"Harry Harrison - SSR 02 - The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

"Whoopee!' I shouted. "Inskipp the killer, daredevil, master of men,
secret power in the galaxy today. And he can't say the word pregnant! How
about baby? Wait, sex, that is a goodie. You blush to think about it. Go
ahead, say sex three times fast, it will do you good--"
"Shut up, diGriz," he growled. "At least you finally married her which
shows you have a single drop of honesty in your otherwise rotten carcass. She
stays behind. You go out on this one-man job. Probably leaving her a widow."
"She lodes awful in black so you can't get rid of me that easily. Ten."
"Look at this," he said, taking a roll of film from the folder and
slipping it into a slot in his desk. A screen dropped down from the ceiling
and the room darkened. The film began.
The camera had been handheld, the color was off at times, and it was most
unprofessional. But it was the best home movie I had ever seen because the
material was so good. Authentic, no doubt about it.
Someone was waging war. It was a sunny day with white puffs of clouds
against a blue sky. And black puffs of antiaircraft fire in among them. But
the fire was not heavy and there was not enough of it to stop the troop
carriers that came in low and fast for landing. This was at an average sized
spaceport, with the buildings in the far background and some cargo ships
nearby. Other craft roared in low and bomb explosions readied skyward from
what must have been the defense positions. The impossibility of what was
happening finally came home to me.
"Those are spaceships!" I gurgled. "And space transports. Is some
numbskull government so stupid as to think that it can succeed in an
interplanetary war? What happened after they lost--and how does it affect me?"
The film ended and the lights came up again. Inskipp steepled his fingers
on the desk and leered over them.
"For your information, Mr. Know-it-all, this invasion succeeded--and so
did the other ones before it. This film was taken by a smuggler, one of our
regular informants, whose ship was just fast enough to get away during the
battle."
This was a stopper. I dragged deeply on the cigar and considered what
little I knew about interplanetary warfare. There was little enough to know.
Because it just doesn't work. Maybe a few times in the galaxy when local
conditions are right, say a solar system with two inhabited planets. If one
planet is backward and the other advanced industrially the primitive one might
be invaded successfully. But not if they put up any kind of a real defense.
The distance-time relationships just don't make this kind of warfare
practical. When every soldier and weapon and ration has to be lifted from the
gravity well of a planet and carried across space the energy expenditure is
considerable, the transport demands incredible and the cost unbelievable. If,
in addition, the invader has to land m the face of determined apposition the
invasion is impossible. And this is inside a solar system where the planets
are practically touching on a galactic scale. The thought of warfare between
planets at different star systems is even more impossible.
But, once again, it has been proven that nothing is basically impossible
if people want to tackle it hard enough. And things like violence, warfare and
bloodshed are still hideously attractive to the lurking violence potential of
mankind, despite the centuries of peace and stagnation. I had a sudden and
depressing thought.