"Joe Haldeman - We Were Very Happy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

We Were Very Happy [Analog Nov 73]
Joe Haldeman
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Scared? Oh yes, I was scared—and who wouldn’t be? Only a fool or a suicide or a robot. Or a line
officer.

Submajor Stott paced back and forth behind the small podium in the assembly-room/chop-hall/
gymnasium of the Anniversary. We’d just made our final collapsar jump, from Tet-Thirty-eight to
Yod’Four. We were decelerating at one and a half gravities and our velocity relative to that collapsar
was a respectable nine-tenths c. We were being chased.

“I wish you people would relax for a while and just trust the ship’s computer. The Tauran vessel at any
rate will not be within strike range for another two weeks and if you keep moping around for two weeks
neither you nor your men will be in any condition to fight when the time comes. Fear is a contagious
disease. Mandella!”

He was always careful to call me “Sergeant” Mandella in front of the company. But everybody at this
briefing was a squad leader or more; not a private in the bunch. So he dropped the honorifics. “Yes,

“Mandella, you are responsible for the psychological as well as the physical efficiency of the men and
women in your squad. Assuming that you are aware of the morale problem building aboard this vessel
and assuming that your squad is not immune… what have you done about it?”

“With my squad, sir?”

He looked at me for a long moment. “Of course.”

“We talk it out, sir.”

“And have you arrived at any dramatic conclusion?”

“Meaning no disrespect, sir, I think the major problem is obvious. My people have been cooped up in
this ship, hell, everybody has, for fourteen-”

“Ridiculous. Every one of us has been adequately conditioned -against the pressures of, living in close
quarters and the enlisted men have the privilege of confraternity.” That was a delicate way of putting it.
“Officers must remain celibate yet we have no morale problem.”

If he thought his officers were celibate, he should sit down and have a long talk with Lieutenant Harmony.
Maybe he just meant line officers, though: himself and Cortez. Fifty-percent right, probably. Cortez was
rather friendly with Corporal Kamehameha.

“The therapists reinforced your conditioning in this regard,” he continued, “while they were working to
erase the hate-conditioning— everybody knows how I feel about that—and they may be misguided but
they are skilled.”

In our first battle with the Tauran's, we had been so saturated with blind hatred that we’d massacred
every last one of them, even though the object of the raid had been to take prisoners. Stott had stayed on
the ship.