"Harry Harrison & David Bischoff - Bill, The Galactic Hero 4 " - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

true! When Drang unfurled the sparkling contract in front of his eyes, the contract to become a hot-shot
Trideo game contestant amongst the myriad civilized worlds of the galaxy, Bill signed without hesitation.
Trideo Games involved not only hand-eye reflexes and keen nerves, but mental coordination as well. The
player was strapped securely into a machine that was a tin and plastic imitation of a spaceship, complete
with fake lasers and ersatz pulsar torpedoes, etiolated tractor and pulsar beams, and all that good old
docsmith stuff. Then, using a tridee screen, the contestant fought the chicken Chingers in their horrible
dreadful Deathships from Sewer-Hell.
In his dream, the Chingers were again seven-foot monsters with razor-sharp teeth, rumored to snack on
toasted human babies while watching television from their Slime-Couches. "Death to the Chingers," he
howled as he arced through their armadas, defying the laws of physics as he nailed Chinger hate-ships
with noble zaps of his powerful beamers.
But then, in his dream, a Chinger destroyer-boat caught him broadside and tore a hole through the side of
the Trideo machine. Bill was stunned. This was just a game! How could.... Then he realized. He'd been a
patsy! The Empire had tricked him. He really was fighting a real war!
It wasn't just a game.
Then hundreds of seven-inch tall Chingers swarmed through the rent, each of them armed with a seven-
foot tall cutlass. Which seemed kind of impossible тАФ but who asks questions in dreams?
He was doomed!

Bill woke up. His head felt like it was splitting open and his sinuses were on fire.
Damned book!
Goddamn cheap stripped hospital book!
His throbbing nasal passages felt as though mad scientists had filled them full with acid. He stumbled out
of bed to the sink, held his head and moaned and tried to blow his nose at the same time. The pain
increased, that was all. Groaning, he tried once again. Taking a deep breath sounding his horn.
"Kaaa-CHOO!" said Bill, clutching the pseudo-porcelain rim.
With an elephantine blast of his nose bugle an inch-long lozenge shot out, fitted with rubber appendages
whose metal tips sparked fitfully as it bounced into the sink and hopped and fizzled about until he turned
on the water and the thing spattered into extinction.
The book.
It was labeled, in raised letters, FENDER BENDER by Orson Bean Curd. Bill remembered faintly that it
was about an idiot-savant servo-mechanic hijacked by Chingers and fiendishly used against the noble
Empire, but nothing much more, since he'd only managed to get the book halfway up his nose. "Don't
forget to sniff out the exciting sequel, MACARONI OF THE MORONS, coming soon from Mace
Books!" read another smaller label, only slightly smeared with nose gunk.
With the high rate of illiteracy amongst the pioneer worlds, book companies had begun to market these

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 Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Tasteless Pleasure

"Stick-a-Books" with great success. They came with their own automatic "lit-pack": engrams that
tendrilled into the user's brain and programmed the unhappy reader with the words and concepts
necessary to understand the book. Then, when the victim had finished "reading" the little machine's
contents, it would puff out sneezing powder. The theory was that a quick blast of sneezing would shoot
the infernal gadget out. After a quick rinse, it was ready for another consumer! However, due to the
capitalistic process of distribution, and the infamous Rack-Space Wars (a space conflict that even chilled
Bill's veteran bones) the practice of "stripping" was used on these books, rather than going to the expense
of shipping the full product back to the publisher. This involved tearing out a tab of circuitry imbued with
identification properties which gave retailers credit for the product. Retailers then sold the remainder at
reduced rates to the military and planets for the mentally retarded. Unfortunately, much of the guts of the