"Rog Philips - The Phantom Truck Driver" - читать интересную книгу автора (Phillips Rog)

Best of all, you could say something and not have it topped by a Juny, unless he got close enough to
hear what you said, and then you could get him easy.
Sure it was hell. Like that Juny that came running toward me, his face wreathed in smiles, saying he
had just invented an improved firing mechanism for our rifles he wanted to show me. I shot him, and
snaked in the gun he had been carrying. And sure enough it had au improved firing mechanism. And I
knew he had probably worked hours figuring it out, driven by a desire to have something to interest some
human enough to buy a few minutes of companionship.
It was hell. You had to keep telling yourself they were vermin. But it was killing things smarter than
you. It was killing friends who would do anything to gain your friendship, but couldn't accept the fact that
you didn't want to wallow in their filth and be surrounded by them and pawed over every minute without
letup.
It was as if they had a lack of integrity coupled with a determination to do what they wished to do
regardless of you, coupled with a clinging personality. A caricature of the human soul.

We should have given up and evacuated the planet, but human beings aren't built that way. So for
five years now we had been in this war of extermination, wanting to let go and run away, and knowing
we never would.
And here I was, with a force of eight hundred men under my command, surrounded by the Junies.
We had to stick to the trench or we couldn't use our atom grenades. We had about two hundred
grenades left. When they were gone, our tommy guns couldn't hold the Junies back for long.
What would happen then? Picture being the pet of a hundred or so Junies. No gun. No clothes. No
way to escape them. No way to kill yourself. Believe me, burning bamboo slivers under your fingernails is
something sane and solid and human by comparison. It leaves you with your self-respect intact.
A mud-coated figure lurched toward me along the trench, and I could tell by the eyek that glittered
through the glue-coated features that it was bad news.
"Captain Summers," the kid gasped between breaths. "We got the radio going again. The whole front
has retreated тАФ all except us. That leaves us half a mile from our front, and тАФ"
"And it might as well be a hundred miles," I said. "We couldn't get a hundred yards through this
slippery muck. Did they say they're going to get to us? "
"They're bogged down all along this front. The goo. A truck can't go ten feet in it. The tires roll it up
like carpeting until it jams."
I looked up at the low, unbroken cloud layer, and groaned. A plane couldn't possibly find us. The
mask of mud that was the kid's face cracked into a grin. "Maybe the phantom truck driver'll come to our
rescue," he said. His grin vanished. "Sorry," he said uncomfortably. "I тАФ"
"That's all right," I said mildly.
I watched him salute and turn away, staggering down the trench the way he had come, back to the
radio dugout.
I took the grenade-counter out of my pocket. A neat little thing like a stopwatch, only it works by
Gamma radiation. Its pointer showed we had just one hundred and twenty-seven atom grenades left тАФ
and even as I squinted at it in the bad light, the needle jumped a couple of times, synchronized with the
echo-like sharp bap of grenades going off. Nice things, the atom grenades. They don't do any physical
damage. It might break the windows if one exploded in a room. But a gust of wind could do that too.
All I know of how they're built is that they consist of an inner core the size of a small vitamin capsule
and containing pure neutrons. The capsule is made of something that keeps them from escaping. Around
this is cotton, then a thin spherical layer of fissionable material weighing two-and-a-half ounces.
Non-radioactive. Then the aluminum covering. There's a small pin you shove in just before throwing the
grenade. This pin breaks a small vial of an acid that soaks across the cotton to the neutron capsule and
eats it, releasing the neutrons. A bulletin I read says the neutrons are traveling at a speed of nine thousand
feet a second when they are released. They hit the shell of fissionables, and instantly the whole shebang is
nothing but Alpha, Beta, and Gamma radiation, and million-degree hot atoms. That's what makes the