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

from the skies in the course of a complicated battle maneuver, and Earth had wobbled over as orbital
substitute.
The solution was simple: since the Troxxt were too firmly based on the small con-tinent to be driven
away, the numerically superior Dendi brought up enough firepower to disintegrate all Australia into an ash
that muddied the Pacific. This oc-curred on the twenty-fourth of June, the Holy Day of First Reliberation.
A day of reckoning for what remained of the human race, however.
How could we have been so naive, the Dendi wanted to know, as to be taken in by the chauvinistic
pro-protoplasm propaganda? Surely, if physical characteristics were to be the criteria of our racial
empathy, we would not orient ourselves on a narrow chemical basis! The Dendi life-plasma was based
on silicon instead of carbon, true, but did not vertebrates—appendaged vertebrates, at that, such as we
and the Dendi—have infinitely more in common, in spite of a minor biochemical difference or two, than
vertebrates and legless, armless, slime-crawling creatures who happened, quite accidentally, to possess
an identical organic substance?
As for this fantastic picture of life in the galaxy...Well! The Dendi shrugged their quintuple shoulders
as they went about the intricate business of erecting their noisy weapons all over the rubble of our planet.
Had we ever seen a representative of these protoplasmic races the Troxxt were supposedly protecting?
No, nor would we. For as soon as a race—animal, vegetable, or mineral—developed enough to
constitute even a potential danger to the sinuous aggressors, its civilization was systematically
dis-mantled by the watchful Troxxt. We were in so primitive a state that they had not considered it at all
risky to allow us the outward seeming of full participation.
Could we say we had learned a single useful piece of information about Troxxt technology—for all
of the work we had done on their machines, for all of the lives we had lost in the process? No, of course
not! We had merely contributed our might to the enslavement of far-off races who had done us no harm.
There was much that we had cause to feel guilty about, the Dendi told us gravely—once the few
surviving interpreters of the pre-Bengali dialect had crawled out of hid-ing. But our collective onus was as
nothing compared to that borne by "vermicular collaborationists"—those traitors who had supplanted our
martyred former leaders. And then there were the unspeakable human interpreters who had had linguistic
traffic with creatures destroying a two-million-year-old galactic peace! Why, killing was almost too good
for them, the Dendi murmured as they killed them.


When the Troxxt ripped their way back into possession of Earth some eighteen months later, bringing
us the sweet fruits of the Second Reliberation—as well as a complete and most convincing rebuttal of the
Dendi—there were few humans found who were willing to accept with any real enthusiasm the
responsibilities of newly opened and highly paid positions in language, science, and government.
Of course, since the Troxxt, in order to reliberate Earth, had found it necessary to blast a
tremendous chunk out of the Northern Hemisphere, there were very few hu-mans to be found in the first
place...
Even so, many of these committed suicide rather than assume the title of Secre-tary General of the
United Nations when the Dendi came back for the glorious Re-Reliberation, a short time after that. This
was the liberation, by the way, which swept the deep collar of matter off our planet, and gave it what our
forefathers came to call a pear-shaped look.
Possibly it was at this time—possibly a liberation or so later—that the Troxxt and the Dendi
discovered the Earth had become far too eccentric in its orbit to possess the minimum safety conditions
demanded of a Combat Zone. The battle, therefore, zigzagged coruscatingly and murderously away in
the direction of Aldebaran.
That was nine generations ago, but the tale that has been handed down from par-ent to child, to
child's child, has lost little in the telling. You hear it now from me almost exactly as I heard it. From my
father I heard it as I ran with him from water puddle to distant water puddle, across the searing heat of
yellow sand. From my mother I heard it as we sucked air and frantically grabbed at clusters of thick