The Star Virus полностью

Pim squatted and pressed his nose flat against the surface of the lens. Then he stood up and tried to mark the glossy surface with a knife. "I want to see some space battles!"

"Yeah!" It was an enthusiastic chorus.

"There's no control over it," Rodrone informed them sourly. "The scenes are all random."

"Aw." Pim screwed up his face. "You'd think—here y'are then, what's this comin' up? Eh, it looks good!"

Rodron shouldered the others aside to look. Pim was right. From the center, a region of blackness was spreading towards the periphery. In it, ships appeared, rectilinear rods almost as black as space itself but shiny. Partitions continually slid open and shut on the long rods. The ships were fighting one another, directing energy and missiles through the openings and glinting inwardly with the urgency of contention.

It was as compelling and alien a sight as the lens had ever produced.

"Look!" mooed Jublow. "There's another one!"

On the opposite side of the lens, wedge-shaped vessels stood out against a brilliant globular star cluster. They seemed to be fighting over possession of a nearby planet, and were warding one another off by creating fields of faint blue nimbus. Rodrone could almost hear them humming and crackling.

"How did you do that?" he demanded sharply.

"Do what?"

"How did you control the visions?"

"Who says I did?"

"I've never been able to get the pictures I wanted from it." He did not mention the second reason for the unlikelihood of such scenes, namely the paucity of space-traveling races in the galaxy.

Pim cackled. "You ought to come down with us and play our little game, mate, and you'll find out what wishing for things can do. I swear I've held that pile down by sheer damned willpower more than once!"

He looked around him for approbation, receiving it in an applause of chuckles and sniggers.

Captain Shone laughed out loud. "You're surprised too often, old pal," he remonstrated to Rodrone. "You want to be more flexible. If old John Theory was here, now, nothing would faze him." He took a swig and spluttered. "There was a mind for you."

Rodrone swung around, his puzzlement forgotten in the face of a fresh surprise. Suspicion flowered into certainty almost as soon as it was born.

"You knew him!"

"Of course I did."

So that was it. The weirdness of the crew was totally explicable now. Shone had been personally acquainted with Clave's distant ancestor, a man whose very family name had changed because of his scientific contributions, and who had lived two hundred years before. With that one datum, everything clicked into place.

Now he knew what sort of a ship he had bought passage on. These were men who would take cargoes on the long hauls across hundreds of light-years, where the time-dilation effect ensured that they could never return to the generation from which they departed. They were the most abandoned of men. They were called deadliners, because their utter removal from the warmth of human society gave them a close affinity with death. They no longer had the ordinary reasons that made a man want to stay alive; they had nothing but their existence in this mausoleum of a freighter.

It was not long before the deadliners grew tired of the lens and wandered off together, leaving Shone asleep at the control desk.

Rodrone sat moodily for a few minutes, then felt restless. The atmosphere of the deadliner ship made him more agitated than usual. He got up and explored sternwards.

The Stator was in complete silence. The galleries echoed his footsteps and the walls felt rusty to his touch. Near to where he believed the propulsion unit and power plant to be, he saw a yellow light and heard the murmur of voices.

The crew of the Stator were sitting on the floor of a small room, playing cards. One wall of the room was covered with the control mechanisms of a nuclear reactor of some antiquity, to judge by its design. The attitude of the deadliners was one of intense concentration. Rodrone had never seen them so quiet.

Pim laid down a card on the pack and moved a counter forward on a board by his side. "Check," he said.

Someone got up and pulled a handle on the wall. Rodrone watched incredulously. He knew what the deadliner was doing: he was withdrawing one of the damper rods.

Jermy looked up as he entered. "You come to join us?"

"What's the game?"

"Brag. Half skill, half chance."

Rodrone nodded to the wall. "And what about the reactor? It's a pretty dangerous thing to include in a game of cards. What sort is it?"

"It's a fast one. It becomes a bomb without the moderators."

He swallowed. There was no need to ask how that figured.

Pim noticed his discomfort. "Whassamatter? We were playing when you came aboard."

"What? You mean you played this mad game aground on Stundaker?"

"Sure."

"But you might have taken half the spaceground with you!"

"The whole of it, mate. This is a fair old reactor we've got here. Well, shall I deal you a hand?"

Rodrone sat down as Jublow shifted over to make room. "Yeah, what the hell…"