"Harry Harrison - Bill 2 - On The Planet Of Robot Slaves" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

Special thanks to Nat Sobel, Michael Kazan, John Douglas, David Keller, and
Mary Higgs First published in Great Britain 1989 by Victor Gollancz
Ltd, 14 Henrietta Street, London WC2E 8QJ Copyright ┬й 1989 by Harry
Harrison British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataHarrison, Harry,
1925-- Bill, the galactic hero on the planet of robot slaves. I.
Title 823'.9141[F] ISBN 0-575-04615-5 Printed in Great Britain by
St Edmundsbury Press Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk T H E T R U ES T O R Y
O FBILL1Bill, that's what they called him. They called him that because
that was his name. A simple farm boy destined for the stars, ripped from his
green acres, his silver robomule, his blue Mom -- she had circulatory troubles
--and forced by trickery into the armed forces of the Emperor. The story
of how Bill became a Galactic Hero has been told in a book titled _Bill, the
Galactic Hero_. It is a true story and there is a tear on every page. (An
artificial tear dripped onto the pages by the printer.) Read it. It will make
you laugh, make you cry, make you want to rush away and throw up. You will see
how hard the military labored to destroy Bill, how he shrunk and withered,
then grew and matured under this treatment. Learning, like any good soldier,
to curse -- say bowb at least 354 times a day -- to drink in excess, to lust
after girls while his eyeballs bulged with sperm. Any woman would be proud to
be his mother. Though I can't think why. After being drugged and tricked
into enlisting in the Space Troopers, Bill was sent for his basic training at
Camp Leon Trotsky. It was there under the sadistic guidance of Deathwish
Drang, a drill instructor with three-inch-long tusks, that his morale was
crushed, his will destroyed, his IQ diminished,2his spirit broken as he was
turned into the perfect trooper. Only his suburb physical condition, the
product of years of boring physical activity down on the farm, prevented him
from being crushed like a beetle as well. No sooner had his basic training
been finished, in fact even before it was finished, and even more important
before he could get through the front door of the Lower Ranks Cathouse, he and
his bunkmates were bundled off to war aboard the space battleship, the grand
old lady of the fleet, the _Fanny Hill_. The war was on. Mankind was
advancing to the stars. For out there among the stardust, suns and planets,
comets and space crap, there existed a race of intelligent aliens. The
Chingers. They were peaceful little green lizards with four arms, scales, a
tail like most lizards. So of course they had to be destroyed. They might
become a menace sometime, maybe. In any case -- what is an army and a navy for
if not to fight war? The boredom of space service was relieved slightly
when Bill discovered that his good friend, Eager Beager, was a Chinger spy. At
first this was hard for Bill to understand, even with his militarily lowered
intelligence, since everyone knew that Chingers looked like moth-eaten
alligators, with four arms, that stood seven feet tall. Bill understood the
facts a lot better when he discovered that Beager was a special kind of spy.
Well, not really a spy, but a robot operated by a seven-inch-high Chinger from
a control center in Beager's skull. Seven inches, seven feet, the military
does exaggerate slightly in the need of good propaganda. In any case the spy
escaped and the normality of starvation and boredom returned until Bill
finally went into battle as a fusetender,3tending giant fuses. The battle
was fierce, all'of his buddies were killed, and Bill was slightly wounded when
his left arm was blown off. Despite this, and completely by accident, he fired
the shot heard round the fleet -- that destroyed the enemy spaceship. A hero