Читать книгу Parasite Planet - John Russell Fearn - Страница 6

CHAPTER ONE

INTO THE MILKY WAY

The Ultra was cruising at a leisurely speed of 40,000 miles an hour—a prodigi­ous velocity by Earth standards, but a mere crawl to a machine which, under necessity, could exceed the speed of light itself by many, many times. Nor was this any familiar region in which the mighty space vessel moved. It was traveling in emptiness many light-years away from the Earthly solar system.

They had a self-imposed mission, these three who floated amid the stars, nor were three people better equipped to carry out that mission. The Golden Amazon; her giant hus­band Abna, metaphysical genius of Jupiter; and their daughter Viona made up a combination of scientific genius and superhuman strength possibly without parallel in the Universe. They called themselves “The Cosmic Crusaders,” these three, their one aim to use their immense gifts to benefit the population of worlds that needed help or scientific education.

“Just the same,” the Amazon commented, when the screens showed Axilon, their last point of adventure, as a mere pinprick of light, “we can’t go on cruising like this with no main objective.”

There was silence in the huge control room for a moment. The Amazon herself, the epitome of superb and ageless womanhood, was standing by the immense outlook window, every curve and line of her supernaturally perfect figure silhouetted against the stars.

Then Abna rose, seven feet of majestic strength, and crossed to her side.

“I seem to recall something about your saying the densest regions of the Milky Way might be a good area to head for next. Or have you abandoned the idea?”

“Far from it, Abna.” The Amazon looked out to the misty, spawning swirl of the Milky Way with its in­credible wilderness of myriads of stars, then her violet eyes turned to look at Abna.

“Far as I can see,” the Amazon continued, “it is the best possible region where we might find other worlds. Out there, in this stupen­dous island-universe, amid all those spawning stars—there must be planetary systems. Worlds, maybe, that could benefit from our crusade to advance scientific amenities.”

Abna nodded his blond head slowly, then gave a whimsical smile. The Amazon frowned. His whimsy was something she always found hard to tolerate, because she could never be sure but what he knew far more than she.

“I didn’t think I said anything very amusing,” she remarked briefly, and turned back into the control room, her very movements showing she was having difficulty in keeping her temper.

“Quite right, you didn’t.” Abna remained where he was, surveying her. “I was just thinking back to a time when you were a very differ­ent person, when your sole aim in life was to use your scientific skill to crush out the lesser factions and establish yourself as mistress of everything. Times have changed, Vi. Behold the beneficent empress,” he finished dryly.

The Amazon swung. “You don’t have to go back over the past, do you? Certainly my original aim was to dominate, until I found it paid better to make friends with people. I couldn’t help myself in that. Part of my upbringing. It changed.…”

“When I came along,” Abna grinned, crossing over to her—and taking no notice of her petulant look, he grasped her shoulders and embraced her gently.

“Stop being primitive,” the Amazon muttered, even though she made no attempt to pull away.

“Very pretty,” observed a girl’s voice, and Viona came from the corridor where she had just completed a rest period.

Abna and the Amazon disengaged themselves and looked at her—Viona of the copper-gold hair and sapphire blue eyes.

“Don’t mind me,” she smiled, lounging across. “I suppose it’s natural for husband and wife to get affectionate sometimes. I wouldn’t know. All I got for a husband was Sefner Quorne.”

The mention of the dead Sefner Quorne, once Viona’s husband, brought a grim silence for a moment; then the Amazon moved into the gap.

“We were just saying, Viona, that the Milky Way might afford some­thing interesting. Cruising around like this is pointless.”

“I could have told you that long ago. All right, let’s see what the possibilities are.”

Viona led the way across to the multiple switchboard and snapped a series of buttons. Automatically, two things happened. The control room’s atomic lights extinguished themselves, leaving only the soft glow of eternal starlight; and upon a big screen nearby there appeared a reflected image of the Milky Way picked up by the Ultra’s radio-telescope.

“Not much there,” Viona sighed, pouting. “Or if there is, we can’t see it.”

“That’s just the point,” Abna commented. “We’re so far away from the nearest stellar systems we can’t sort them out prop­erly. Only thing to do is narrow the distance. Set the computer to work, Viona. Let’s see how far away we are from the nearest dense cluster of stars.”

The girl restored the lights, then, switching on the computer, she fed it with the basic mathematics and waited while it electronically sorted them and finally produced an answer. The number of light years given in the totality display made the three glance at each other.

“Whew!” Viona whistled. “That’s a stupendous distance in any language.”

“We can cover it rapidly enough by exceeding the speed of light by several times, traveling through hyperspace in the fourth dimension,” Abna said calmly. “I’ll set the course and fix the alarms to ring and waken us when we’re reasonably near the cluster.”

Abna computed the path through space, checking the figures by the infallible master computer, and then gradually swung the mighty vessel around until its nose was pointing directly towards the Milky Way. This done, he set the power plant in action and switched in the automatic control.

“Ready?” the Amazon enquired, and Abna nodded.

“Quite ready. We’d better get to the pressure-beds.”

He, Viona, and the Amazon all stretched themselves flat on the pressure beds against the wall, beds in which the springs and cushioning were designed to expand and contract with the minimum of discomfort under extreme accelerative pressure. Then gradually the Ultra began to build up velocity, until it achieved that intolerable speed which brought down un­consciousness upon the three travelers. At the same time, entirely by automatic processes, the Ultra was plunged into hyperspace. In this region, the normal limitations on objects exceeding the speed of light no longer applied. Relative to the normal universe, the Ultra’s velocity steadily increased to the speed of light…and beyond it. Faster and faster.…