"Gordon R. Dickson - Act Of Creation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

"Adam, come here," I ordered




Gordy is perhaps best known for the group of stories and novels
involving Dorsai – the world which produces as its only export the
finest mercenary soldiers in known space. (The Hugo-winning
"Soldier, Ask Not" is part of this cycle, which is itself only a part of a
much larger scheme Gordy calls the Childe Cycle. Ultimately this
should involve historical novels, mainstream novels, and possibly a
series of concertos for the kazoo – if I recall correctly.) The Dorsai
are among the most memorable characters in sf, dark and somber
and inflexibly honorable to a man; not (as Gordy has said) men of
the military, but men of war. The following story is the only
representation of the Dorsai Saga in this collection – and a strikingly
atypical one (well, the typical ones are already heavily
anthologized). It is also one of my personal favorites.
History says that very often it is the people who do the most for their
race that suffer most greatly: Prometheus, Moses, and a Nazarene
carpenter come to mind. But the Law of Karma insists that the books
always balance in the end – that inherent in every destruction is
an . . .


ACT OF CREATION

Now that I have had time to think it over, the quite commonsense
explanation occurs to me that old Jonas Wellman must have added an
extra, peculiar circuit to cause the one unusual response. He was quite
capable of it, of course – technically, that is. And I don't know but what he
was equally capable of it psychologically. Nevertheless, at the time, the
whole thing shook me up badly.
I had gone up to see him on a traditionally unpleasant duty. His son, Alvin,
had been in my outfit at the time of Flander's Charge, off the Vegan
Warhold. The boy was liaison officer from the Earth Draft, and he went with
the aft gun platform, the Communications Dorsai Regulars, when we got

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 "Adam, come here," I ordered


pinched between a light cruiser and one of those rearmed freighters the
Vegans filled their assault line with.
The cruiser stood off at a little under a thousand kilometers and boxed us
with her light guns. While we were occupied, the freighter came up out of
the sun and hit us with a CO beam, before we caught her in our laterals and
blew her to bits. It was their CO beam that did it for Alvin and the rest.
At any rate, Alvin had been on loan to us, so to speak, and, as commanding
officer, I owed a duty-call to his surviving relatives. At that time, I hadn't