"H. Beam Piper & J. J. McGuire - Hunter Patrol" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

chance shots when the interdictory barrage started. He hurried toward it and followed it down to the
valley that would lead toward the frontтАФthe thinly-held section of the Communist lines, and the UN lines
beyond, where fresh troops were waiting to jump from their holes and begin the attack.

There was something wrong about this ravine, though. At first, it was only a vague presentiment, growing
stronger as he followed the dry gully down to the valley below. Something he had smelled, or heard, or
seen, without conscious recognition. Then, in the dry sand where the ravine debouched into the valley, he
saw faint tank-tracksтАФonly one pair. There was something wrong about the vines that mantled one side
of the ravine, too....

An instant later, he was diving to the right, breaking his fall with the butt of his auto-carbine, rolling rapidly
toward the cover of a rock, and as he did so, the thinking part of his mind recognized what was wrong.
The tank-tracks had ended against the vine-grown side of the ravine, what he had smelled had been
lubricating oil and petrol, and the leaves on some of the vines hung upside down.

Almost at once, from behind the vines, a tank's machine guns snarled at him, clipping the place where he
had been standing, then shifting to rage against the sheltering rock. With a sudden motor-roar, the muzzle
of a long tank-gun pushed out through the vines, and then the low body of a tank with a red star on the
turret came rumbling out of the camouflaged bay. The machine guns kept him pinned behind the rock; the
tank swerved ever so slightly so that its wide left tread was aimed directly at him, then picked up speed.
Aren't even going to waste a shell on me, he thought.

Futilely, he let go a clip from his carbine, trying to hit one of the vision-slits; then rolled to one side,
dropped out the clip, slapped in another. There was a shimmering blue mist around him. If he only hadn't
used his last grenade, back there at the supply-dump....

The strange blue mist became a flickering radiance that ran through all the colors of the spectrum and
became an utter, impenetrable blackness....




There were voices in the blackness, and a softness under him, but under his back, when he had been
lying on his stomach, as though he were now on a comfortable bed. They got me alive, he thought; now
comes the brainwashing!

He cracked one eye open imperceptibly. Lights, white and glaring, from a ceiling far above; walls as
white as the lights. Without moving his head, he opened both eyes and shifted them from right to left.
Vaguely, he could see people and, behind them, machines so simply designed that their functions were
unguessable. He sat up and looked around groggily. The people, their costumesтАФdefinitely not
Pan-Soviet uniformsтАФand the room and its machines, told him nothing. The hardness under his right hip
was a welcome surprise; they hadn't taken his pistol from him! Feigning even more puzzlement and
weakness, he clutched his knees with his elbows and leaned his head forward on them, trying to collect
his thoughts.

"We shall have to give up, Gregory," a voice trembled with disappointment.

"Why, Anthony?" The new voice was deeper, more aggressive.

"Look. Another typical reaction; retreat to the foetus."