"Keith Laumer - Bolos 8 - Bolo Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

slaves and carry them off to freedom in the sky.

Most of the former CDF personnel knew better, of course. The clackers would have been foolish to
leave human garrisons so close to the newly conquered world. The stories, though, like hope
itself, simply would not die.

"There's got to be a weakness there," he said, speaking very quietly. No one yet knew just how
sensitive the hearing ofclacker spies was, or how thickly strewn their listening devices might be.

"What weakness?" Alita asked. "Who?"

"The clackers," Wal replied. "He's been going on about it all day."




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"The cluckers have weaknesses, I'm sure," Dieter said, "Don't see what we can do about it,
though."

"We can learn."

A solitary floater eye drifted past, paused, then turned its disturbing, solitary orb on the four
of them for a moment. Then it drifted away again, randomly checking other groups of slaves,
maintaining that constant, fear-stirring knowledge that the Masters' eyes and ears and thoughts
were everywhere, inescapable, unbeatable.

When her bowl was scraped clean, Alita set it carefully aside. "What weakness?" she asked again.

"Why do they have us sifting through the mud for every last scrap of refined metal? Every shard of
broken glass, every piece of plastic? Jewelry stripped from skeletons. Bric-a-brac and smashed
kitchen appliances and eating utensils and the plumbing pulled from the bones of burned-out
buildings. They cleaned up most of the easy-to-reach stuff, all the big pieces, right after the
invasion. Hell, they must have gotten ninety-five percent of everything within a few weeks after
they moved in. Why so much effort for that last five percent?"

"They are machines," Dieter reminded him. "They are efficient."

"Efficient? Using half-starved slaves isn't efficient." "I told you," Wal reminded him. "We can't
attribute human concepts of need or efficiency to the clackers." "But it doesn't make sense. Look,
they want every scrap of glass we can find ,.. but all they need to do is scoop up sand from
Cloud's beaches, and they could make all the glass they could ever need. Aluminum? Delamar's
regolith is rich in aluminum silicates, easily extracted, easily processed with a simple solar
furnace. Ceramics?" He brushed absently at the crust of dried mud on his right forearm. "All they
need to do is gather clay, shape it, and bake it. I think the weirdest thing, though, is their
craving for iron and steel. Any spacefaring civilization has access to all of the iron ore it
coula possibly use simply by collecting and processing asteroids."