Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But he'd seen the stars of normspace through the torn vault floor. It was something.... "We might have the light that slugged us to thank for that," he said. "I'm not sure just what did happen there, but it could have been Maulbow's control unit it was attacking rather than the ship. Maulbow said the lights were sensitive to the unit.
There was the matter of the ship's location instruments. The only set Gefty had been able to obtain any reading on were the direction indicators. And what they appeared to indicate was that the Silver Queen was turning on a new heading something like twenty times a second. Gefty asked, "Has Mr. Maulbow shown any signs of waking up?" Kerim shook her head.
The companies he had doing the actual work appeared to have a terrible time getting everything exactly the way Mr. Maulbow wanted it There's nothing that looks like a set of keys in those first two suitcases, Gefty." "Well," Gefty said, "if you don't find them in the others, you might start thumping around to see if he's got secret compartments in his luggage somewhere."
Then there was the janandra the big, snakish thing in the storage which Maulbow had brought back up from the moon along with the battered machine. It had been, he said, his shipboard companion on another voyage. It wasn't ordinarily aggressive Gefty's sudden appearance in the vault must have startled it into making an attack. It was not exactly a pet.
Maulbow, one of the explorers, had met disaster a million light-years from the home of his kind, centuries behind them, his vehicle wrecked on an airless moon with damaged control unit and shattered instruments. He had made his way to a human civilization to obtain the equipment he needed, and returned at last with the Silver Queen to where the time-sailer lay buried. Gefty's lip curled.
When I was ... stranded ... the unit was seriously damaged. My recent repairs were necessarily hasty. "What caused the crack-up?" Maulbow said, tone taut with impatience, "Certain sections of the Great Current are infested with dangerous forces. I shall not attempt to describe them ..." "I wouldn't get it?" "I don't pretend to understand them very well myself, Rammer.
That was where Gefty had stood when Maulbow entered the room, and if he had remained there an instant after letting go of the knife, he would have been in very much worse condition than the essentially fireproof furnishings.
He said to Kerim, "I thought the machine Maulbow set up in the storage vault would turn out to be some drive engine, but apparently it has an entirely different function. He connected it with the instruments he had made in the Hub, and together they form what he calls a control unit. The emergency panel would show if the unit were drawing juice from the ship.
If the first aid treatment has pulled him through so far, the autosurgeon probably can fix him up." Kerim's face suddenly took on a guilty expression. "I forgot all about Mr. Maulbow!" She hesitated. "Should I come along?" Gefty shook his head. "I won't need help. And if it's a case for the surgeon, you wouldn't like it. Those things work painlessly, but it gets to be a mess for a while."
Word Of The Day