"Gordon R. Dickson - The Forever Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

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CHAPTER

1


THE PHONE WAS RINGING. HE CAME UP OUT OF A SLEEP AS DARK
as death, fumbled at the glowing button in the phone's base with numb fingers and punched it. The
ringing ceased.
"Wander here," he mumbled. An officer he did not recognize showed on the screen.
"Major, this is Assignment. Lieutenant Van Lee. Laagi showing upward of thirty ships facing our sector
of the Frontier. Scramble, sir."
"Right," he muttered.
There was no reason for the Laagi to start putting extra ships into that part of their territory that faced the
North American Sector, and necessitate an all-personnel call-out of the ship-handling crews-including
people like himself who had just come back in off patrol out there six hours ago.
But then, attacking or running, the Laagi made no sense. They never had.
"You're to show in Conference Room K at four hundred hours. Bring your personals."
"Right." Groggily he rolled over on his stomach and squinted at his watch in the glow from the button
on the phone. In the pale light, the figures on his wrist-com stood at

1
2 / Gordon R. Dickson
twelve minutes after three-three hundred twelve hours. Enough time.
"Understood, sir?"
"Understood, Lieutenant," he said.
"Very good, sir. Out."
The phone went dead. For a moment the desire for sleep sucked at Jim Wander like some great black
bog; then with a convulsive jerk he threw it and the covers off him in one motion and sat up on the edge
of his bed in the darkness, scrubbing at his face with an awkward hand.
After a second, he turned the light on, got up, showered and dressed. As he shaved, he watched his face
in the mirror. It was still made up of the same roughly squarish, large-boned features he remembered,
but the lines about the mouth and between the eyebrows seemed deepened with the sleep, under the
tousled black hair, coarsely curling up from his forehead. It could not be drink, he thought. He never
drank except on leave, nowadays. Alcohol at other times did nothing for him anymore. It was just that
now he slept like a log-like a log watersoaked and drowning in some bottomless lake.
He had not gone stale. Out on the Frontier he was as good as ever. But he needed something-what, he
could not specify. He felt the lack of it, like the emptiness of a long-empty stomach inside him. But it
was not hunger, because he was fed regularly; and it was not women, as his friends suggested, because
he had no trouble finding women on his leaves from duty. What he wanted was to come to grips with
something. That was it, to have a wall behind him he could set his back against and a job to do in front
of him, where he could see himself getting it done-instead of fighting an endless war and getting
nowhere, surrounded by those who found simply being in the war enough to justify their existence.

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