"Murray Leinster - Morale" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

museum, and a rural Central put him on the Area Officer's tight beam. The Area Officer listened drearily
as the Sergeant said in a military manner:



It spouted a flash of bluish flame.

"Sergeant Walpole, sir, Post Fourteen, reports that he has nothing of importance to report."

The Wabbly, uncombatable engine of war, spreads unparalleled death and destruction—until Sergeant
Walpole "strikes at the morale" of its crew.

The Area Officer's acknowledgment was curt; embittered. For he was an energetic young man, and he
loathed his job. He wanted to be in the west, where fighting of a highly unconventional nature was taking
place daily. He did not enjoy this business of watching an unthreatened coast-line simply for the
maintenance of civilian confidence and morale. He preferred fighting.

Sergeant Walpole, though, exhaled a lungful of smoke at the telephone transmitter and waited. Presently
the rural Central said:

"All through?"

"Sure, sweetie," said Sergeant Walpole. "How about the talkies tonight?"

That was at 2:20 P. M. There was coy conversation, while the civilian telephone-service suffered. Then
Sergeant Walpole went back to his post of duty with a date for the evening. He never kept that date, as it
turned out. The rural Central was dead an hour after the first and only Wabbly landed, and as everybody
knows, that happened at 2:45.

But Sergeant Walpole had no premonitions as he went back to his hammock on the porch. This was
Post Number Fourteen, Sixth Area, Eastern Coast Observation Force. There was a war on, to be sure.
There had been a war on since the fall of 1941, but it was two thousand miles away. Even lone-wolf
bombing planes, flying forty thousand feet up, never came this far to drop their eggs upon inviting targets
or upon those utterly blank, innocent-seeming places where munitions of war were now manufactured
underground.

Here was peace and quiet and good rations and a paradise for gold-brickers. Here was a summer
bungalow taken over for military purposes, quartering six men who watched a certain section of
coast-line for a quite impossible enemy. Three miles to the south there was another post. Three miles to
the north another one still. They stretched all along the Atlantic Coast, those observation-posts, and the
men in them watched the sea, languidly observed the television broadcasts, and slept in the sun. That was
all they were supposed to do. In doing it they helped to maintain civilian morale. And therefore the
Eastern Coast Observation Force was enviously said to be "just attached to the Army for rations," by the
other services, and its members rated with M. P.'s and other low forms of animal life.

Sergeant Walpole reclined in his hammock, inhaling comfortably. The ocean glittered blue before him in
the sun. There was a plume of smoke out at sea indicating an old-style coal-burner, its hull down below
the horizon. Anything that would float was being used since the war began, though a coal-burning ship
was almost a museum piece. A trim Diesel tramp was lazing northward well inshore. A pack of gulls
were squabbling noisily over some unpleasantness floating a hundred yards from the beach. The Diesel