"William Tenn - Down Among the Dead Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

Down Among the Dead Men
William Tenn

I stood in front of the junkyard's outer gate and felt my stomach turn over slowly, grindingly, the way it
had when I saw a whole terrestrial subfleetтАФclose to 20,000 menтАФblown to bits in the Second Battle of
Saturn more than eleven years ago. But then there had been shattered fragments of ships in my visiplate
and imagined screams of men in my mind; there had been the expanding images of the Eoti's box-like
craft surging through the awful, drifting wreckage they had created, to account for the icy sweat that
wound itself like a flat serpent around my forehead and my neck.
Now there was nothing but a large, plain building, very much like the hundreds of other factories in
the busy suburbs of Old Chicago, a manufacturing establishment surrounded by a locked gate and
spacious proving groundsтАФthe Junkyard. Yet the sweat on my skin was colder and the heave of my
bowels more spastic than it had ever been in any of those countless, ruinous battles that had created this
place.
All of which was very understandable, I told myself. What I was feeling was the great-grandmother
hag of all fears, the most basic rejection and reluctance of which my flesh was capable. It was
understandable, but that didn't help any. I still couldn't walk up to the sentry at the gate.
I'd been almost all right until I'd seen the huge square can against the fence, the can with the slight
stink coming out of it and the big colorful sign on top:


Don't Waste Waste
Place All Waste Here
RememberтАФ
Whatever is Worn Can Be Shorn
Whatever is Maimed Can Be Reclaimed
Whatever is Used Can Be Reused
Place All Waste Here
тАФConservation Police


I'd seen those square, compartmented cans and those signs in every barracks, every hospital, every
recreation center, between here and the asteroids. But see-ing them, now, in this place, gave them a
different meaning. I wondered if they had those other posters inside, the shorter ones. You know: "We
need all our re-sources to defeat the enemyтАФand garbage is our biggest natural resource."
Decorating the walls of this particular building with those posters would be down-right ingenious.
Whatever is maimed can be reclaimed...I flexed my right arm inside my blue jumper sleeve. It felt
like a part of me, always would feel like a part of me. And in a couple of years, assuming that I lived that
long, the thin white scar that circled the elbow joint would be completely invisible. Sure. Whatever is
maimed can be re-claimed. All except one thing. The most important thing.
And I felt less like going in than ever.
And then I saw this kid. The one from Arizona Base.
He was standing right in front of the sentry box, paralyzed just like me. In the center of his uniform
cap was a brand-new, gold-shiny Y with a dot in the center: the insignia of a sling-shot commander. He
hadn't been wearing it the day before at the briefing; that could only mean the commission had just come
through. He looked real young and real scared.
 I remembered him from the briefing session. He was the one whose hand had gone up timidly during
the question period, the one who, when he was recognized, had half risen, worked his mouth a couple of
times and finally blurted out: "Excuse me, sir, but they don'tтАФthey don't smell at all bad, do they?"
There had been a cyclone of laughter, the yelping laughter of men who've felt them-selves close to