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

agony. There, about thirty metres down the street, a spacesuited body lay flat on the ground. It wasn’t moving, but
was it dead? He had to know.
Harker crawled over the field of death, over the remains of shattered bodies. The front of his spacesuit became
caked with mud and some not-quite-dried blood that had an inhuman, oily consistency. The drizzle was becoming
harder, turning to rain, but still steaming up from the radioactively heated ground. Clouds of vapour fogged his
way, hiding the object of his search. Still Harker crawled, keeping to the direction he knew to be the true one.
His leg was on fire, and every centimetre of the crawl was hell, a surrealist’s nightmare of the world gone mad.
Once he thought he heard a scream, and he looked around, but there was no one nearby. It must have been a
hallucination. He’d had them before on the battlefield, under pain.
He reached his goal after an eternity of crawling. He could detect faint twitches; the enemy was still alive then,
though barely. Harker turned him over on his back to deliver the death blow, then looked into the man’s face.
It was Gary.

All the resurrections now seem to run together in his memory. The next one, he thinks, is Venus, the place of hot,
stinking swamps, of nearly killing atmospheric pressure and protective bubble-pockets of life. These are the first aliens
he has ever killed, the tiny creatures no more than twenty-five centimetres high who can swarm all over a man and kill
him with a million tiny stabs. At first it is easier to kill nonhumans, less wearing on the scruples. But eventually it
doesn’t matter. Killing is killing, no matter whom it is done to. It becomes a clinical, mechanical process, to be done as
efficiently as possible, not to be thought over.
Then back on the Moon again – or is it Mars? – fighting other humans. The spacesuits are improved this time,
tougher, but the fighting is just as silent, just as deadly.
Then a war back on Earth again. (Apparently that outlawing of war on the mother planet has not worked out as
well as expected.) Some of the fighting is even done under the oceans, in and around large domes that house cities
with populations of millions. There are trained dolphins and porpoises fighting in this one. It doesn’t matter. Harker
kills them no matter what they look like.
This war is the last time Harker ever sets foot upon his native planet.
Then comes the big jump to an interstellar war. He is resurrected on a planet under a triple sun – Alpha Centauri,
someone says – and the enemy is two-foot long chitinous caterpillars with sharp pincers. They fight valiantly despite
a much more primitive technology. By this time Harker is no longer sure whom he is working for. His side is the one
that resurrects him and gives him an enemy to fight. They give him shelter, food, clothing, weapons and, occasionally,
relaxation. They no longer bother to tell him why he is fighting. It no longer seems to matter to him.
Wake up and fight until there is no more killing to do; then retreat into purgatory until the next war, the next battle.
The killing machine named Harker has trod the surfaces of a hundred planets, leaving nothing but destruction and
death in his wake.

Gary stared up into Harker’s eyes. He was in pain, near death, but was there some recognition there? Harker
could not speak to him, their communicators were on different frequencies, but there was something in Gary’s eyes
… a plea. A plea for help. A plea for a quick and merciful death.
Harker obliged.
His mind was numb, his leg was burning. He did not think of the paradox of Gary still being alive though he had
seen him die on the Moon years (centuries? millennia?) ago. He knew only that his leg hurt and that he was in an
exposed position. He crawled on his side, with his left elbow pulling him forward, for ten metres to a piece of wall.
He lifted himself over it and tumbled to the ground. If not completely safe, he was at least off the street, out of the
open space.
He reached for the first-aid kit on his belt, to tend his leg. There was none there. That idea took a full minute to
sink into his mind: THEY HADN’T GIVEN HIM A FIRST-AID KIT. He felt a moment of anger, but it subsided quickly.
Why should they give him a kit? What was he to them? A pattern called out of the past, an anachronism – useful for
fighting and, if necessary, dying. Nothing more. He was a ghost living far beyond his appointed hour, clinging to
life in the midst of death. A carrion eater, feeding on death and destruction to survive, for he had no purpose except
to kill. And when the killing was done, he was stored away until his time came round again.