"William Tenn - The Deserter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

"And the first fifty of which," he reminded her irritably, "were my relatives and neighbors. If you're
old enough to remember Mars and the Three Watertanks Mas-sacre, young lady."
She swallowed and looked stricken. An apology seemed to be in the process of composition, but
Mardin moved past her in a long, disgusted stride and headed rap-idly for the distant platform. He had a
fierce dislike, he had discovered long ago, for people who were unable to hate wholesomely and
intelligently, who had to jog their animus with special symbols and idiotic negations. Americans, during the
War of 1914-18, changing sauerkraut into liberty cabbage; mobs of Turks, in the Gibraltar Flare-up of
1985, lynching anyone in Ankara caught eating oranges. How many times had he seen aged men in the
uniform of the oldsters' service, the Infirm Civilian Corps, make the socially accepted gesture of grinding
out a worm with their heels whenever they referred to the enemy from Jupiter!
He grimaced at the enormous expanse of ice-covered tank in which a blanket of living matter large
enough to cover a city block pursued its alien processes. "Let me see you lift your foot and step on
that!" he told the astonished girl behind him. Damn all simplicity-hounds, anyway, he thought. A week
on the receiving end of a Jovian ques-tion-machine is exactly what they need. Make them nice and
thoughtful and give them some inkling of how crazily complex this universe can be!
That reminded him of his purpose in this place. He became thoughtful himself and—while the circular
scar on his forehead wrinkled—very gravely reminiscent of how crazily complex the universe actually
was...
So thoughtful, in fact, that he had to take a long, relaxing breath and wipe his hands on his coveralls
before climbing the stairs that led up to the hastily constructed platform.
Colonel Liu, Mardin's immediate superior, broke away from the knot of men at the other end and
came up to him with arms spread wide. "Good to see you, Mardin," he said rapidly. "Now listen to me.
Old Rockethead himself is here—you know how he is. So put a little snap into your salute and kind of
pull back on those shoulders when you're talking to him. Know what I mean? Try to show him that when
it comes to military bearing, we in Intelligence don't take a—Mardin, are you listening to me? This is very
important."
With difficulty, Mardin took his eyes away from the transparent un-iced top of the tank. "Sorry, sir,"
he mumbled. "I'll—I'll try to remember."
"This the interpreter, Colonel Liu? Major Mardin, eh?" the very tall, stiffly erect man in the jeweled
uniform of a Marshal of Space yelled from the railing. "Bring him over. On the double, sir!"
Colonel Liu grabbed Mardin's left arm and pulled him rapidly across the plat-form. Rockethead
Billingsley cut the colonel's breathless introduction short. "Major Igor Mardin, is it? Sounds Russian. You
wouldn't be Russian now, would you? I hate Russians."
Mardin noticed a broad-shouldered vice-marshal standing in Billingsley's rear stiffen angrily. "No,
sir," he replied. "Mardin is a Croat name. My family is French and Yugoslav with possibly a bit of Arab."
The Marshal of Space inclined his fur-covered head. "Good! Couldn't stand you if you were
Russian. Hate Russians, hate Chinese, hate Portuguese. Though the Chi-nese are worst of all, I'd say.
Ready to start working on this devil from Jupiter? Come over here, then. And move, man, move!" As he
swung around, the dozen or so sap-phire-studded Royster pistolettos that swung picturesquely from his
shoulder straps clinked and clanked madly, making him seem like a gigantic cat that the mice had belled
again and again.
Hurrying after him, Mardin noticed with amusement that the stiff, angry backs were everywhere
now. Colonel Liu's mouth was screwed up into a dark pucker in his face; at the far end of the platform,
the young lieutenant who'd escorted him from the jet base was punching a tiny fist into an open palm.
Marshal of Space Rudolfo Billingsley enjoyed a rank high enough to make tact a function of the moment's
whim—and it was obvious that he rarely indulged such moments. "Head thick as a rocket wall and a
mouth as filthy as a burned-out exhaust, but he can figure out, down to the smallest wound on the
greenest corporal, exactly how much blood any attack is going to cost." That was what the line officers
said of him.
And that, after all, Mardin reflected, was just the kind of man needed in the kind of world Earth had