LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

kicked up a notch, too. Not that he would have otherwise been tempted to take his eye off the crawlers—a mama does everything for her children, doesn't she?—but he even conscientiously took care of the bothersome minor duties that human lives didn't depend on.

      And it was all because of Perry Rhodan.

      It was the same for Alemaheyu as it was for the commander of the Palenque. He wasn't able to ignore the knowledge that in his long life, Rhodan had encountered an unimaginable number of people, and had mastered dangers and tests of his skill and courage that Alemaheyu could only guess at. Much as it annoyed the Palenque's comm officer, he simply wasn't able to behave naturally in Rhodan's presence—even though the Immortal hadn't so much as hinted with a single word or gesture that he expected special treatment. On the contrary: Rhodan slept in a standard cabin, ate the standard food, and performed standard duties. Yesterday, in fact, he had turned up in a hangar and helped a technician with the maintenance on one of the crawlers.

      Rhodan was the friendliest and most sociable passenger the Palenque had carried in a long time, and yet it was only with an effort that Alemaheyu could keep from stuttering with excitement when he spoke with the Immortal. It was enough to drive him up the wall.

      After greeting Rhodan, Alemaheyu and the rest of the control-center crew went back to their duties. There was not much to do. The crawlers did the actual work. The Palenque stood ready in case something unexpected happened. Akonians appearing, or something like that, which certainly wouldn't happen as long as they had Rhodan on board. That was life: if you wanted to avoid something, it was always on your heels. But if you were looking for it, it was nowhere to be found.

      "Mild hyperstorm," the hyperdetection officer called out. "Sectors 72Z to 84R."

      Not unexpected. Hyperstorms were the rule rather than the exception in this area. Alemaheyu called up the hyperdetection data. No reason to worry. The storm wasn't strong enough to endanger the crawlers. Besides, only one of them was in the affected area.

      Alemaheyu made contact. "Crawler Eleven!"

      "What is it, Mama?"

      "There's a hyperstorm brewing along your course. Rather weak, nothing that should bother your crate."

      "Okay. Then why are you calling us?"

      "Because Mama always worries." The two men, Alemaheyu Kossa on the Palenque and Mikch Theyner on the crawler, laughed. The joke had long since worn out, but they couldn't resist making it. It had been Mikch who had given Alemaheyu the nickname in the first place. "But seriously," the comm officer went on, "it's possible the data stream will be interrupted for a few minutes. I just wanted to let you know so you don't worry about it."

      "Too late. Our pants are already sticky and stinky. Catch you later!"

      "Be seeing you!"

      Alemaheyu had barely finished speaking when the data stream broke off. The crawler had been caught in the storm. The craft would now be thoroughly shaken. It would do Mikch and his people good. Remind them of how comfortable they had it on the Palenque, remind them of their place. Very little could go wrong. Without guidance from the Palenque, the crawler was effectively blind from a navigational standpoint, but it was operating in a slow, sublight flight.

      It would be hours before it came near a moon or a planet.

      Sharita Coho and Rhodan had retreated to the rear section of the control center and were conversing in whispers. Alemaheyu tried to eavesdrop, but they were too far away. He only caught the word "Akonians" a few times.

      A soft chirping reminded the comm officer that it was again time for a routine check. He immersed himself in the work, exchanging a few words with the crews of the various crawlers. Four reported in. The craft had left the planetary shadow and was in the process of landing on a highly promising high plateau after an optical scan of the surface.

      Alemaheyu wished the crew good luck in finding pay dirt. When he returned to his status review, he felt a stab of unease. What was going on with Crawler Eleven? The data stream was still out.

      "Hyperdetection!" Alemaheyu called. "What about the hyperstorm? Is it still going on?"

      "Yes," came the reply. "It'll reach its peak in about an hour."

      "Roger," Alemaheyu said. Then he had a thought. "Position?"

      "Shifted to Sector ... "

      "Shifted? What about the area where it originated?"

      "Nearly normal readings now."

      Alemaheyu called up the communications module on the holoscreen and attempted to make contact with Crawler Eleven. No result, either from the crew or the crawler's syntron. The comm officer gave the hypercom maximum transmitting power, focusing the beam on the sectors in which the hyperstorm had raged. No response. It was as though the crawler had ceased to exist.

      A lump developed in Alemaheyu's throat. He suddenly wished he had a joint to smoke to calm his nerves. But all that would've gotten him was a burst of Sharita's wrath. The comm officer leaped up and hurried over to Rhodan and the commander.

      "Sharita," he said, as she looked up at him angrily, "I'm sorry to disturb you, but I think we have an emergency."

      3

      A vague sense of unease drove Denetree that evening.

      She was used to taking off on her bicycle after the shift. Most metach on field duty were too tired afterwards to do more than drag themselves back to the half-gravity of the Middle Deck, eat with their Metach'ton, plug into the Net for an on-line game, or just sit and wait for the next day.

      Not Denetree.

      Yes, the work was hard, but after a Ship-year—more than half her obligation as a field hand was behind her—she had gotten used to it. In the beginning, only her thighs had developed, and she had otherwise looked like a beanpole. But now she had put on some flesh. Her arms, her entire body had become muscular. In the first months, the effort of cycling had almost completely burned her out. The gravity of the Outer Deck crushed newcomers mercilessly toward the ground, after a few minutes making every movement a torture. There was very little help from machinery in the fields, allegedly to save the always limited supply of energy on board. Denetree felt certain that was true, but exhausting the young metach in performing their service for the Ship seemed to her an equally likely intention. It kept them from getting dumb ideas.

      In theory, at least. In practice, Denetree became an example of the opposite. In the unanimous opinion of everyone who knew her, Denetree's endless rounds through the Ship on a bicycle after the end of her shift fell clearly into the category of dumb ideas. Except that it was harmless. Denetree didn't bother anyone, and as long as her rides always took her back to her Metach'ton, and her work performance the next day didn't suffer, no one tried to stop her. Not her neighbors, not the Naahk or the Net.

      Immediately after the end of her shift, Denetree climbed on the bicycle she considered "hers." Of course, it wasn't really her own. None of the metach owned their own bicycle, no matter how highly they were placed. The bicycles belonged to all equally—which didn't necessarily mean that every metach could use every bicycle.

      Denetree had made a number of changes to the bicycle she used: "optimizations," as she called them. Her bicycle's rims had a smaller diameter than the standard model and the tires were wider with a studded tread—designed for better traction rather than minimal rolling resistance, as was typical. Denetree pumped the tires full enough that only the center of the tire rested on the ground, creating a narrow, smooth strip that made it easier to ride on uneven terrain, but was apparently inferior in direct comparison to the standard ultrathin tires.

      The other members of her metach had laughed at her when she rode her bicycle to her shift the first time. "Look, that crazy Denetree has built a plow!" they mocked. "Come on, dig us a furrow!" Only after she had beaten the loudest mocker in a race, handily leaving him in the dust, did they stop their open teasing.

      It had been Denetree's luck to end up with one of the heaviest men in the metach as her opponent. He weighed more than a hundred kilos, and

Скачать книгу