"Judith Merril - Peeping Tom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

PEEPING TOM
YOU TAKE a boy like Tommy Bender—a nice American boy, well brought-up in a nice, average,
middle-class family; chock-full of vitamins, manners and baseball statistics; clean-shaven, soft-spoken,
and respectful to women and his elders. You take a boy like that, fit him out with a uniform, teach him to
operate the most modern means of manslaughter, reward him with a bright gold bar, and send him out to
an exotic eastern land to prove his manhood and his patriotism.
You take a kid like that. Send him into combat in a steaming jungle inferno; teach him to sweat and
swear with conviction; then wait till he makes just one wrong move, pick him out of the pool of drying
blood, beat off the flies, and settle him safely on a hospital cot in an ill-equipped base behind the lines, cut
off from everyone and everywhere, except the little native village nearby. Let him rest and rot there for a
while. Then bring him home, and pin a medal on him, and give him his civvies and a pension to go with his
limp. You take a boy like Tommy Bender, and do all that to him, you won't expect him to be quite the
same nice, apple-cheeked youngster afterwards.
He wasn't.
When Tommy Bender came home, he was firmly disillusioned and grimly determined. He knew what
he wanted out of life, had practically no hope of getting it, and didn't much care how he went about
getting the next best things. And in a remarkably short time, he made it clear to his erstwhile friends and
neighbors that he was almost certain to get anything he went after. He made money; he made love; he
made enemies. Eventually, he made enough of a success so that the enemies could be as thoroughly
ignored as yesterday's woman. The money, and the things it bought for him, he took good care of.
For almost five years after he came home, Tommy Bender continued to build a career and ruin
reputations. People tried to understand what had happened to him; but they didn't really.
Then, abruptly, something happened to change Tommy. His business associates noticed it first; his
family afterwards. The girls he was seeing at the time were the last to know, because he'd always been
undependable with them, and not hearing from him for two or three weeks wasn't unusual.
What happened was a girl. Her name was Candace, and when she was married to Tommy, seven
weeks after her arrival, the papers carried the whole romantic story. It was she who had nursed him back
to health in that remote village on the edge of the jungle years ago. He'd been in love with her then, but
she'd turned him down.
That last part wasn't in the news story of course, but it got around town just as fast as the paper did.
Tommy's bitterness, it seemed, was due to his long-frustrated love. And anyone could see how he'd
changed since Candace came back to him. His employees, his debtors, his old friends and discarded
women, his nervous mother and his angry brother all sighed with relief and decided everything was going
to be all right now. At last they really understood.
But they didn't. They didn't, for instance, understand what happened to Tommy Bender in that
God-forsaken little town where he'd spent two months on crutches, waiting for his leg to heal enough to
travel home.

It was hot and sticky in the shack. The mattress was lumpy. His leg itched to the very fringes of
madness, and the man on his right had an erratically syncopated snore that took him past the raveled
edge straight to insanity. All he needed to make the torture complete was the guy on his left—and the
nurse.
The nurse was young and round and lithe, and she wore battle fatigues: slacks, and a khaki shirt that
was always draped against her high, full breasts in the damp heat. Her hair, dark blonde or light brown,
was just long enough to be pinned back in a tiny bun, and just short enough so wisps of it were always
escaping to curl around her ears or over her forehead.
When she bent over him to do any of the small humiliating services he needed done for him, he could
see tiny beads of sweat on her upper lip, and that somehow was always the one little touch too much.
So that after she moved on to the next bed, and beyond it, it would be torture to have Dake, the guy
on the left, turn toward him and start describing, graphically, what he would do if he could just get his