Captive of the Centaurianess Read Online Free PDF

gabbling, barely able to keep her in sight. There were no slideways. Except in the tunnels where authorized vehicles moved, everybody walked. It was a result of the government's concern over preserving public physical fitness in Ganymede's low gravity. Dyann felt feather-light. She proceeded in three- and four-meter bounds. When a clump of people got in the way of that, she sprang over their heads.
    The Academy occupied 50 hectares on a high level of town, a pleasant break in an environment where the very parks were functional. Here, grass, trees, and flowerbeds made lanes of life between walls which, admittedly roofless, were at least covered with plastic ivy. Overhead, a teledome gave an awesome vision of Jupiter, stars, Milky Way, the shrunken sun. The air bore faint, flowery perfumes and recorded birdsong. Upon this campus, moving from building to building, were a number of persons, several obviously military personnel but most just as obviously scholars, little different from their colleagues on Earth.
    Dyann stopped one of the latter, loomed over him, and asked where Dr. Urushkidan might be. "In Archimedes Hall—over there," he gasped, and tottered off, perhaps in search of a reviving cup of tea.
    She might have known, Dyann thought. In front of that door, a soldier on guard clashed with the general atmosphere. She guessed his presence was due to the military significance of Urushkidan's work. Though her appearance startled him, too, rather badly, he slanted his rifle before him and cried, "Halt!"
    Dyann obeyed. "I must see the Martian," she told him. "Please to let me by."
    "Nobody sees him without a pass," he replied.
    Dyann shoved him aside and took hold of the door switch. He yelled and batted at her with his rifle butt. That was his great mistake.
    "You should show more respect for ladies," she chided, and removed the weapon from his grasp. Her free hand flung him across the greensward. He collided with Hamand, who had panted onto the scene, hard enough that neither was of much use for some time to come. Dyann admired the rifle—Earthlings on Varann were deplorably stingy about giving such things to her folk—before she slung it across her back by the strap. By now, too many passersby had halted to stare and chatter. Best she keep on the move. She opened the door and passed on through.
    For a minute she poised in the hallway beyond, cocking her ears this way and that. They were keen. A faint sound of altercation gave her the clue she hoped for, and she bounded up a flight of stairs. Before another door she stopped to listen. Yes, that was the voice of Urushkidan, bubbling like an infuriated teakettle.
    "I will not, sir, do you hear me? I will not. And I demand immediate return passage from tis ridiculous satellite."
    "Come now, Dr. Urushkidan, do be reasonable." Was that Roshevsky-Feldkamp? "What is your complaint, actually? Do you not have generous financial compensation, Mars-conditioned lodgings, servants, every imaginable consideration? If you wish something further, inform us and we will try to provide it."
    "I came here to lecture and to complete my matematical research. Now I find you habe arranged no lectures and expect me to superbise an—an engineering project—as if I were a mere empiricist!"
    "But your contract plainly states—"
    "Did you tink I would waste my baluable time reading one of your pieces of printed gibberish? Sir, in human law itself, a proper contract requires tat tere habe been a meeting of minds. Te mind of your goberment neber met te mind of myself. It was not capable of it."
    The man attempted ingratiation: "You are a leading scientist. As such, you realize that science advances by checking theory against fact. If, with your help, we create a faster-than-light ship, it will be a total confirmation of your ideas."
    "My ideas need no confirmation. Tey are a debelopment of certain implications of general relatibity, true. Howeber, tat is incidental. In principle, what I habe produced