"William Tenn - The Liberation of Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

through five hours of a July day in all the silk-hatted, stiff-collared, dark-suited diplomatic regalia that the
barbaric past demanded of political leaders who would deal with the representatives of another people.
They waited and wilted be-neath the enormous ship—which no human had ever been invited to enter,
despite the wistful hints constantly thrown out by university professors and aeronautical designers—they
waited patiently and wetly for the Dendi leader to emerge and let them know whether he had meant the
State of Washington or Washington, D.C.
The tale comes down to us at this point as a tale of glory. The capitol building taken apart in a few
days and set up almost intact in the foothills of the Rocky Moun-tains; the missing Archives that were
later to turn up in the Children's Room of a Public Library in Duluth, Iowa; the bottles of Potomac River
water carefully borne westward and ceremoniously poured into the circular concrete ditch built around
the President's mansion (from which, unfortunately, it was to evaporate within a week because of the
relatively low humidity of the region)—all these are proud moments in the galactic history of our species,
from which not even the later knowledge that the Dendi wished to build no gun site on the spot, nor even
an ammunition dump, but merely a recreation hall for their troops, could remove any of the grandeur of
our determined cooperation and most willing sacrifice.
There is no denying, however, that the ego of our race was greatly damaged by the discovery, in the
course of a routine journalistic interview, that the aliens totaled no more powerful a group than a squad;
and that their leader, instead of the great scien-tist and key military strategist that we might justifiably have
expected the Galactic Federation to furnish for the protection of Terra, ranked as the interstellar
equiva-lent of a buck sergeant.
That the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and the Navy, had
waited in such obeisant fashion upon a mere noncommissioned officer was hard for us to swallow, but
that the impending Battle of Earth was to have a historical dignity only slightly higher than that of a patrol
action was impossibly humiliating.


And then there was the matter of "lendi."
The aliens, while installing or servicing their planetwide weapon system, would occasionally fling
aside an evidently unusable fragment of the talking metal. Sepa-rate from the machine of which it had
been a component, the substance seemed to lose all those qualities which were deleterious to mankind
and retain several which were quite useful indeed. For example, if a portion of the strange material was
at-tached to any terrestrial metal—and insulated carefully from contact with other substances—it would,
in a few hours, itself become exactly the metal that it touched, whether that happened to be zinc, gold, or
pure uranium.
This stuff—"lendi," men have heard the aliens call it—was shortly in frantic de-mand in an economy
ruptured by constant and unexpected emptyings of its most important industrial centers.
Everywhere the aliens went, to and from their weapon sites, hordes of ragged hu-mans stood
chanting—well outside the two-mile limit—"Any lendi, Dendi?" All attempts by law-enforcement
agencies of the planet to put a stop to this shameless, wholesale begging were useless—especially since
the Dendi themselves seemed to get some unexplainable pleasure out of scattering tiny pieces of lendi to
the scrab-bling multitude. When policemen and soldiery began to join the trampling, mur-derous dash to
the corner of the meadows wherein had fallen the highly versatile and garrulous metal, governments gave
up.
Mankind almost began to hope for the attack to come, so that it would be relieved of the festering
consideration of its own patent inferiorities. A few of the more fa-natically conservative among our
ancestors probably even began to regret liberation.
They did, children; they did! Let us hope that these would-be troglodytes were among the very first
to be dissolved and melted down by the red flame-balls. One cannot, after all, turn one's back on
progress!
Two days before the month of September was over, the aliens announced that they had detected