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

some of them were rather nasty. I was particularly charmed by utie and wombat.
"All right," I said after a while. "Feel better?"
They were all breathing hard, but they felt better. I could tell it, and they knew it. The air in the room
felt softer now.
"First off," I said, "I want you to notice that you are all big boys and as such, can take care of
yourselves. From here on out, if we walk into a bar or a rec camp together and someone of
approximately your rank says something that sounds like zombie to your acute ears, you are at liberty to
walk up to him and start taking him apartтАФif you can. If he's of approximately my rank, in all
probability, I'll do the taking apart, simply because I'm a very sensitive commander and don't like having
my men dep-recated. And any time you feel that I'm not treating you as human beings, one hun-dred
percent, full solar citizenship and all that, I give you permission to come up to me and say, 'Now look
here, you dirty utie, sirтАФ'"
The four of them grinned. Warm grins. Then the grins faded away, very slowly, and the eyes grew
cold again. They were looking at a man who was, after all, an outsider. I cursed.
"It's not as simple as that, Commander," Wang Hsi said, "unfortunately. You can call us
hundred-percent human beings, but we're not. And anyone who wants to call us blobs or canned meat
has a certain amount of right. Because we're not as good asтАФas you mother's sons, and we know it.
And we'll never be that good. Never."
"I don't know about that," I blustered. "Why, some of your performance chartsтАФ"
"Performance charts, Commander," Wang Hsi said softly, "do not a human being make."
On his right, Weinstein gave a nod, thought a bit, and added: "Nor groups of men a race."
I knew where we were going now. And I wanted to smash my way out of that room, down the
elevator, and out of the building before anybody said another word. This is it, I told myself: here we are,
boy, here we are. I found myself squirming from corner to corner of the desk; I gave up, got off it, and
began walking again.
Wang Hsi wouldn't let go. I should have known he wouldn't. "Soldier surrogates," he went on,
squinting as if he were taking a close look at the phrase for the first time. "Soldier surrogates, but not
soldiers. We're not soldiers, because soldiers are men. And we, Commander, are not men."
There was silence for a moment, then a tremendous blast of sound boiled out of my mouth. "And
what makes you think that you're not men?"
Wang Hsi was looking at me with astonishment, but his reply was still soft and calm. "You know
why. You've seen our specifications, Commander. We're not men, real men, because we can't reproduce
ourselves."
I forced myself to sit down again and carefully placed my shaking hands over my knees.
"We're as sterile," I heard Yussuf Lamehd say, "as boiling water."
"There have been lots of men," I began, "who have beenтАФ"
"This isn't a matter of lots of men," Weinstein broke in. "This is a matter of allтАФall of us."
"Blobs thou art," Wang Hsi murmured. "And to blobs returneth. They might have given at least a few
of us a chance. The kids mightn't have turned out so bad."
Roger Grey slammed his huge hand down on the arm of his chair. "That's just the point, Wang," he
said savagely. "The kids might have turned out goodтАФtoo good. Our kids might have turned out to be
better than their kidsтАФand where would that leave the proud and cocky, the goddam name-calling, the
realo trulo human race?"
I sat staring at them once more, but now I was seeing a different picture. I wasn't seeing conveyor
belts moving along slowly covered with human tissues and organs on which earnest biotechs performed
their individual tasks. I wasn't seeing a room filled with dozens of adult male bodies suspended in nutrient
solution, each body connected to a conditioning machine which day and night clacked out whatever
minimum information was necessary for the body to take the place of a man in the bloodiest part of the
fighting perimeter.
This time, I saw a barracks filled with heroes, many of them in duplicate and trip-licate. And they