"Gardner,.James.Alan.-.Expendable" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

Listen. Here is what all ECMs knew.
Violent death is rare in the Technocracy. We have no wars. The crime level is
low, and few incidents involve lethal weapons. When accidents happen, victims
can almost always be saved by sophisticated local medical centers.
But.
There are no medical centers on unexplored planets. Death may come with savage
abruptness or the stealthy creep of alien disease. In a society where people
expect to ease comfortably out of this world at a ripe old age, the thought of
anyone being killed in the prime of life is deeply disturbing. If it happens to
someone you know, the effect is devastating.
Unless... the person who dies is different. Not like everyone else.
Two centuries ago, the Admiralty High Council secretly acknowledged that some
deaths hurt Fleet morale more than others. If the victim was popular,
well-liked, and above all, physically attractive, fellow crewmates took the
death hard. Performance ratings dropped by as much as thirty percent. Friends of
the deceased required lengthy psychological counseling. Those who had ordered
the fatal mission sometimes felt a permanently impairing guilt.
But if the victim was not so popular, not so well-liked, and above all, ugly...
well, bad things happen, but we all have to carry on.
No one knows exactly when the High Council solidified this fact of human
behavior into definite policy. In time, however, the Explorer Corps evolved from
a group of healthy, bright-eyed volunteers into... something less photogenic.
Potential recruits were flagged at birth. The flawed. The ugly. The strange. If
a child's physical problems were truly disabling, or if the child didn't have
the intelligence or strength of will to make a good Explorer, the full power of
modern medicine would be unleashed to correct every impediment to normality. But
if the child combined ability and expendability in a single package-if the child
was smart and fit enough to handle the demands of Exploration, but different
enough to be less real than a normal person ...
... there was an Explorer's black uniform in that child's future.


My Class


As I record this, I have in front of me a picture of my class at the Academy. In
the first row are the ones with problems the camera does not reveal: Thomas, the
stammerer; Ferragamo, the man whose voice did not change at puberty; my
roommate, Ullis Naar, who usually blinked convulsively every two seconds but
managed to keep her eyes open for this photo; Ghent, loudly flatulent... yes,
what a joke, who could take Ghent seriously? Not his crew-mates when Ghent was
flayed alive by savages during a first contact. A few days of superficial
mourning, and then his shipmates forgot him.
The system worked.
Back to the photo. One row of visually acceptable Explorers, and behind them the
rest of us: pop-eyed, three-fingered, obese, deformed. No one in the back rows
smiled for this picture. Most tried to hide behind the heads of those in front.
What unthinking Director of Protocol demanded that we pose for such a photo? I'd
always been told (in smug, selfcongratulatory tones) that our society had