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

thing more."
"Got that," he said, and threw a fist at me, missed, and poised again.
That was when I lost control. 'You trash," I screamed and took my gun from the inner pocket, and
shot him, just once, in the head. The projectile went all the way through, of course, just as they said it
would. He fell in front of me.
"He's dead," the girl said. "You killed him." But she didn't move.
But I was still concentrating on the boy. "You son of a bitch," I said, and shot him again, for good
measure, then in the fit that I could barely understand, but had had too often to resist, I turned on the girl
and raised the gun to her eyes.
"You want it too?" I said.
She shook her head and said nothing. Her eyes rolled and she staggered back.
could do it, you know. I don't have to put up with this kind of thing from the likes of you. Nobody
wants you. Back on Earth, you don't even exist except as a convenient statistic. I could wipe out the
whole, damned colony and say it was one of your feuds and that would be the end of the whole thing."
"No," she said, still hacking. "No, no. What's wrong with you?"
There was plenty, hut I was far gone. They had touched, together, the reservoir of pain, grief, need
within me. And they'll do it to you every time, long past the point when you can take it any more.
"I won't put up with it," I said to her flatly, and shot the girl through the heart. She fell before me
soundlessly, the metal of her suit gliding to rock as if it were rubber.
I was still angry. I could have incinerated the Moon itself if I had had the equipment
But I managed to put away the gun and got back to the ship.
I thought about filing a report on it, but decided not to: they could as likely have killed each other.
Probably would have, eventually, if I hadn't interceded. So I simply made a note in the log to that
effect—that I had found the two bodies scattered in a crater-and left it at that.
I haven't been outside since. My two-man crew brings the mail and messages back to me. I know
perfectly well that the colony knows what happened and what I did, but that's all right with me because
there's nothing they can do. Filth, discards, their word means nothing to Earth, and I transmit all the word
myself, anyway. And if one or two of them ever wanted to go back to report what happened, they'd
have to go in my ship.
So the hell with them.
The hell with the whole boondoggle. My year ends in three months and I'm going.
Aside from the events I've transcribed here to explain my feelings, nothing ever happens on the
Moon.