"Harry Harrison - Bill, The Galactic Hero" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

behind him, and one last, anguished wail cut through the thud of marching feet.
"Step up the count to 130," the sergeant ordered, glancing at the watch set
under the nail of his little finger. "Just ten miles to the station, and we'll
be in camp tonight, my lads."
The command robot moved its metronome up one notch and the tramping boots
conformed to the smarter pace and the men.. began to sweat. By the time they
had reached the copter station it was nearly dark, their red paper uniforms
hung in shreds, the gilt had been rubbed from their pot-metal buttons, and
the surface charge that repelled the dust from their thin plastic boots had
leaked away. They looked as ragged, weary, dusty, and miserable as they felt.

II

It wasn't the recorded bugle playing reveille that woke Bill but the
supersonics that streamed through the metal frame of his bunk that
shook him until the fillings vibrated from his teeth. He sprang to his
feet and stood there shivering in the gray of dawn. Because it was summer
the floor was refrigerated: no mollycoddling of the men in Camp Leon Trotsky.
The pallid, chilled figures of the other recruits loomed up on every side, and
when the soul-shaking vibrations had died away they dragged their thick
sackcloth and sandpaper fatigue uniforms from their bunks, pulled them hastily
on, jammed their feet into the great, purple recruit boots, and staggered out
into the dawn.
"I am here to break your spirit," a voice rich with menace told them, and
they looked up and shivered even more as they faced the chief demon in this
particular hell.
Petty Chief Officer Deathwish Drang was a specialist from the tips of the
angry spikes of his hair to the corrugated stamping-soles of his mirrorlike
boots. He was wide-shouldered and lean-kipped, while his long arms hung,
curved like those of some horrible anthropoid, the knuckles of his immense
fists scarred from the breaking of thousands of teeth. It was impossible to
look at this detestable form and imagine that it issued from the tender womb
of a woman. He could never have been born; he must have been built to order
by the government. Most terrible of all was the head. The face! The hairline
was scarcely a finger's-width above the black tangle of the brows that were
set like a rank growth of foliage at the rim of the black pits that concealed
the eyes-visible only as baleful red gleams in the Stygian darkness. A nose,
broken and crushed, squatted above the mouth that was like a knife slash in
the taut belly of a corpse, while from between the lips issued the great,
white fangs of the canine teeth, at least two inches long, that rested in
grooves on the lower lip.
"I am Petty Chief Officer Deathwish Drang, and you will call me 'sir' or
'm'lord.'" He began to pace grimly before the row of terrified recruits.
"I am your father and your mother and your whole universe and your dedicated
enemy, and very soon I will have you regretting the day you were born. I will
crush your will. When I say frog, you will jump. My job is to turn you into


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