"Nancy Kress - The Battle of Long Island" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

hunting knife, which was taken away from him. He’d received a head wound, most
likely a glancing shell fragment, enough to cause concussion but, according to the
brain scan, not permanent damage. When I burst into Recovery, he’s sitting up,
dazed, looking at the guards at the door holding their M-18s.
“The General and Dr. Bechtel are on their way,” I say to the guards, which is
approximately true. I sent a soldier walking across the compound to tell them. My
phone seems to be malfunctioning. The soldier is walking very slowly.
“General Putnam?” the new Arrival asks. His voice is less dazed than his face:
a rough, deep voice with the peculiar twist on almost-British English that still sends a
chill through me all these months after the Hole opened.
“Were you with the Connecticut Third Regiment? Let me check your pulse,
please, I’m a nurse.”
“A nurse!” That seems to finish the daze; he looks at my uniform, then my
face. When the Hole first opened, there was wild talk of putting the medical staff in
Colonial dress - “to minimize the psychological shock.” As if anything could
minimize dying hooked to machines you couldn’t imagine in a place that didn’t exist
while being stuck with needles by people unborn for another two centuries. Cooler
heads prevailed. I wear fatigues, my short hair limp against my head from a shower,
my glasses thick over my eyes.
“Yes, a nurse. This is a hospital. Let me have your wrist, please.”
He pulls his hand away. I grab his wrist and hold it firmly. Two Arrivals have
attacked triage personnel and one attacked a Recovery guard; this soldier looks
strong enough for both. But I served in the minor action in Kuwait and the major
ones in Colombia. He lets me hold his wrist. His pulse is rapid but strong.
“What is this place?”
“I told you. A hospital.”
He leans forward and clutches my arm with his free hand while I’m reaching
for the medscan equipment. “The battle - who won the battle?”
They’re often like this. They find themselves in an alien, impossible,
unimaginable place, surrounded by guards with uniforms and weapons they don’t
recognize, and yet their first concern is not their personal fate but the battle they left
behind. They ask again and again. They have to know what happened.
We aren’t supposed to tell Arrivals anything not directly medical. No hint that
this is more than a few days into their future. That’s official policy. Not until the
Military intelligence experts are finished with whatever they do, wherever they do it.
Not until the Pentagon has assured itself that the soldier, the Hole itself, is not some
terrorist plot (whose, for Christ’s sweet fucking sake?). We’re “not qualified for this
situation.” (Who do they imagine is?) Those are my orders.
But he hasn’t asked for very much future: The Battle of Long Island was over
in less than 24 hours. And I, of all people, am not capable of denying anyone the
truth of his past.
“The Colonists lost. Washington retreated.”
“Ahhhhhhhhhhh . . . .” He lets it out like escaping gas. In Bogota, in the ‘95
offensive, lethal gas wiped out 3,000 men in an hour. I don’t look directly at his face.
“You were hit in the head,” I say. “Not badly.”
He puts his hand to his head and fingers the bandage, but his eyes never leave
mine. He has a strong, fierce face, with sunken black eyes, a hooked nose, broken
teeth, and a beard coming in red, not gray. He could be anywhere from forty to
sixty. It’s not a modern face; today the Army would fix the teeth and shave the
beard.