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

squad of six men had grown by that time to a platoon of twenty, because we were now closing the
second and final season of the sixteenth year of the cycle and we were having to break up Klahari gangs
of as many as fifty in a group. Not only that, but we had the cheerful thought always with us that, with the
post-seniors running things, most of the groups we broke up were re-forming again, the minute we'd
passed on.
It was time to begin trying to hustle the planters and their families back into our Regional Installations.
Time to begin listening to their complaints that their buildings would be burned and leveled, and half their
cleared land reclaimed by the jungle when they returnedтАФwhich was perfectly true. Time to begin
explaining to them why it was not practical to bring in an army from Earth every seventeen years to
protect their land. And time to try to explain to them once again that we were squatters on a Klahari
world, and it was against Earth policy to exterminate the natives and take over the planet entire, even if
we couldтАФwhich we could not. There were millions of the mature Klahari in the cities, and our technical
edge wasn't worth that much.
So by the time I came to the Dupres' property, my patience was beginning to wear thin from turning
the other cheek to the same bad arguments, dozens of times repeated. And that was bad. Because I
knew Pelang Dupres would be one of the stubborn ones. I came up slowly and took a station just inside
the ferns at the edge of one of his fields to look the place overтАФbut what I saw was not Pelang, but
Jean.
He was coming toward me, a good cautious thirty yards in, from the edge of the field this time, with
his scanner hooked down over his eyes and that old, all-purpose blunderbuss of a DeBaraumer in his
arms. Three years had stretched him out and leaned him up. Oddly, he looked more like his mother
nowтАФand something else. I squatted behind the ferns, trying to puzzle it out. And then it came to me. He
was walking like a KlahariтАФin the cautious, precise way they have, swinging from ball of foot to ball of
other foot with the body always bolt upright from the hips.
I stood up for a better look at him; and he was down on his belly on the earth in an instant, the
DeBaraumer swinging to bear on the ferns in front of me, as my movement gave me away to his scanner.
I dropped like a shot myself and whistledтАФfor that is what the Klahari can't do, whistle. The muscles in
their tongue and lips won't perform properly for it.
He stood up immediately; and I stood up and came out onto the field to meet him.
"You're a sergeant," he said, looking at my sleeve as I came up."
"That's right," I said. "Sergeant Tofe Levenson of the Rangers. I was a corporal when you saw me
last. You don't remember?"
He frowned, puzzling it over in his mind, then shook his head. Meanwhile I was studying him. There
was something strange about him. He was still a boy, but there was something different in additionтАФit
was like seeing a seven-year-old child overlaid with the adult he's going to be. As if the future man was
casting his shadow back on his earlier self. The shadow was there in the way he carried the rifle, and in
his stance and eyes.
"I'm here to see your daddy," I said.
"He's not here."
"Not here!" I stared at him, but his face showed only a mild curiosity at my reaction. "Where is he?"
"He and my maтАФmother"тАФhe corrected himselfтАФ"went in to Strongpoint Hundred Fourteen for
supplies. They'll be back tomorrow."
"You mean you're here alone?"
"Yes," he said, again with that faint puzzlement that I should find this odd, and turned back toward the
buildings. "Come to the house. I'll make you some coffee, Sergeant."
I went to the house with him. To jog his memory, on the way I told him about my earlier visit. He
thought he remembered me, but he could not be sure. When I spoke to him about the Klahari, I found he
was quite aware of the danger they posed to him, but was as strangely undisturbed by it as if he had been
a Klahari himself. I told him that I was here to warn his father to pack up his family and retire to the
Strongpoint he was currently at for suppliesтАФor, better yet, pull back to one of our base installations. I