"Barry N. Malzberg - Terminus Est" - читать интересную книгу автора (Malzberg Barry N)

there. Bohemians are all the time getting cut up in their so-called feuds and the Government has been very
strict on the matter of Moon burials: there will be none. Perhaps the true horror of the swindle only
assaults us at the moment of someone's death there; to bury on the Moon would be a complete
severance from our history. Just a speculation; I'm not very good at this sort of thing.
The reason I have not been out on the Moon for six months has to do with events occurring the last
time I went out. As a matter of fact, it was an experience which made me swear off the Moon forever.
I'm perfectly willing to sweat out a pension by running a messenger service, but there is no reason at all to
get involved with the subjects on one end, and I came to that decision without any regrets the time I saw
the bohemian couple lying locked with one another on the very edges of the Dome. I found myself
walking right toward them on my last time through and I was damned if I was going to turn to their
convenience.
They were literally perched up against the walls, as close to making a conjoinment, I suppose, as it is
possible in Moon gear, and quite oblivious to my approach. The boy had taken off some of his bottom
castings and arranged his helmet in a strange way so that it concealed all of him but his mouth. One of
their newer perversions, I suppose. The girl was lying straddled across him, her face in his lap, her hands
somewhere in the vicinity of his shoulder-joints.
It made no difference to me at all. They could do what the hell they wanted, it livened up the blasted
place. But I caught a piece of rock in a heel and went down, slowly, on my posterior end there was
something of a clatter. When I stood up, they had broken apart and were staring at me.
"What are you doing here?" the girl said. "Who are you?"
"I'm the commander of the Enterprise," I said, "and I'm taking a walk around the Dome. What's the
difference? Who's bothering you?"
"What's the difference he asks," the girl said. She turned to the boy. "Tell him what the difference is."
"I know you," the boy said. "You're the litde idiot who loves to come by and make speeches in our
meetings about how we're all escapists and we should come home to the real world. I know you damned
well."
"I don't care what you do," I said. I meant it, at least in the particular. Although I could make efforts
now and then to talk sense to them collectively, it was really none of my business what individual idiots
wanted to do. For that matter, it was not my fault that service compels me, now and then under the
contract, to give a kind of reenlistment talk to the troops. "You can stay here and grow old for all I care.
You can even bring children onto the Moon, if you can stand it"
"Get this," the girl said in a high voice. "Listen to him; he thinks he's clever."
"I don't like idiots," the boy said, standing slowly and tilting his helmet so that I could see his eyes. "I
don't like them on my territory and I particularly don't like asinine platitudes. I'm just coked up enough to
beat the hell out of this guy, if you don't mind, Deborah."
"I don't mind at all," she said. "As a matter of fact, I'll sit and watch."
"Now listen," I said. "I don't'even know who the two of you are. Outside the Dome, I have nothing to
do with you at all. I was just taking a walk, and I'm going back to my ship. So let's adjourn this." I was
trying to be reasonable. Even with scum, I'm told it pays.
"Sure he's going back," the girl said. "Into the little ship and off in the sky. What do you want to be
when you grow up, baby, a pilot?"
 But you can't be decent They'll get you all the time, although you should know better. I felt the old,
painful congested rage moving within me. I think that all things being equal, then, I might have hit her, but
the boy got to me first.
He caught me with a sneak punch behind the right ear where the metal is thin, and he must have
knocked me out for a moment, because the next thing I knew, I was already in the process of getting up
and he was looking at me, leering. I was in pain. His eyes, full and round, seemed to take the terrible
knowledge from me, but what he did was to hit one fist against the other. I could hear them clang.
"Good," he said. "Here we go again."
"No. Don't do it," I said. "I'm warning you, now, I don't want to get involved, but you better not try a