Alice: The Girl From Earth - Булычев Кир - Страница 54

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The fat pirate was still sitting on the ground beside the Pegasus; he had convinced us that he had an old, bad heart that demanded fresh air. No one wanted to argue with him and, let alone hold a conversation, especially after the Third Captain had told how it had been Veselchak U himself who had tortured him in a vain attempt to gain the secret of galaxion.

“Zeleny!” I called. “Would you look after the cow while I feed the other animals; just make certain the Crockadee doesn’t carry her off.”

As I looked up I saw still another starship descending on this planet.

Now, that really was too much! This wasn’t a planet as much as a space port! Where had this one come from?

In the end I came to the conclusion that it was reinforcements for the pirates and desired to raise the alarm, but then I realize the ship was in trouble.

The pilot wasn’t flying straight, but was twisting and turning from side to side oddly, and along his tail stretched some sort of greyish mass which acted as a break and prevented a normal landing.

At my cry everyone came running from the ship and looked up at the new arrival.

“Turn on the transmitter, Zeleny!” Poloskov called.

Zeleny hurried to the Pegasus, hunted through the emergency frequencies and turned the radio on full so that those of us outside the ship could hear.

“Incoming ship!” Zeleny called. “What is going on? Are you in trouble. Reply!”

A very pleasant, very feminine voice answered: “I’m in no trouble worth mentioning, no. So long as I can hold on to this thing little else matters.”

“Now that voice is familiar.” I said. Somewhere I’ve heard it before.”

“When we were lost near the empty planet.” Alice suggested.

“Hold it.” The First Captain cut us off. “I could swear that’s my wife Ella.”

The Captain turned white and rushed into the ship to join Zeleny at the com console. A moment later we heard his voice:

“Ella, is that you? What’s going on?”

“Who’s speaking, please? The woman’s voice asked firmly. “Is that you, Seva? Why aren’t you on Venus? You know how worried I get when you gad about the cosmos.”

The Second Captain laughed.

“She can never get used to the idea that her husband is a space explorer.” He told me. “Even though she herself has circled the Galaxy.”

“That doesn’t matter.” The First Captain said. “Have you forgotten your ship’s in trouble? Do you need assistance. What is that thing you’re hauling?”

“Can’t you see it?” Ella sounded surprised. “It’s a living gas cloud. I’ve only been chasing after it for the last three weeks. I caught it in a force screen net, but now it’s trying to break out and get away. So I have to set down on the first planet that I came to strengthen the net field. Seva, darling, you wouldn’t by any chance have a ship of your own on hand?”

“Of course I do.” The First Captain answered. “And don’t hurry in landing, not while that thing. is fighting you. You might crash.”

“Everything will be all right. Just get up here and we’ll land it together.”

The First Captain hadn’t yet finished his conversation with his wife before the Second Captain was on the ship’s bridge; three minutes later they had the starship into the air where Ella was fighting with the obstreperous living cloud that was known across the space ways as a legend, but which no one had managed to capture alive.

The two ships merged their force fields into a common net and after half an hour the living cloud, tightly grasped by the two ships, lay on the grass not far from us. We all ran over to them. I have to admit that I was the first tor each the scene; after all, I understood what a service Ella had done for biology.

The living nebula was…. well, interesting. In interstellar space once it had expanded to fill several million cubic kilometers the effect must have been overpowering, but here on the grass, confined by the occasionally glittering force scene, it really looked like a thick, grey, pulsing cloud.

The air lock to Ella’s ship slid wide and she ran down the extending steps. Her husband, the First Captain, ran to meet her. He stretched out strong arms and Ella jumped up to meet him. The Captain held her in the air a moment and carefully let her down to the ground.

“You’re not injured?” He asked.

“No.” Ella answered, laughing. “And anyway none of that was really important.

Ella was breathtakingly beautiful and all the men fell in love with her at once. Even the empathicator had become transparent from the feelings that filled it.

“Nothing else matters.” Ella repeated, shaking her long blond hair. “The gas cloud is captured, and now all that remains is to get it to Earth to convince the skeptics that it really does exist.

I kept my silence, in as much as under skeptics she, naturally, would include me. I even remembered our last meeting of sorts at the conference and had ridiculed her for chasing after Science Fiction. There exist in the universe so many real, perfectly natural and ordinary animals the study of which costs time and effort, such as the Dragonette minor, wander bushes, and empathicator, that the very concept of a living gas cloud struck me as a fantasy. And I had said so at the time.

“Where have you been hiding?” Ella exclaimed when she saw the Second Captain. “I haven’t seen you for several years. How are you getting on? Are you still flying?”

“No.” The Second Captain answered, “basically I’ve been sitting in one spot.”

“That’s perfectly fine.” Ella supported him. “You can get an enormous amount of work done sitting in one spot. And whose is this charming little girl.”

“I’m called Alice.” The charming little girl answered.

“Alice. What an unusual name.”

“It’s perfectly ordinary. Alice Selezneva.”

“Wait a moment. Does your father not work in the Moscow Zoo?”

“He does.” Alice answered. She knew nothing about our scientific disagreements.

“That’s great, Alice; when you see your father I’d like you to tell him that living gas clouds are not biological nonsense, they’re not fantasies or fairy tale imaginings as he likes to say, but totally real.”

“You can tell him yourself.” Alice said. “My father is here. There he is.”

No escape was possible for me now; I stepped forward and introduced myself.

“I beg your pardon.” I said. “Rather clearly I must acknowledge my error.”

“This is marvelous.” Ella answered. “Now you can help me study the cloud.”

“With pleasure.”

Then Ella turned toward her husband.

“And how did you happen to be here?”

“The Second got into trouble,” Seva answered briefly, “and we had to get him out of it. And we did, with the help of our new friends.”

“And just what sort of trouble did you get into, Captain?”

“I was held captive by pirates.”

“By pirates. I thought you defeated them long ago.”

“We did, but they came back. You know what happens if you leave one weed in the ground.”

“Well, I really don’t understand it.” Ella threw up her hands. “Who in our day and age ever has to spend four years in jail?”

Ella had come to us from another world, the world we were familiar with but from which we had been gone for the last few days. And, in fact, she should it difficult to believe when we told her about torture, caverns, and treachery. For the nonce no one bothered to argue with her.

“And what have you done with the pirates?” Ella asked.

“One’s in a cage. Two are in the hold. The fattest and worst was just here a moment ago.” The Second Captain answered. “Where has he gotten to?”

The Fat Man had vanished. A moment ago he had been sitting on the grass, laughing timidly. Then he was gone.

We hunted through the surrounding underbrush, looked under and behind every bush; he could not have gotten very far. The Blabberyap bird would have raised an alarm.

“This is a fine mess.” Ella said with reproach. “You can’t keep a lone pirate locked up! Really, what sort of weeding are you doing?”

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