"Keith Laumer - Galactic Odyssey" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

To the untrained eye, a Class-One Karg robotтАФthe only kind ever used in Timesweep workтАФwas
undistinguishable from any other citizen. But my eye wasnтАЩt untrained. He was the same Karg IтАЩd left
in the hotel room back in 1936 with a soft -nosed slug in his head. Now here he was, with no hole in his
head, climbing down onto the deck of the ship as neat and cool as if it had all been in fun. I hugged the
deck and tried to look hors de combat.
I was just beginning to form a hopeless plan for creeping out of sight when the door I was lying
against opened. Tried to open, that is. I was blocking it. Somebody inside gave it a hearty shove and
started through.
The KargтАЩs head had turned at the first sound. He whipped up a handsome pearl-mounted, wheel-
lock pistol. The explosion was like a bomb. I heard the slug hit; a solid, meaty smack, like a well-hit ball
hitting the fielderтАЩs glove. The fellow in the door plunged through and went down hard on his face.
The Karg turned back to his men and rapped out an order. The Karg was by the weather rail, calmly
stripping the safety foil from a thermex bomb. He dropped it through the open hatch, then scrambled
with commendable agility back to his ship. Quite su ddenly I was alone, watching the attacking ship
recede downwind under full sail.
Smoke billowed from the hatch, with tongues of pale flame in close pursuit. I got a pair of legs
under me. A gun lay a yard from the empty hand of the man the Karg had shot. It was a .01 microjet of
Nexx manufacture, with a grip that fitted my hand perfectly.
It ought to. It was my gun. I didnтАЩt like doing it, but I turned the body over and looked at the face.
It was my face.
(from Dinosaur Beach )
BAEN BOOKS by KEITH LAUMER

Retief!
Odyssey
 PREFACE

Discerning people have always read Keith Laumer for a lot of reasons, and I am delighted that
Baen Books is making his works available to be read yet again.
As David Drake pointed out in the preface to the first volume in this series, those with some
knowledge of LaumerтАЩs life (and of history) can appreciate the telling accuracy of his trenchant,
experience-based observations of the lunacies of real-world diplomacy in the Retief novels.
Regarded by many, perhaps even most, of his r eaders as the crown jewels of his literary legacy,
the Retief stories used frequently devastating humor to underscore the not particularly humorous
dilemma of a tough-minded, principled pragmatist trapped on the far side of the Looking Glass.
And as the best satire always is, they were teaching tools, as well.
Along with the humor, however, Retief communicated something else which was common to
all of LaumerтАЩs work. In addition to his highly capable pragmatism, his realism, or even his
occasional cynicism, Retief, like Poul AndersonтАЩs Flandry, embodied the other qualities which
Laumer obviously believed were the true measure of a human being: self-reliance, unswerving
devotion to oneтАЩs principles (however unfashionable those principles might be, or however
uncomfortable one might be admitting that one held them), and gallantry. Always gallantry.
Something which is overlooked almost as often as the sheer scope of LaumerтАЩs work, is the
spare, clean prose style and muscular storytelling technique which he shared with those other
high prophets of human capability, H. Beam Piper and Robert Heinlein. There was a seeming
simplicity to the way he wove his tales, coupled with a very real, often first-person colloquialism,
which both moved events rapidly and deceived the eye into missing the complexity of what he had
to tell us. Characterization in a Laumer story flows so simply and so naturally that its depths creep
up upon us almost unnoticed. Yet it is the vibrancy of the characters which truly holds us, and