"Mark S. Geston - The Allies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Geston Mark S)

"Sure." I hadn't heard that one, but I spent most of my time with my training
staff and my psychological handlers. Still, it seemed an odd choice of phrase.
"'Have you?"

His expression changed. "Last week. See? It can be the literal truth. We took
her to the vet and had her put down. She was pretty old and would have happened
soon anyway, even without us leaving. The administrative people've taken care of
whatever else's to be left behind."

I followed Bates's state back toward the city. "Jesus. Not that we brought much
to this place anyway." I assumed he was marveling at how little we had left to
defend by now. I was. Knowledge of what the occupied territories looked like
made it so much worse.

I tried to distract him. "But not drown the cat? Or.... "I tried to think of a
kind of pet generally obnoxious enough to warrant strangulation. "Or terminate
the parrot?"

"But why should anyone think of doing that?" he responded with genuine interest,
as if I had asked something meant to do more than fill up an awkward pause.
"There haven't been anything in Kearney but dogs since I got here." He was
right. "I thought it was just the way people who came here were. You know? But
every other place I've visited lately seems to be the same way. Just a few dogs
and nothing else that wasn't already in a cage before the war began." He shook
his head, as if this puzzle had defeated him before.

I stupidly kept trying to shake him out of his reverie. "So I envision long
columns of refugee cats and escaped zoo animals, trudging through no man's land,
toward the green walls of the occupied territories." Sure. And leaving burning,
miniature cat shtetls behind, walking down the muddy road, pushing carts before
them, away from the ancient oppresSOr.

Bates almost took me seriously. "It might not have been too much different from
that, really. Who knows ?" He shrugged. "But they are gone. Almost all of them
except for the dogs." Then he smiled again, but sadly. "And look at how I reward
such loyalty. Putting her down just because there won't be any room for her on
the Ship."

"No room for anything but we few hundreds of thousands and what we need for a
long quiet flight through the void."

"So we'll just have to find our cats and dogs where we land."

He sounded sensible again. "And our lions and crows and carp."
"Oh my," he responded on cue, but not very brightly,

"I'm sure there'll be a place where all of them will be there to welcome us."

We reached the East Portal and Bates dropped me off at my car. I said goodbye to
him then because he was scheduled to board the next day.