At least I'm glad there's a rational, mercenary motive. For a while I thought you were going through with that go-down-with-the-ship routine."
Boom ... Boom ... BOOM. The loose rod pounded with suddenly increasing fury.
He lunged through the hatch. At least the compression unit was forward of the faulty pile. And, while he did the job which automatic regulators had abandoned, he would not have to keep track of his time of exposure to hard radiation.——————————
"Calling Space Ship Fleury. Repeat: Calling Space Ship Fleury.... Answer please."
Brad jerked his head off the panel ledge. Hot coffee from a container that his limp hand half-gripped sloshed over the brim and spilled on the deck. He turned a haggard, puzzled face to the bulkhead speaker.
It had flooded the compartment with sound—live, vibrant sound. The signal had been loud and clear. Not weak. Not like the one from Jim's lifecraft two jumps away.
"This is the SS Fleury!" he shouted, stumbling forward eagerly and gripping the gooseneck of the mike. "Come in!"
"Fleury from SS Cluster Queen.... Answering your SOS."
His hopes suddenly vanished. "Is that Altman? What are you doing on this run?"
"Yeah, Conally. This is Altman. Freeholding to Vega.... What's your trouble? Anything serious?"
Altman had come in to unload at Arcturus II Spaceport while the Fleury was still docked, Brad recalled. The huge ship had been berthed next to his.
"Main drive jacket blown out in the engine compartment," Brad said hoarsely. "It happened at the end of the eighth jump. We're about a half-notch into hyper—just barely off the border."
"That's tough." There was little consolation in the tone. "Got any passengers?"
"No. None this trip. I'm solo now. My engineer's gone off in the craft."
"Can't you replace that jacket and limp through?"
"Got a faulty gasket on the replacement. Can't be patched up."
"You're in a helluva fix, Conally. Even a Lunar ferry pilot's got enough sense to check his spare parts before blastoff."
"I check mine after each landing. There isn't much that can happen to it when the pile's cold.... Can you give me a tow, Altman?"
"Can't do that, Conally. I'm not...."
"If you'll just give me a boost then. To the crest of this hyperjump. Then I won't have to worry about slipping through."
"Like I started to tell you," Altman intoned insistently, "one of my grapples is sheared."
"You still have two more."
"Uh-uh. This wise boy ain't gonna take a chance of a line snapping and knocking a hunk outta my hull. Especially when you got cargo spilling all over space."
Brad clenched his fists. He spoke through his teeth. "Look, Altman. Regulations say...."
"... I gotta help you," the other cut him short. "I know that, pal. That's why I happen to be stopping off at this not too enticing spot. And I'm offering help.... Come aboard any time you want."
"And hang up a free salvage sign on the Fleury?"
Altman didn't answer.
Twisting the gooseneck in his hand, Brad sucked in a deep breath and blew it out in a rush. But he didn't say what had leaped into his mind. Instead he glanced over at the panel's screen.
Altman's ship showed up there—a large, greenish-yellow blip. There were other small dots on the scope too. As he looked, the large blip coasted over to one of the dots. The two became one mark on the screen.
"You're picking up my cargo!" Brad shouted.
"The stuff not in orbit around the Fleury ain't yours any longer, Conally," Altman laughed. "You oughta bone up on your salvage laws."
"You damned scavenger!"
"Now, now, Brad," the other said smoothly. "What would you do if you were in my position? Would you let top priority cargo slip through to normal and get lost off the hyperlane? Or would you scoop it up and bring it in for bonus price?"
"You're not after a bonus," Brad roared into the mike. "You're after a contract.... Altman, I'll pay two thousand for a ten-minute tow up-arc. That'll almost wipe out my profit on this haul."
"No sale."
Brad gripped the mike with both hands. "So you're just going to sit around and pick up cargo droppings!"
"The book says I gotta stick around until you come aboard, until you get underway on hyperpower, or until there just ain't any more ship or crew.... Might as well pick up cargo; there's nothing else to do."
"And when I come aboard you'll want to unload the Fleury too, I take it."
"Wouldn't you?"——————————
Half the spilled crates were in close orbit around the SS Fleury. The tri-D scope showed that. Brad estimated distances of several of the objects as he clamped the helmet to the neckring of his suit and clattered to the pilot compartment airlock.
In the lock he unsnapped the hand propulsor from its bulkhead niche and clamped it to his wrist plate while the outer hatch swung open and the lock's air exploded into a void encrusted with a crisscross of vivid, vari-colored lines. The individual streaks, he estimated, averaged at least ten degrees in length. That indicated he was a reasonable period of time away from spillthrough into normal space where the lines would compress into the myriad normal pinpoints that were stars, undistorted by hyperspace perspective. When the streaks decreased to four or five degrees, he reminded himself, that was the time to start worrying about dropping out the bottom of the trough.
He waited until one of the square, tumbling objects rolled by, obscuring sections of the out-of-focus celestial sphere as it whirled in its orbit. Timing it, he waited for the box to complete another revolution. Just before it arrived the third time, he pushed off.
As he closed in on the crate, he knew his timing had been correct. He intercepted it directly above the hatch and clung clumsily to a hand ring as its greater mass swept him along in an altered orbit. A quick blast from his propulsor eliminated the rotation he had imparted to the object and he reoriented himself with respect to the ship. Spotting the ruptured sideplate where the cargo had burst through the hull, he steered his catch toward the hole with short bursts of power.
The bent plate made a natural ramp down which he slid the crate onto the gravity-fluxed deck. Inside, he degravitated the chamber, floated the box into position and double-lashed it to the deck.
Pushing away from the ship again, he checked the length of the stellar grid streaks. They were still approximately ten degrees long. It looked hopeful. He might have time to collect all the orbiting cargo before he got dangerously close to spillthrough. Then he'd see about pushing on up-arc until the fuzzy streaks stretched to forty or fifty degrees—perhaps even ninety, if he could allow himself the luxury of wishful thinking. There he'd be at quartercrest and would have time to rest before worrying about being drawn down the arc again toward normal space.
While he jockeyed the fourth crate into the hold, a huge shadow suddenly blotched out part of the star lines off to the port side. It was the Cluster Queen pursuing a crate not in orbit around the Fleury. Brad shrugged; he'd be unable to pick up the ones that far out anyway.
But his head jerked upright in the helmet suddenly. If Altman was after a free box, he realized, the Cluster Queen could not appear in sharp outline to an observer in the Fleury system! The Fleury, sliding down the hyperspatial arc with its orbiting crates, would be moving slowly toward normal space in response to the interdimensional pull exerted by its warp flux rectifier, hidden inaccessibly in the bowels of the pile, as it was on most outdated ships. But the free boxes, in another time-space system with the Cluster Queen, would be stationary on the arc and would appear increasingly fuzzy as the planal displacement between the two systems became greater.
The truth, Brad realized, was that the Cluster Queen was drawing closer both spatially and on the descending node of the hyperspatial arc! Altman was violating the law; he was going to take the cargo in orbit. And he could well get away with it too, since it would be the word of only one man aboard the Fleury against the word of the entire crew of the Queen.——————————
There were still six boxes in orbit. He pushed out again toward the closest and saw he had not been wrong in his reasoning. The Queen's outline was razor-edge sharp; it was close enough to stretch across fifty-five degrees of the celestial sphere.
He kept it in the corner of his vision as he hooked on to the crate and started back to the ship. The Queen was reversing attitude slowly. When he had first spotted it, it was approaching at an angle, nose forward. But now it had gyroed broadside and was continuing to turn as it drifted slowly toward Brad and the box.
"Altman!" he cried into his all-wave helmet mike. "You're on collision course!"
Brad kicked away from the crate and streaked back toward the Fleury.
There was a laugh in the receiver. "Did you hear something, Bronson?"
"No, captain," another voice laughed. "For a moment I thought maybe I picked up a small blip near that crate. But I don't guess Conally would be stupid enough to suit up and try to hustle his own cargo."
Brad activated his propulsor again and gained impetus in his dash for the Fleury's hatch.
"Still," Altman muttered, "it seems like I heard somebody say something about a collision course."
The Cluster Queen was no longer turning. It had stabilized, with its tubes pointed in the general direction of the Fleury and her floating crates.
Perspiration formed on Brad's forehead as he glanced up and saw the other ship steady itself, settling on a predetermined, split-hair heading. Somebody, he realized grimly, was doing a good job of aiming the vessel's stern.
He got additional speed out of his propulsor, but the tubes swung slowly as he covered more of the distance to his hatch. It seemed he couldn't escape his position of looking up into the mouths of the jets.
"I don't know, boss," the speaker near his ear sounded again. "Maybe he is out there."
"We better not take chances, then," Altman was not hiding the heavy sarcasm in his words. "Blast away!"
Brad kicked sideways, stiffened his arm and hit the wrist jet full
试读结束[说明：试读内容隐藏了图片]