"Stephen Goldin - But As A Soldier, For His Country" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goldin Stephen)

Harker awakens to sterility, to a place of abnormal quiet. The air smells funny, antiseptic, even more so than most
of the hospitals heтАЩs been in. His body feels funny too, as though he were floating in some strangely buoyant liquid;
yet he can feel a firm couch underneath his back. His heart bangs away inside his chest, much too fast, much too hard.
He is in a room with other men, other resurrectees, all of whom feel equally strange and perplexed. Their number
has almost tripled now from the original three hundred, and they have been crowded closely together to fit into one
large hall. Harker lifts his head, and after much looking, manages to spot Gary a dozen rows away. The presence of his
friend allays some of the alienness he feels here.
тАЬWelcome to the Moon, men,тАЭ blares a voice from a loudspeaker. There is a reverberation of gasps throughout the
room at this revelation of their location. The Moon! Only astronauts and scientists got to go there. Are there wars on
the Moon now? What year is this and who тАУ and how тАУ are they expected to fight?
The loudspeaker goes on to give further information. For one thing, they are no longer a part of the U.S. Army.
The United States has been incorporated into the North American Union, which has inherited their tapes. The enemy
is the South Americans, the Sammies, led largely by the Peruvian complex. The two powers are fighting for possession
of the Mare Nectaris, which symbolises the points of disagreement between them. Since the outlawing of war on Earth
itself, aggressions have to be released here, on the Moon.
тАЬThe Moon!тАЭ Gary exclaims when they can finally talk together. тАЬCan you believe it? I never thought IтАЩd make it
up here. DonтАЩt it knock you on your ass just thinking about it?тАЭ
Callisthenics are not necessary, since their bodies have been recreated in as good a shape as they were in when
they were first recorded. But they do have to spend almost two weeks undergoing training to be able to deal with the
lighter gravity of the Moon. There are also spacesuits they have to become accustomed to, and whole new instincts
have to be drilled into the men to take care that nothing will rip their suits, the portable wombs they carry against
NatureтАЩs hostility.
Projectile weapons are back, Harker notices, in use as antipersonnel armament. On the Moon, in spacesuits, a small
sliver of shrapnel is just as deadly as a laser beam. Rifles that fire the lunar equivalent of buckshot are relied on
heavily by the infantry in the field. Orbiting satellites cover their advances with wide-angle energy beams that Harker
doesnтАЩt even begin to understand.
It is an entirely different style of fighting, he finds. Totally silent. There are radios in their spacesuits, but they are
forbidden to use them because the enemy could triangulate their position. The soldiers make no noise, and on the
airless surface of the Moon, the weapons make no noise. It is a battle in pantomime, with silent death ready to creep
up at any time.
Gary is killed the third week out. It is during a battle at the open end of the crater Fracastorius, which proves to be
the turning point of the war. Gary and Harker are part of a line advancing cautiously across the pockmarked plain,
when suddenly Gary falls to the ground. Other men along the line fall too. Harker goes to the ground, feigning death
so that the Sammie snipers will not waste any more ammunition on him. But Gary is not feigning it. Harker, otherwise
motionless, can turn his head within the helmet and see the tiny tear in the right side of his friendтАЩs spacesuit. The
wound would have been minuscule, but the explosive decompression has been fatal. GaryтАЩs eyes are bugged out, as
though in horror at death, and blood is bubbling at his nostrils and mouth.
Harker cries for his friend. For the last time, he cries.
He lies there for three hours, motionless, until his air supply is almost exhausted. Then he is picked up by a
Sammie sweep patrol and taken prisoner. He sits out the short remainder of the war in a Sammie camp where he is
treated decently enough, suffering only a few indignities. When the war ends, he is exchanged back to the N.A.U.,
where, still numbed from GaryтАЩs death, he allows himself to be retaped and rerecorded for future use.

Harker fell and hit his head against a block of stone rubble. The helmet withstood the blow тАУ unlike the
primitive ones he had worn at first, which would have cracked open тАУ but it started a ringing in his ears which
momentarily drowned out the pain impulses coming from his leg. He lay there stunned, waiting for death, in the
form of the enemy soldier, to claim him. But nothing happened. After a while his head cleared, which only meant
that he could feel the searing agony in his leg more deeply. It was hardly an improvement.
If the soldier had not delivered the killing blow, it could mean that HarkerтАЩs reflex shot had killed or wounded
him. He had to find out quickly; his life might depend on it. He twisted around painfully, his leg pulsing with