"Bill the Galactic Hero" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asprin Robert)

his eyes he could see the steady ripple of motion as men collapsed here and
there among the massed ranks of thousands and were dragged to the waiting
ambulances by alert corpsmen. Here they were laid in the shade of the vehicles
until they revived and could be urged back to their positions in the formation.

Then the band, burst into "Spacemen Ho and Chingers Vanquished!" and the
broadcast signal to each boot heel snapped the ranks to attention at the same
instant, and the thousands of rifles flashed in the sun. The commanding
general's staff car-this was obvious from the two stars painted on it-pulled
up beside the reviewing stand and a tiny, round figure moved quickly through
the furnacelike air to the cornfort of the enclosure. Bill had never seen him
any closer than this, at least from the front, though once while he was
returning from late KP he had spotted the general getting into his car near
the camp theater. Al least Bill thought it was he, but all he had seen was a
brief refit view. Therefore, if he had a mental picture of the general, it was
of a large backside superimposed on a teeny, antlike figure. lie thought of
most officers in these general terms, since the men of course had nothing to
do with officers during their recruit training. Bill had had a good glimpse of
a second lieutenant once, near the orderly room, and he knew he had a face.
And there had been a medical officer no more than thirty yards away, who had
lectured them on venereal disease, but Bill had been lucky enough to sit behind
a post and had promptly fallen asleep.

After the band shut up the anti-G loudspeakers floated out over the troops,
and the general addressed them. He had nothing to say that anyone cared to

listen to, and he closed with the announcement that because of losses in the
field their training program would be accelerated, which was just what they
had expected. Then the band played some more and they marched back to the
barracks, changed into their haircloth fatigues, and marched-double time now-to
the range, where they fired their atomic rifles at plastic replicas of Chingers
that popped up out of holes in the ground. Their aim was bad until Deathwish
Drang popped out of a hole and every trooper switched to full automatic and
hit with every charge fired from every gun, which is a very hard thing to do.
Then the smoke cleared, and they stopped cheering and started sobbing when
they saw that it was only a plastic replica of Deathwish, now torn to tiny
pieces, and the original appeared behind them and gnashed its tusks and gave
them all a full month's KP. .

"The human body is a wonderful thing," Bowb Brown said a month later, when
they were sitting around a table in the Lowest Ranks Klub eating plastic-
skinned sausages stuffed with road sweepings and drinking watery warm beer.
Bowb Brown was a throat- herder from the plains, which is why they called him
Bowb, since everyone knows just what thoatherders do with their thoats. He
was tall, thin, and bowlegged, his skin burnt to the color of ancient leather.
He rarely talked, being more used to the eternal silence of the plains broken
only by the eerie cry of the restless thoat, but he was a great thinker, since
the one thing he had plenty of was time to think in. He could worry a thought
for days, even weeks, before he mentioned it aloud, and while he was thinking
about it nothing could disturb him. He even let them call him Bowb without
protesting: call any other trooper bow b and he would hit you in the face. Bill