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

up the mud. And tell them we were kidding about getting a truckload of grenades."
 He started back toward the dugout.
"Wait a minute!" I called. He turned and came back.
I was thinking of the last time. Clean bedding, lawns, good meals with dishes and tablecloths. A
hundred miles from the front.
"Tell them," I said slowly, "that the phantom truckdriver brought us three thousand grenades. Tell
them I recognized him." I grinned at the kid. "Tell them I let him go because I knew he didn't exist. The
medicos cured me of believing he existed. Tell them that. It's an order." I grinned. "Get with it, son."

His eyes were round bright marbles sticking in the mud that coated his face. "Yes, sir," he said, and
was gone, stumbling through the muck of the trench.
Ten feet away I saw an arm go through the motion of throwing a grenade. It went off. I counted three
and raised my head to look. Fifteen or twenty Junies lay sprawled in the mud. Dead. Their last
expressions still on their little faces: pathetic, eager friendly expressions.
To them nothing had any meaning unless it contributed to social intercourse. The futile, impotent
understanding of this was plain to me now.
They didn't understand we were waging a war of extermination against them, grim and ear nest. Such
a thing would be incomprehensible to them, without meaning within their framework of nothing having
meaning unless it furthered companionship.
They thought it was a game we were playing with them, like football or canasta. And they'd think that
up to the end, when the last few hundred of them were surrounded and one last grenade would make
their species extinct.
And that would happen, too. Man had landed on this planet and named it Juno, and he would never
abandon this planet. Instead, he would make it over into the image of his desires. He would do so
because he always had, and always would, wherever he went.
Anything else would be as inconceivable to him as the idea of wanting privacy would be to a Juny.
It stopped raining. Alpha Centauri, a little smaller than Earth's sun at this distance, would be setting in
another two hours. I wondered if I would have to spend another night here.
I hoped not. I wanted to get away from it to the sane atmosphere of the psychopathic ward, where
there would be nothing but the neatly classified normal insanities.
Maybe if I told them the truth about the phantom truckdriver and stuck to my guns, they would keep
me there.