"Stephen Goldin - But As A Soldier, For His Country" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldin Stephen)

around in a circle.
With a month to go, Harker suddenly leaves his friend and goes off on his own. He lets desolation sink in until it
has invaded the roots of his soul. He often walks alone at night, and several times is stopped by the police. Even
when someone is with him, generally a streetgirl, he is alone.
He looks at things, ordinary things, with new strangeness. The cars going by on the street are suddenly vehicles
of great marvels. The skyscrapers that reach above him, their defaced walls and smog-dirtied windows, all become
symbols of a world that will not exist for him much longer. He stares for an hour at a penny on the sidewalk, until
someone notices what he is staring at and picks the coin up for himself.
He talks but little and even his thoughts are shallow. He disengages his brain and lives on a primal level. When he
is hungry, he eats; when his bladder or bowels are full, he relieves them. He takes whores to his hotel room for
couplings that are merely the release of excess semen. During the last week, he is totally impotent.
He returns to the post when his leave is up and, as promised, is assigned to a room with Gary. The latter still seems
to be in good spirits, undaunted by the prospects of the immediate future. The presence of his friend should brighten
Harker up, but for some reason it only makes him more depressed.
For a week, they run him and the other volunteers – three hundred in all – through a battery of medical tests that
are the most thorough Harker has ever experienced. Then they lead him, naked, to a white room filled with coffins,
some of which are occupied and some of which are still empty.
There they freeze him against the time when they will need a good soldier again.

It was dark up on the surface, not a night-dark but a dreary, rainy, cloud-dark. A constant drizzle came from the
sky, only to steam upward again when it touched the smouldering ruins of what had recently been a city. Buildings
were mostly demolished, but here and there a wall stood silhouetted against the dark sky, futilely defying the
fearsomeness of war. The ground and wreckage were still boiling hot, but Harker’s suit protected him from the
temperature. The drizzle and steam combined to make the air misty, and to give objects a shadow quality that
denied their reality.
Harker looked around on reflex, taking stock. All around him were his own people, who had also just emerged
from the elevator. No sign yet of the mysterious ‘they’ he was supposed to keep busy for four hours. “Spread out,”
somebody said, and ingrained instincts took over. Clustered together at the mouth of the elevator, they made too
good a target. They scattered at random in groups of one, two or three.
Harker found himself with a woman – not a resurrectee, just another soldier. Neither of them spoke; they
probably had little in common. One was rooted in time, the other drifted, anchorless and apart.
The clouds parted for a moment, revealing a green sun. I wonder what planet it is this time, Harker thought, and
even before the idea was completely formed, apathy had erased the desire to know. It didn’t matter. All that
mattered was the fighting and killing. That was why he was here.
An unexpected movement off to the left. Harker whirled, gun at the ready. A wraithlike form was approaching
out of the mists. Three meters tall, stick-man thin, it moved agonisingly, fighting what was, to it, impossibly heavy
gravity. Memories flooded Harker’s mind, memories of a planet with a red sun, gravity only a third of Earth’s, of
dust and sand and choking dryness. And tall thin forms like this one. The men at his side and an army advancing
on him. The enemy. An enemy once more?
Harker fired. This gun fired pulses of blue that seemed to waft with dreamlike slowness to the alien being. They
reached it with a crackling more felt than heard. Static electricity? The being crumpled lifeless to the ground.
The woman grabbed Harker’s arm. “What’d you do that for?”
“It was a … a …” What had they been called? “A Bjorgn.”
“Yes,” said the soldier. “But they’re on our side now.”

Resurrection is slow, the first time, and not a little painful.
Harker awakes to quiet and white. That is his first impression. Later, when he sorts it out, he knows there must
have been heat too. A nurse in a crisp white blouse and shorts is standing beside him, welcoming him back to the land
of the living. It’s been seven years, she tells him, since he was frozen. There is a war in Africa now, and they need
good fighting men like him. She tells him to rest, that nothing is expected of him just yet. He’s been through an ordeal,