"Dickson, Gordon R - Soldier Ask Not" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

• Gordon R. Dickson
drop behind our group to speak to someone else after begging me to bring her here—speak to someone who was a complete stranger to me, and speak as earnestly as I could see she was speaking, even at this distance, by the tenseness of her figure and the little movements of her hands—seemed to me like a discourtesy amounting to betrayal. After all, she had talked me into coming.
The hair on the back of my neck rose, a cold wave of anger rose in me. It was ridiculous; at that distance not even the best human ears ever bora could have overheard their conversation, but I found myself straining against the enclosing silence of the vast room, trying to make out what it was they could be talking about.
And then—imperceptibly, but growing rapidly louder—I began to hear. Something.
Not my sister's voice, or the voice of the stranger, whoever he was. It was some distant, harsh voice of a man speaking in a language a little like Latin, but with dropped vowels and rolled r's that gave his talk a mutter, like the rapid rolling of the summer thunder that accompanies heat lightning. And it grew, not so much louder, as closer—and then I heard another voice, answering it.
And then another voice. And another, and another and another.
Roaring, shouting, leaping, like an avalanche, the voices leaped suddenly upon me from every direction, growing wildly greater in number every second, doubling and redoubling—all the voices in all the languages of all the world, all the voices that had ever been in the world—and more than that. More— and more—and more.
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They shouted in my ear, babbling, crying, laughing, cursing, ordering, submitting—but not merging, as such a multitude should, at last into one voiceless, if mighty, thunder like the roar of a waterfall. More and more as they grew, they still remained all separate. / heard each one! Each one of those millions, those billions of men's and women's voices shouted individually in my ears.
And the tumult lifted me at last as a feather is lifted on the breast of a hurricane, swirling me up and away out of my senses into a raging cataract of unconsciousness.
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CHAPTER 3
I remember I did not want to wake up. It seemed to me I had been on a far voyage, that I had been away a long time. But when, at last, reluctantly, I opened my eyes, I was lying on the floor of the chamber and only Lisa Kant was bending over me. Some of the others in our party had not yet finished turning around to see what had happened to me.
Lisa was raising my head from the floor.
"You heard\" she was saying, urgently and low-voiced, almost in my ear. "What did you hear?"
"Hear?" I shook my head, dazedly, remembering at that, and almost expecting to hear that uncountable horde of voices flooding back in on me. But there was only silence now, and Lisa's question. "Hear?" I said, "—them."
"Them?"
I blinked my eyes up at her and abruptly my mind
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cleared. All at once, I remembered my sister Eileen; and I scrambled to my feet, staring off into the distance at the entrance by which I had seen her standing with the man in black. But the entrance and the space about it was empty. The two of them, together—they were gone.
I scrambled to my feet. Shaken, battered, torn loose from my roots of self-confidence by that mighty cataract of voices in which I had been plunged and carried away, the mystery and disappearance of my sister shook me now out of all common sense. I did not answer Lisa, but started at a run down the ramp for the entrance where I had last seen Eileen talking to the stranger in black.
Fast as I was, with my longer legs, Lisa was faster. Even in the blue robes, she was as swift as a track star. She caught up with me, passed me and swung around to bar the entrance as I reached it.
"Where are you going?" she cried. "You can't leave—just yet! If you heard something, IVe got to take you to see Mark Torre himself! He has to talk to anyone who ever hears anything!"
I hardly heard her.
"Get out of my way," I muttered, and I pushed her aside, not gently. I plunged on through the entrance into the circular equipment room beyond the entrance. There were technicians at work in their colored smocks, doing incomprehensible things to inconceivable tangles of metal and glass—but no sign of Eileen, or the man in black.
I raced through the room into the corridor beyond. But that, too, was empty. I ran down the corridor and turned right into the first doorway I came to. From desks and tables a few people, reading and
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• Gordon R. Dickson
transcribing, looked up at me in wonder, but Eileen and the stranger were not among them. I tried another room and another, all without success.
At the fifth room, Lisa caught up with me again.
"Stop!" she said. And this time she took actual hold of me, with a strength that was astonishing for a girl no larger than she was. "Will you stop?—And think for a moment? What's the matter?"
"Matter!" I shouted. "My sister—" and then I stopped. I checked my tongue. All at once it swept over me how foolish it would sound if I told Lisa the object of my search. A seventeen-year-old girl talking to, and even going off from a group with, someone her older brother does not know, is hardly good reason for a wild chase and a frantic search—at least in this day and age. And I was not of any mind to rehearse for Lisa's benefit the cold unhappiness of our upbringing, Eileen's and mine, in the house of my uncle Mathias.
I stood silent.
"You have to come with me," she said urgently after a second. "You don't know how terribly, inconceivably rare it is when someone actually hears something at the Transit Point. You don't know how much it means now to Mark Torre-—to Mark Torre, himself—to find someone who's heard!"
I shook my head numbly. I had no wish to talk to anyone about what I had just been through, and least of all to be examined like some freak experimental specimen.
"You have to!" repeated Lisa. "It means so much. Not just to Mark, to the whole project. Think! Don't just run off! Think about what you're doing first!"
The word "think" got through to me. Slowly my
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mind cleared. It was quite true what she said. I should think instead of running around like someone out of his wits. Eileen and the black-dressed stranger could be in any one of dozens of rooms or corridors—they could even be on their way out of the Project and the Enclave completely. Besides, what would I have said if I had caught up with them, anyway? Demand that the man identify himself and state his intentions toward my sister? It was probably lucky I had not been able to find them.
Besides, there was something else. I had worked hard to get the contract I had signed three days ago, just out of the University, with the Interstellar News Services. But I had a far way to go yet, to the place of my ambitions. For what I had wanted—so long and so fiercely that it was as if the want was something live with claws and teeth tearing inside me— was freedom. Real freedom, of the kind possessed only by members of planetary governments—and one special group, the working Guild members of the Interstellar News Services. Those workers in the communications field who had signed their oath of nonallegiance and were technically people without a world, in guarantee of the impartiality of the News Services they operated.
For the inhabited worlds of the human race were split—as they had been split for two hundred years now—into two camps, one which held their populations to * 'tight'' contracts and the other who believed in the so-called loose contract. Those on the tight-contract side were the Friendly worlds of Harmony and Association, Newton, Cassida and Venus, and the big new world of Ceta under Tau Ceti. On the loose side were ranged Earth, the Dorsai, the Exotic
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• Gordon R. Dickson
worlds of Mara and Kultis, New Earth, Freiland, Mars and the small Catholic world of Ste. Marie.
What divided them was a conflict of economic systems—an inheritance of the divided Earth that had originally colonized them. For in our day interplanetary currency was only one thing—and that was the coin of highly trained minds.
The race was now too big for a single planet to train all of its own specialists, particularly when other worlds produced better. Not the best education Earth or any other world could provide could produce a professional soldier to match those turned out by the Dorsai. There were no physicists like the physicists from Newton, no psychologists like those from the Exotics, no conscript hired troops as cheap and careless of casualty losses as those from Harmony and Association—and so on. Consequently, a world trained one kind or type of professional and traded his services by contract to another world for the contract and services of whatever type of other professional the world needed.
And the division between the two camps of worlds was stark. On the "loose" worlds a man's contract belonged in part to him; and he could not be sold or traded to another world without his own consent— except in a case of extreme importance or emergency. On the "tight" worlds the individual lived at the orders of his authorities—his contract might be sold or traded at a moment's notice. When this happened, he had only one duty—and that was to go and work where he was ordered.