"Harry Harrison - Galactic Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

That's it, matey, pull up a stool, sure use that one. Just dump old Phrnnx
onto the floor to sleep it off. You know that Krddls can't stand to drink -
much less drink flnnx, and that topped off with a smoke of the hellish krmml
weed. Here, let me pour you a mug of flnnx, oops, sorry about your sleeve.
When it dries you can scrape it off with a knife. Here's to your health and
may your tubleliners never fail you when the kpnnz hordes are on your tail.

No, sorry, never heard your name before. Too many good men come and go, and
the good ones die early, aye! Me? You never heard of me. Just call me Old
Sarge - as good a name as any. Good men I say, and the best of them was well,
we'll call him Gentleman Jax. He had another name, but there's a little girl
waiting on a planet I could tell you about, a little girl who's waiting and
watching the shimmering trails of the deep-spacers when they come, and waiting
for a man. So for her sake we'll call him Gentleman Jax, he would have liked
that, and she would like that if only she knew, although she must be getting
kind of gray, or bald by now, and arthritic from all that sitting and waiting
but, golly, that's another story and by Orion it's not for me to tell. That's
it, help yourself, a large one. Sure the green fumes are normal for good
flnnx, though you better close your eyes when you drink or you'll be blind in
a week, ha-ha!, by the sacred name of the Prophet Mrddl! Yes, I can tell what
you're thinking. What's an old space rat like me doing in a dive like this out
here at galaxy's end where the rim stars flicker wanly and the tired photons
go slow? I'll tell you what I'm doing, getting drunker than a Planizzian
pfrdffl, that's what. They say that drink has the power to dim memories and by
Cygnus I have some memories that need dimming. I saw you looking at those
scars on my hands. Each one is a story, matey, aye, and the scars on my back
each a story and the scars on my . . . well, that's a different story. Yes,
I'll tell you a story, a true one by Mrddl's holy memory, though I might
change a name or two, that little girl waiting, you know.

You heard tell of the CCC? I can see by the sudden widening of your eyes and
the blanching of your space-tanned skin that you have. Well, yours truly, Old
Sarge here, was one of the first of the Space Rats of the CCC, and my buddy
then was the man they know as Gentleman Jax. May Great Kramddl curse his name
and blacken the memory of the first day when I first set eyes on him ....

"Graduating class . . . ten-SHUN!тАЭ

The sergeant's stentorian voice bellowed forth, cracking like a whiplash
across the expectant ears of the mathematically aligned rows of cadets. With
the harsh snap of those fateful words a hundred and three incredibly polished
boot heels crashed together with a single echoing crunch as the eighty seven
cadets of the graduating class snapped to steel-rigid attention. (It should be
explained that some of them were from alien worlds, different numbers of legs,
and so on.) Not a breath was drawn, not an eyelid twitched a thousandth of a
milliliter as Colonel von Thorax stepped forward, glaring down at them all
through the glass monocle in front of his glass eye, close cropped gray hair
stiff as barbed wire, black uniform faultlessly cut and smooth, a krmml-weed
cigarette clutched in the steel fingers of his prosthetic left arm, black
gloved fingers of his prosthetic right arm snapping to hat brim's edge in a