"Harlan Ellison - Alone Against Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

garbage.
It had to be that way. They were Discards.
But people? No, they were not people. People did not have hooks where hands should have been,
nor one eye, nor carapaces, nor humps on chests and backs, nor fins, nor any of the other mutations these
residents of the ship sported. People were normal. Evenly matched sets of arms and legs and eyes. Evenly
matched husbands, wives. Evenly distributed throughout the Solar System, and evenly dividing the goods
of the System between themselves and the frontier worlds at the Edge. And all happily disposed to let the
obscene Discards die in their prison ship.
“She’s gone.”
He had pursed his lips, had sunk his perfectly normal head onto his gigantic chest, and had been
thinking. Now he looked up at the speaker. It was John Smith, with feathers where hair should have been.
“I said: she’s gone.” Bedzyk nodded without replying. Riila had been just one more in the
tradition. They had already lost over two hundred Discards from the ship. There would be more.
Strange how these-he hesitated again to use the word people, finally settled on the word they used
among themselves: creatures-these creatures had steeled themselves to the death of one of their kind. Or
perhaps they did not consider the rest as malformed as themselves. Each person on the ship was different.
No two had been affected by Sickness in the same way. The very fibers of the muscles had altered with
some of these creatures, making their limbs useless; on others the pores had clogged on their skin surfaces,
eliminating all hair. On still others strange juices had been secreted in the blood stream, causing weird
growths to erupt where smoothness had been. But perhaps each one thought he was less hideous than the
others. It was conceivable. Bedzyk knew his great chest was not nearly as unpleasant to look upon as, say,
Samswope’s spiny crest and twin heads. In fact, Bedzyk mused wryly, many people might think it was
becoming, this great wedge of a chest, all matted with dark hair and heroic-seeming. Uh-huh, the others
are pretty miserable to look at, but not me, especially. Yes, it was conceivable.
In any case, they paid no attention now, if one of their group killed himself. They turned away;
most of them were better off dead, anyhow.
Then he caught himself.
He was starting to get like the rest of them! He had to stop thinking like that. It wasn’t right. No
one should be allowed to take death like that. He resolved, the next one would be stopped, and he would
deliver them a stern warning, and tell the Discards that they would find landfall soon, and to buck up.
But he knew he would sit and watch the next time, as he had this time. For he had made the same
resolve before Riila had gone.
Samswope came into the saloon-he had been on KP all “day” and both his heads were dripping
with sweat-and picked his way among the conversing groups of Discards to the seat beside Bedzyk.
“Mmm.” It was a greeting; he was identifying his arrival.
“Hi, Sam. How was it?”
 “Metsoo-metz,” he gibed, imitating Scalomina (the one-eyed ex-plumber, of Sicilian descent),
tipping his hand in an obvious Scalominian gesture. “I’ll live. Unfortunately.” He added the last word with
only a little drop of humor.
“Did I ever tell you the one about the Candy-Ass Canadian Boil-Sucker?” He didn’t even smile as
he said it; with either head. Bedzyk nodded wearily: he didn’t want to play that game. “Yeah, well,”
Samswope said wearily. He sat silently for several long moments, then added, with irony, “But did I tell
you I was married to her?” His wife had turned him in.
Morbidity ran knee-deep on the ship.
“Riila killed herself a little bit ago,” Bedzyk said carelessly. There was no other way to say it.
“I figured as much,” Samswope explained. “I saw them carrying her past the galley to the garbage
lock. That’s number six this week alone. You going to do anything, Bedzyk?”
Bedzyk twisted abruptly in his chair. He leveled a gaze at a spot directly between Samswope’s two
heads. His words were bitter with helplessness and anger that the burden should be placed upon him. “What
do you mean, what am I going to do? I’m a prisoner here, too. When they had the big roundup, I got