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

tramp edged closer inshore still. It was all very peaceful and placid. There are few softer jobs on earth
than being a member of a "force in being" for the sake of civilian morale.
But at 2:32 P. M. the softness of that job departed, as far as Sergeant Walpole was concerned. At that
moment he heard a thin wailing sound high aloft. It was well enough known nearer the front, but the
Eastern Coast Observation Force had had no need to become unduly familiar with it. With incredible
swiftness the wailing rose to the shrillest of shrieks, descending as lightning might be imagined to descend.
Then there was a shattering concussion. It was monstrous. It was ear-splitting. Windows crashed in the
cottage and tinkled to the sandy earth outside. There was a pause of seconds' duration only, during which
Sergeant Walpole stared blankly and gasped, "What the hell?" Then there was a second thin wailing
which rose to a scream....

Sergeant Walpole was in motion before the second explosion came. He was diving off the veranda of
Post Number Fourteen. He saw someone else coming through a window. He had a photographic
glimpse of one of his men emerging through a doorway. Then he struck earth and began to run. Like
everybody else in America, he knew what the explosions and the screamings meant.

But he had covered no more than fifty yards when the third bomb fell from that plane so far aloft that it
was not even a mote in the sky. Up there the sky was not even blue, but a dull leaden gray because of
the thinness of the atmosphere yet above it. The men in that high-flight bomber could see the ground only
as a mass of vaguely blending colors. They were aiming their bombs by filtered light, through telescopes
which used infra-red rays only, as aerial cameras did back in the 1920's. And they were sighting their
eggs with beautifully exact knowledge of their velocity and height. By the time the bombs had dropped
eight miles they were traveling faster than the sound of their coming. The first two had wiped out Posts
Thirteen and Fifteen. The third made no sound before it landed, except to an observer at a distance.
Sergeant Walpole heard neither the scream of fall nor the sound of its explosion.

He was running madly, and suddenly the earth bucked violently beneath his feet, and he had a momentary
sensation of things flying madly by over his head, and then he knew nothing at all for a very long time.
Then his head ached horribly and someone was popping at something valorously with a rifle, and he
heard the nasty sharp explosions of the hexynitrate bullets which have remodeled older ideas of warfare,
and Sergeant Walpole was aware of an urgent necessity to do something, but he could not at all imagine
what it was. Then a shell went off, the earth-concussion banged his nose against the sand, and the
rifle-fire stopped.

"For Gawd's sake!" said Sergeant Walpole dizzily.

He staggered to his feet and looked behind him. Where the cottage had been there was a hole. Quite a
large hole. It was probably a hundred yards across and all of twenty deep, but sea-water was seeping in
to fill it through the sand. Its edge was forty or fifty feet from where he stood. He had been knocked
down by the heaving earth, and the sand and mud blown out of the crater had gone clean over him.
Twenty feet back, the top part of his body would have been cut neatly off by the blast. As it was....

He found his nose bleeding and plugged it with his handkerchief. He was still rather dazed, and he still
had the feeling that there was something extremely important that he must do. He stood rocking on his
feet, trying to clear his head, when two men came along the sand-dunes behind the beach. One of them
carried two automatic rifles. The other was trying to bandage a limp and flapping arm as he ran. They
saw the Sergeant and ran to him.

"Hell, Sarge, I thought y'were blown to little egg-shells."