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

There was no real discipline to the young Klahari, even now, and if a group got impatient they would
simply go ahead and attack, even if the leaders were patient enough to wait and build up their forces.
So either there had been premature assaults on the walls, or Strudenmeyer was even more of a bad
commander than I had thought, and had been putting men up on the walls to be shot at, instead of using
rifles through the gunports on automatic and remote control. Even as I thought this, I was putting it out of
my mind. I think that at that time I didn't want to believe that the factor could be that poor a leader,
because I had the responsibility for him, having put him in charge of the Strongpoint. Just at that moment,
however, something else happened to help shove it out of my mind, for I discovered a new wrinkle to this
treetop post that they hadn't had back when I was learning about sentinel duty.
In addition to the wall scanners that gave me an interior view of the Strongpoint, I found there were
eight phone connections inside its walls from which the commander there could check with the sentinels.
All he had to do was pick up a phone and ask whatever question he had in mind. But the damn things
were oneway!
I could activate the receiver at my end. In other words, I could hear what anyone was saying in the
immediate vicinity of the phone. But I couldn't make myself heard by them until someone lifted down the
phone at that end. And there was no bell or signal with which I could call them to lift a phone down. I
jammed the receivers all open, of course, and several different conversations around the fort came
filtering into my post to match up with the images on some of the scanners before me. But nobody was
talking about trying a phone to one of the sentinel posts. Why should they? As far as they knew they
were unmanned.
I lay there, protected by the shade of the crown leaves, as Achernar climbed up into the sky over the
jungle and the Strongpoint, and more Klahari filtered in every moment below me. I was safe,
comfortable, and absolutely helpless. I had food for half a year, the dew catchers supplied me with more
pure water than I could drink, and around me on my pleasantly breezy perch were all modern
conveniences, including solar cookers to heat my food, or water for shaving if it came to that. I lay there
like an invisible deity, seeing and hearing most of what went on below in the Strongpoint and entirely
unsuspected by those I was watching. A commander without a command, spectator to what, it soon
became plain, was a command without a commander.
You might think the men who would delay longest before pulling back in the face of a threat like the
Klahari would be the bravest and the best of the planters. But it was not so. These men were the
stubbornest of the planters, the most stupid, the most greedy; the hardheads and unbelievers. All this
came out now before me on the scanners, and over the open phones, now that they were completely cut
off and for the first time they fully saw the consequences of their delaying.
And Strudenmeyer was their natural leader.
There was nothing the factor had done that he ought to have done, and there was nothing he had left
undone that he had ought not to have done. He had failed to send out men to the sentinel posts, because
they objected to going. He had omitted to take advantage of the military knowledge and experience of
the two enlisted men I had brought to the Strongpoint with me. Instead he had been siding with the
majorityтАФthe combat-ignorant plantersтАФagainst the military minority of two when questions of
defending the Strongpoint came up. He had put men on the wallsтАФinviting premature assaults from the
Klahari that could not have taken the Strongpoint in any case, but that could whittle down his fighting
strength. As they already had by wounding three of his able men, including Pelang Dupres. And, most
foolish of all in a way, he had robbed himself of his best rifle and his most knowledgeable expert of the
Klahari, by reducing Jean Dupres from the status of fighting man to that of seven-year-old child.
He had done this because Pelang, lying under the awning, groaning with self-pity at the loss of his
wife, and a lance-thrust through his shoulder, and abusing his son who was restricted to the single duty of
waiting on the wounded, treated the boy with nothing but contempt. Jean's only defenders were my two
enlisted men, who had seen him in action in the jungle. But these two were discounted and outcast
anyway in the eyes of the planters, who would have liked to have found reason to blame them, and the
military in general, for the whole situation.