Читать книгу The Science Fiction Anthology онлайн

657 страница из 776

“Not until the food was eaten, anyway,” said the skipper witheringly, and I subsided with a fresh drink.

“Beulah was kind of cute, for all of her tonnage,” said the skipper. “She had two enormous tusks, and a pair of ears like wings, and a nose that was longer than her tail. But she was mighty friendly, after she got to know me. She’d pick me up and carry me around, if I asked her to. And she’d eat right out of my hand. She turned out to be even tamer than the Indian elephant. All I had to do was figure out how to carry her.

“For a starter, I figured like you said, to have Beulah on one side of the cargo compartment, and her chow on the other. Then I calculated to have my own supplies on the other two sides of the space, so that I could move them away from her as her food stocks got smaller, and hold the balance that way. That wasn’t enough, of course, so I built a couple of water tanks on the opposite side of the ring from Beulah.

“As you know, not much can be done about moving water around in a space ship—it’s got its own cooling chores to perform—but every little bit helped. Finally, I jockeyed the master computer and the auxiliary computer down and ran them on tracks, so I could slide them around to compensate for Beulah’s appetite. Some lead slugs brought the auxiliary’s weight up equal to the master’s, and they also brought my total load up to the absolute maximum that I could carry.