"Judith Merril - Whoever You Are" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

WHOEVER YOU ARE
THIS IS A love story. That is to say, it is a story of the greatest need and greatest fear men know. It
is also a story of conquest and defeat, of courage and cowardice, and the heroism that is a product of
both of them. It begins in security and isolation; it ends in victory and desecration. Whoever you are, this
story has happened to you already, and will again. Whoever you are, however you live, you are writing
the ending to the story with every breath you take, with every move you make.

In the cabin of the Service rocket, Scanliter Six, Sergeant Bolster and his new crewman, Pfc. Joe
Fromm, were playing checkers. It was the bored third day of a routine one-week tour of duty on the
Web, checking the activities of the scanner-satellites that held the tight-woven mesh of e-m-g in a hollow
sphere of protective power cast around the System.
Fromm studied the board soberly, sighed, and moved a man into unavoidable trouble. Bolster smiled,
and both of them looked up momentarily as they heard the click of the keys cutting tape on the receiver.
The sergeant returned his attention to the checker board, and jumped two men before he bothered to
look up at the viewer. He saw a streak of light move upward and across the screen in a wide expected
curve, from right to left; reached over to inspect the fresh-cut tape, and grunted approval.
"BB-3, coming in at 26°, 13', 37", all correct," he said. "Check 'em off, Joe. "That's nine, thirty-eight,
and oneoh-seven at the point of entry. All in correlation. Transmission clear. It's your move."
Fromm picked up the clipboard with the scanlite-station checkoff chart, and marked three tiny
squares with his initials, almost without looking. He was still staring at the view-screen, empty now of
everything but the distant specks of light that were the stars.
"Hey," Bolster said again. "It's your move."
Joe Fromm didn't even hear him. The scanner outside completed its revolution around the small ship,
and .. there it was again! The flaring trail of rockets traveled across the screen, independent of the
up-and-down motion of the revolving scanner.

The sergeant grunted again. "What's the matter? Didn't you ever see one home before?"
"That's the first," Fromm said without turning. "Shouldn't we be recording the tape?"
"Not yet." Bolster surveyed the checker board sadly; he'd have a king on the next move . . . if
Fromm ever made another move. "All we got now is radar-recog. Then . . . there you are . . ." He
nodded at the renewed clacking of the keys. "That'll be the code-dope coming in. Then we wait till after
it hits detection, and we get the last OK, before we send the tape to the Post."
He explained it all dutifully just the same. It used to be when they sent a new man out, they at least
took him on a practice tour first. "Look, make a move will you? You got a whole year here to sit and
look at 'em come in."
With difficulty, the Pfc. took his eyes off the viewer, touch a piece on the board at random, and
pushed it forward, leaving Bolster with the choice of a three-man jump to nowhere, or the one-man jump
that would net him his king. The private leaned forward to finger the tape as it emerged from the receiver,
reading off the replies to code-dope demands, and signal responses, with a certain reverent intensity.
"Did you ever see an illegal entry?" he asked. "I mean an attempt? Somebody told me there was one on
this sect . . ."
At that instant the BB-3 hit the detector field awaiting it at the point of entry on the Web, and
generated mechanical panic in an entire sequence of scanlite instruments. Synchronized pulses from the
three scanlite stations circling the point of entry transmitted their frustration in the face of the
unprecedented and unpredicted; and the tape in the cabin of Scanliter Six vibrated out of the recorder
under the furious impact of the chattering keys.
Alarm bells began to shrill: first in the small cabin, directly over the sergeant's head; then in similar
cabins on four other Scanliter rockets within range; finally, about two minutes later, in the Exec Office at
Phobos Post, which was the nearest Solar Defense base to the point of entry at the time.
 Pfc. Joe Fromm stopped his hesitant query in mid-word, feeling vaguely guilty for having brought the