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

"Third floorтАФCorpse Reception and Classification," the operator sang out.
"Fifth floorтАФPreliminary Organ Processing."
"Seventh floorтАФBrain Reconstitution and Neural Alignment."
"Ninth floorтАФCosmetics, Elementary Reflexes, and Muscular Control."
At this point, I forced myself to stop listening, the way you do when you're on a heavy cruiser, say,
and the rear engine room gets flicked by a bolt from an Eoti scram-bler. After you've been around a
couple of times when it's happened, you learn to sort of close your ears and say to yourself, "I don't
know anybody in that damned engine room, not anybody, and in a few minutes everything will be nice
and quiet again." And in a few minutes it is. Only trouble is that then, like as not, you'll be part of the
detail that's ordered into the steaming place to scrape the guck off the walls and get the jets firing again.
Same way now. Just as soon as I had that girl's voice blocked out, there we were on the fifteenth
floor ("Final Interviews and Shipping") and the kid and I had to get out.
He was real green. A definite sag around the knees, shoulders sloping forward like his clavicle had
curled. Again I was grateful to him. Nothing like having somebody to take care of.
"Come on, Commander," I whispered. "Up and at 'em. Look at it this way: for char-acters like us,
this is practically a family reunion."
It was the wrong thing to say. He looked at me as if I'd punched his face. "No thanks to you for the
reminder, Mister," he said. "Even if we are in the same boat." Then he walked stiffly up to the
receptionist.
I could have bitten my tongue off. I hurried after him. "I'm sorry, kid," I told him earnestly. "The
words just slid out of my big mouth. But don't get sore at me; hell, I had to listen to myself say it too."
He stopped, thought about it, and nodded. Then he gave me a smile. "OK. No hard feelings. It's a
rough war, isn't it?"
I smiled back. "Rough? Why, if you're not careful, they tell me, you can get killed in it."
The receptionist was a soft little blonde with two wedding rings on one hand, and one wedding ring
on the other. From what I knew of current planet-side customs, that meant she'd been widowed twice.
She took our orders and read jauntily into her desk mike: "Attention Final Con-ditioning. Attention
Final Conditioning. Alert for immediate shipment the follow-ing serial numbers: 70623152, 70623109,
70623166, and 70623123. Also 70538966, 70538923, 70538980, and 70538937. Please route
through the correct numbered sec-tions and check all data on TAF AGO forms 362 as per TAF
Regulation 7896, of 15 June, 2145. Advise when available for Final Interviews."
I was impressed. Almost exactly the same procedure as when you go to Ordnance for a
replacement set of stern exhaust tubes.
She looked up and favored us with a lovely smile. "Your crews will be ready in a moment. Would
you have a seat, gentlemen?"
We had a seat gentlemen.
After a while, she got up to take something out of a file cabinet set in the wall. As she came back to
her desk, I noticed she was pregnantтАФonly about the third or fourth monthтАФand, naturally, I gave a
little, satisfied nod. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the kid make the same kind of nod. We looked at
each other and chuckled. "It's a rough, rough war," he said.
"Where are you from anyway?" I asked. "That doesn't sound like a Third District accent to me."
"It isn't. I was born in ScandinaviaтАФEleventh Military District. My home town is Goteborg,
Sweden. But after I got myтАФmy promotion, naturally I didn't care to see the folks any more. So I
requested a transfer to the Third, and from now on, until I hit a scrambler, this is where I'll be spending
my furloughs and Earth-side hospitalizations."
I'd heard that a lot of the younger sling-shotters felt that way. Personally, I never had a chance to
find out how I'd feel about visiting the old folks at home. My father was knocked off in the suicidal
attempt to retake Neptune way back when I was still in high school learning elementary combat, and my
mother was Admiral Raguzzi's staff secretary when the flagship Thermopylae took a direct hit two years
later in the famous defense of Ganymede. That was before the Breeding Regulations, of course, and