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

my men had already covered her body with a drape a Klahari had been carrying off; and the body was
hidden. He went over and looked down at the drape, but did not lift it. I walked up to stand beside him,
trying to think of something to say. But, still with that strange calmness, he was ahead of me.
"I have to bury her," he said, still evenly empty of voice. "Later we'll send her home to Earth."
The cost of sending a body back to Earth would have taken the whole Dupres farm as payment. But
that was something I could explain to Jean later.
"I'm afraid we can't wait to bury her, Jean," I said. The Klahari are right behind us."
"No," he said, quietly. "We'll have time. I'll go tell them."
He put the DeBaraumer down and started walking toward the nearest edge of the jungle. I was so
shaken by the way he was taking it all that I let him goтАФand then I heard him talking in a high voice to
the jungle; .words and sounds that seemed impossible even from a child's throat In a few minutes he
came back.
They'll wait," he said, as he approached me again. "They don't want to be rude."
So we buried Elmire Dupres, without her husbandтАФwho had gone that morning to a neighbor's
fieldтАФwith never a tear from her son, and if I had not seen those piled Klahari dead in the living room
before his barricade, I would have thought that Jean himself had had no connection with what had
happened here. At first, I thought he was in shock. But it was not that. He was perfectly sensible and
normal. It was just that his grief and the loss of his mother were somehow of a different order of things
than what had happened here. Again it was like the Klahari, who are more concerned with why they die
than when, or how.
We marked the grave and went on, fighting and falling backтАФand Jean Dupres fought right along with
us. He was as good as one of my men any dayтАФbetter, because he could move more quietly and he
spotted the attacking Klahari before any of us. He had lugged the DeBaraumer alongтАФI thought because
of his long association with it. But it was only a weapon to him. He saw the advantage of our jungle rifles
in lightness and firepower over it, almost at onceтАФand the first of our men to be killed, he left the
DeBaraumer lying and took the issue gun instead.
We were three men and a boy when we finally made it to the gates of Strongpoint Hundred Fourteen,
and inside. There were no women there. The Strongpoint was now purely and simply a fort, high, blank
walls and a single strong gate, staffed by the factor and the handful of local planters who had refused to
leave before it was too late. They were here now, and here they would stay. So would we. There was no
hope of our remnant of a band surviving another fifty kilometers of jungle retreat.
I left Jean and the men in the yard inside the gates and made a run for the factor's office to put in a call
to Regional Installation. One air transport could land here in half an hour and pick us all up, planters and
my gang alike. It was then that I got the news.
I was put right through to the colonel of the Rangers before I could even ask why. He was a balding,
pleasant man whom I'd never spoken three words to in my life before; and he put it plainly and simply,
and as kindly as possible.
"тАж This whole business of the jungle Klahari forming one single band has the city Klahari disturbed
for the first time," he told me, looking squarely at me out of the phone. "You see, they always assumed
that the people we had here were our young men, our equivalent of the Klahari boys, getting a final test
before being let back into our own civilization elsewhere. It was even something of a compliment the way
they saw itтАФour coming all this way to test our own people on their testing ground here. Obviously we
didn't have any test area to match it anywhere else. And, of course, we let them think so."
"Well, what's wrong with that, nowтАФsir?" I asked. "We're certainly being tested."
 "That's just it," he said. "We've got to let you be tested this time. The city Klahari, the older ones,
have finally started to get worried about the changes taking place here. They've let us know that they
don't intervene on the side of their boysтАФand they expect us not to intervene on the side of ours."
I frowned at him. I didn't understand in that first minute what he meant.
"You mean you can't pick us up from here?"
"I can't even send you supplies, Lieutenant," he said. "Now that it's too late, they're working overtime