"Gordon R. Dickson - Jean Dupres" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

natural commander. But he was a big-bellied man with a booming voice and very noticeable whites to his
eyes; and I suspected him of a lack of guts.
I told him to be sure to plant sentinels in the observation posts, nearly two hundred feet off the ground
in treetops on four sides of the Strongpoint and a hundred meters out. And I told him to pick men who
could stay there indefinitely. Also, he was to save his men and ammunition until the Klahari actually tried
to take the Strongpoint by assault.
"тАж You'll be all right," I told him, and the other men, just before I went out the gate. "Remember, no
Strongpoint has ever been taken as long as the ammunition held out, and there were men to use it."
Then I left.
The forest was alive with Klahari, but they were traveling, not hunting, under the impression all
humans still alive were holed up in one place or another. It took me three days to make the unfinished
Strongpoint, and when I got there I found the sergeant and his men had been wiped out, the Strongpoint
itself gutted. I was surprised by two seniors there, but managed to kill them both fairly quietly and get
away. I headed back for Strongpoint Hundred Fourteen.
It was harder going back; and I took eight days. I made most of the distance on my belly and at night.
At that, I would never have gotten as far as I did, except for luck and the fact that the Klahari were not
looking for humans in the undergrowth. Their attention was all directed to the assault building up against
Strongpoint Hundred Fourteen.
The closer I got to the Strongpoint, the thicker they were. And more were coming in all the time.
They squatted in the jungle, waiting and growing in numbers. I saw that I would never make it back to the
Strongpoint itself, so I headed for the tree holding the north sentinel post hidden in its top (the Klahari did
not normally climb trees or even look up) to join the sentinel there.
I made the base of the tree on the eighth night, an hour before dawnтАФand I was well up the trunk
and hidden when the light came. I hung there in the crotch all day while the Klahari passed silently below.
They have a body odor something like the smell of crushed grass; you can't smell it unless you get very
close. Or if there are a lot of them together. There were now and their odor was a sharp pungency in the
air, mingled with the unpleasant smell of their breath, reminiscent, to a human nose, of garbage. I stayed
in that tree crotch all day and climbed the rest of the way when it got dark. When I reached the platform,
it was dark and empty. The stores of equipment kept there by general order had never been touched.
Strudenmeyer had never sent out his men.
When morning came, I saw how serious that fault had been. I had set up the dew catchers to funnel
drinking water off the big leaves in the crown of the tree above me, and done a few other simple things I
could manage quietly in the dark. With dawn the next day I set up thie post's equipment, particularly the
communication equipment with the Strongpoint and the other sentinel posts. As I had suspected, the
other posts were emptyтАФand Strudenmeyer had not even set a watch in the communications room at the
Strongpoint. The room when I looked into it was empty, and the door closed. No one came to the sound
of the call buzzer.
I could see most of the rooms of the Strongpoint's interior. I could see outside the buildings, all
around the inside of the walls and the court separating them from the buildings and the watch-tower in the
center. The scanners set in walk and ceilings there were working perfectly. But I could not tell
Strudenmeyer and the rest I was there. Just as I could get radio reception from the station at Regional
Installation, but I could not call R.I. because my call had to be routed through the communications room
in the Strongpoint, where there was nobody on duty.
A hundred and eighty feet below me, and all around the four walls that made the Strongpoint what it
was, the Klahari were swarming as thickly as bees on their way to a new hive. And more were coming in
hourly. It was not to be wondered at. With the group to the west wiped out, we were the forward point
held by humans in the jungle. Everything beyond us had been taken already and laid waste. The Klahari
post-seniors leading the horde could have bypassed us and gone onтАФbut that was not their nature.
And Strudenmeyer was down there with twenty men and a boyтАФno, seventeen men. I could count
three wounded under an awning in the west yard. Evidently there had already been assaults on his walls.