"Henry Kuttner - Clash by Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

Free Company. Their finery cannot disguise that stamp, hard-won through years of battle. Under the
domino masks their mouths are hard and harsh. Unlike the undersea dwellers, their skins are burned
black with the ultraviolet rays that filter through the cloud layer of Venus. They are skeletons
at the feast.
They are respected but resented. They are Free Companions . . .
We are on Venus, nine hundred years ago, beneath the Sea of Shoals, not much north of the equator.
But there is a wide range in time and space. All over the cloud planet the underwater Keeps are
dotted, and life will not change for many centuries. Looking back, as we do now, from the
civilized days of the Thirty-fourth Century, it is too easy to regard the men of the Keeps as
savages, groping, stupid and brutal. The Free Companies have long since vanished. The islands and
continents of Venus have been tamed, and there is no war.
But in periods of transition, of desperate rivalry, there is always war. The Keeps fought among
themselves, each striving to draw the fangs of the others by depriving them of their reserves of
korium, the power source of the day. Students of that era find pleasure in sifting the legends and
winnowing out the basic social and geopolitical truths. It is fairly well known that only one
factor saved the Keeps from annihilating one another - the gentlemen's agreement that left war to
the warriors, and allowed the undersea cities to develop their science and social cultures. That
particular compromise was, perhaps, inevitable. And it caused the organization of the Free
Companies, the roving bands of mercenaries, highly trained for their duties, who hired themselves
out to fight for whatever Keeps were attacked or wished to attack.
Ap Towrn, in his monumental 'Cycle of Venus,' tells the saga through symbolic legends. Many
historians have recorded the sober truth, which unfortunately seems often Mars-dry. But it is not
generally realized that the Free Companions were almost directly responsible for our present high
culture. War, because of them, was not permitted to usurp the place of peace-time social and
scientific work. Fighting was highly specialized, and, because of technical advances, manpower was
no longer important. Each band of Free Companions numbered a few thousand, seldom more.
It was a strange, lonely life they must have led, shut out
from the normal life of the Keeps. They were vestigian but necessary, like the fangs of the
marsupians who eventually evolved into Homo sapiens. But without those warriors, the Keeps would
have been plunged completely into total war, with fatally destructive results.



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Harsh, gallant, indomitable, serving the god of battles so that it might be destroyed - working
toward their own obliteration - the Free Companies roar down the pages of history, the banner of
Mars streaming above them in the misty air of Venus. They were doomed as Tyrannosaur Rex was
doomed, and they fought on as he did, serving, in their strange way, the shape of Minerva that
stood behind Mars.
Now they are gone. We can learn much by studying the place they held in the Undersea Period. For,
because of them, civilization rose again to the heights it had once reached on Earth, and far
beyond.
'These lords shall light the mystery Of mastery or victory, And these ride high in history, But
these shall not return.'
The Free Companions hold their place in interplanetary literature. They are a legend now, archaic
and strange. For they were fighters, and war has gone with unification. But we can understand them
a little more than could the people of the Keeps.
This story, built on legends and fact, is about a typical warrior of the period- Captain Brian