"Joe Haldeman - 1968" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

Spider had attempted to strike his company's First Sergeant and, rather than go through the formality of a
court-martial, they had taken away his typewriter, given him a rucksack and a rifle that didn't work, and
put him on a helicopter. All this was subsequent to the First Sergeant having given him two black eyes, a
split lip, and several loosened teeth. Spider was impressed by the asymmetry of the exchange (see
"Entropy"). All he had done was misspell a name in a signature block.

Entropy

Entropy was a buzzword in 1968, a perfectly good thermodynamic term captured and put in thrall by
those who traffic in metaphor. When something changes the entropy of a system, that change is,
innocently enough, the heat absorbed in the process, divided by the system's temperature. The entropy of
a system measures the availability of energy in it; energy to do work. The more entropy, the less useful
energy available.

What makes this concept dramatic and literary and symbolic of futility, perversity, anomie, is that any
change in a real system results in an increase of entropy. When the dust settles, you have less to work
with than when you started.

So the entropy of a system is said to be an indicator of the degree of disorder in that system. In any
change worked upon-a closed system, entropy, thus disorder, must either (trivially) remain constant or
increase.

One familiar secular statement of this basic thermodynamic principle is Murphy's Law: If anything can go
wrong, it will. That was one of the things Spider had written on the camouflage cover of his helmet.

Names(1)

Spider was named Darcy after a rich uncle who unfortunately left all his money to other people.

He got the name Spider partly because of the abnormal length of his arms and legs. He'd had the name
since the seventh grade, and was very good at drawing spiders. He drew a large black one on the top of
the camouflage net of his helmet.

The army let him use Spider as his code name (see "Names (2)")

Human relations

"I can get along with most anybody," Spider said. He tossed the can away and sat down in the inch-thick
dust. He lit up a Lucky Strike. "I mean that sergeant had togo some."

"I know what you mean." Tonto was writing again, trying to describe his surroundings to his wife:Were in
a clearing about the size of a football field. There's a old stone farmhouse in the middle, all bombed out.
We got six 155s and a8-incher and four or five tanks and three compnies of infantry. No way in Hell
Charlys gonna mess with us.

"Spelled the fuckin' sergeant's name wrong at the bottom of a letter. I woulda typed it over. But he
started hollerin' and callin' me names. I don't have to take that kind of shit."

"Damn straight."Theres a rubber plantation all around us. I guess were at one end of it. You can see the
jungle off to the west. We got patrols out all day and ambushes all night. We got 3 layers of barbed wire