"David Drake - Men Like Us (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

engine to drive it. Nuclear-power technology was so simple, given the refined fuel and expendable
humans to work it, that an age that could not manufacture smokeless powder could nonetheless build a
fission plant. All it would have taken was a weapons stockpile and a technician or two from Oak Ridge,
vacationing in the mountains at the time of the Blast.
It was what Smith had come to learn.
There was a new sound in the night. A score or more of men were thudding across the bridge to the
power plant. Smith ducked his head beneath the sill of the window. As he did so, the siren on the roof
hooted ferally. Knowing that there was no escape downward if he had been seen, the traveler slipped
sideways and began to clamber up between a pair of the windows. As his fingers touched the edge of the
slates, a voice from below shouted, "There he is!"
Smith gathered himself to swing onto the gently sloped roof; something tapped his knuckles. He looked
up. The muzzle of Carter's M16 stared back at him. The policeman smiled over the sights. "I saw
something block one of the plant windows," the local man said. "Thought it might be worth waking the
guards for. Now, friend, you just climb down easy to where the people are waiting, or me and the boys
here won't wait for the ceremony."
The pair of guards flanking Carter had faces as tense as their cocked crossbows. Smith shook his head
ruefully and descended into the waiting manacles.
The siren gave three long cries as the guards marched Smith back across the bridge. Citizens, warned by
the initial signal, began walking out of their houses, the men armed, the women bleak as gray steel. They
drifted toward the shrouded platform across the long axis of the Assembly from the bridge. None of the
citizens seemed to want to be the first to reach the common destination. They dawdled in pairs and trios,
turning aside as Smith and his captors passed among them.
The chief and the remaining policemen had hurried up the steps to what was clearly a covered altar by
the time
Smith reached it. Cords fluttered as the canvas roof was gathered within the screen of hoardings built on
a base of stone blocks. Something mechanical purred and paused. Sparks hissed about the power line
strung to the platform along a line of low posts on the western edge of the Assembly.
"On up," Carter said, smiling. He tweaked Smith's manacles toward the steps. The guards were taking
position at the base of the altar, facing out toward the Assembly. Despite the siren calls, there was no
sign of life or movement from the smelter and its associated buildings. Their blank walls were more than a
physical reminder of the grip the freeholders of Moseby held on the minds and lives of those who would
work in their village. The business tonight was no business of a bargee or a factory hand.
Smith mounted the steps. Two p olicemen received him, holding their rifles by the pistol grips as if they
were still functional weapons. Well, perhaps they were.
There were other improbable things in this place.
The moonlight was shadowed by the flimsy walls. It gave only hints of the enclosed area the policemen in
their ragged uniforms; two large, vertical cylinders, the one mounted somewhat higher than the other; and,
at the front of the platform, a wooden block the height of a man's knee.
"There," muttered one of the policemen, guiding the traveler's neck onto the block. No force was
necessary. Smith was as docile as a babe at its mother's breast. Carter took a quick lashing from Smith's
right wrist to a staple set for the purpose in the flooring. "If it wasn't that you know too much," the
policeman said conversationally, "we'd let you spend the rest of your life inside the plant. But somebody
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who's traveled as you have, seen what you have . . . we don't want to be like Samson, chaining you
in the temple so you can bring it down on us, hey?"
"Tie him, and we'll get this over with," the chief growled.