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

can observe from the way he talks that he wouldn't ever get mad enough to tell us to get back in the can.
And I don't think he'd call us blobs very often. He's the kind of guy who'd buttonhole another sling-shot
commander and tell him, 'Man, have I got the sweetest zombie crew you ever saw!' That's the way I
figure him. Zombies."
And then they were sitting quietly staring at me again. And it wasn't mockery in their eyes. It was
hatred.
I went back to the desk and sat down. The room was very still. From the yard, fifteen floors down,
the marching commands drifted up. Where did they latch on to this, zombie-blob-canned meat stuff?
They were none of them more than six months old; none of them had been outside the precincts of the
Junkyard yet. Their condition-ing, while mechanical and intensive, was supposed to be absolutely
foolproof, pro-ducing hard, resilient, and entirely human minds, highly skilled in their various specialties
and as far from any kind of imbalance as the latest psychiatric knowledge could push them. I knew they
wouldn't have got it in their conditioning. Then whereтАФ
And then I heard it clearly for a moment. The word. The word that was being used down in the drill
field instead of Hup! That strange, new word I hadn't been able to make out. Whoever was calling the
cadence downstairs wasn't saying, "Hup, two, three, four."
 He was saying, "Blob, two, three, four. Blob, two, three, four."
Wasn't that just like the TAF? I asked myself. For that matter, like any army any-where anytime?
Expending fortunes and the best minds producing a highly neces-sary product to exact specifications, and
then, on the very first level of military use, doing something that might invalidate it completely. I was
certain that the same officials who had been responsible for the attitude of the receptionist outside could
have had nothing to do with the old, superannuated TAF drill-hacks putting their squads through their
paces down below. I could imagine those narrow, nasty minds, as jealously proud of their prejudices as
of their limited and painfully acquired military knowledge, giving these youngsters before me their first
taste of barracks life, their first glimpse of the "outside." It was so stupid!
But was it? There was another way of looking at it, beyond the fact that only sol-diers too old
physically and too ossified mentally for any other duty could be spared for this place. And that was the
simple pragmatism of army thinking. The fighting perimeters were places of abiding horror and agony, the
forward combat zones in which sling-shots operated were even worse. If men or materiel were going to
col-lapse out there, it could be very costly. Let the collapses occur as close to the rear echelons as
possible.
Maybe it made sense, I thought. Maybe it was logical to make live men out of dead men's flesh
(God knows humanity had reached the point where we had to have rein-forcements from somewhere!)
at enormous expense and with the kind of care usu-ally associated with things like cotton wool and the
most delicate watchmakers' tools; and then to turn around and subject them to the coarsest, ugliest
environment pos-sible, an environment that perverted their carefully instilled loyalty into hatred and their
finely balanced psychological adjustment into neurotic sensitivity.
I didn't know if it was basically smart or dumb, or even if the problem had ever been really weighed
as such by the upper, policy-making brass. All I could see was my own problem, and it looked awfully
big to me. I thought of my attitude toward these men before getting them, and I felt pretty sick. But the
memory gave me an idea.
"Hey, tell me something," I suggested. "What would you call me?"
They looked puzzled.
"You want to know what I call you," I explained. "Tell me first what you call people like me, people
who areтАФwho are born. You must have your own epithets."
Lamehd grinned so that his teeth showed a bright, mirthless white against his dark skin. "Realos," he
said. "We call you people realos. Sometimes, realo trulos."
Then the rest spoke up. There were other names, lots of other names. They wanted me to hear them
all. They interrupted each other; they spat the words out as if they were so many missiles; they glared at
my face, as they spat them out, to see how much impact they had. Some of the nicknames were funny,