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

lot."
I left her looking grateful, which is absolutely the only way to leave a woman, and barged on to
Room 1524.
It was evidently used as a classroom when reconverted human junk wasn't being picked up. A
bunch of chairs, a long blackboard, a couple of charts. One of the charts was on the Eoti, the basic
information list, that contains all the limited information we have been able to assemble on the bugs in the
bloody quarter-century since they came busting in past Pluto to take over the solar system. It hadn't been
changed much since the one I had to memorize in high school: the only difference was a slightly longer
section on intelligence and motivation. Just theory, of course, but more care-fully thought-out theory than
the stuff I'd learned. The big brains had now concluded that the reason all attempts at communicating with
them had failed was not because they were a conquest-crazy species, but because they suffered from the
same extreme xenophobia as their smaller, less intelligent communal insect cousins here on Earth. That is,
an ant wanders up to a strange anthillтАФzok! No discussion, he's chopped down at the entrance. And the
sentry ants react even faster if it's a creature of another genus. So despite the Eoti science, which in too
many respects was more advanced than ours, they were psychologically incapable of the kind of mental
projection, or empathy, necessary if one is to realize that a completely alien-looking individual has
intelligence, feelingsтАФand rights!тАФto substantially the same extent as oneself.
Well, it might be so. Meanwhile, we were locked in a murderous stalemate with them on a perimeter
of never-ending battle that sometimes expanded as far as Sat-urn and occasionally contracted as close as
Jupiter. Barring the invention of a new weapon of such unimaginable power that we could wreck their
fleet before they could duplicate the weapon, as they'd been managing to up to now, our only hope was
to discover somehow the stellar system from which they came, somehow build our-selves not one
starship but a fleet of themтАФand somehow wreck their home base or throw enough of a scare into it so
that they'd pull back their expedition for defensive purposes. A lot of somehows.
But if we wanted to maintain our present position until the somehows started to roll, our birth
announcements had to take longer to read than the casualty lists. For the last decade, this hadn't been so,
despite the more and more stringent Breeding Regulations which were steadily pulverizing every one of
our moral codes and so-ciological advances. Then there was the day that someone in the Conservation
Police noticed that almost half our ships of the line had been fabricated from the metallic junk of previous
battles. Where was the personnel that had manned those salvage derelicts, he wondered...
 And thus what Blondie outside and her co-workers were pleased to call soldier surrogates.
I'd been a computer's mate, second class, on the old Jenghiz Khan when the first batch had come
aboard as battle replacements. Let me tell you, friends, we had real good reason for calling them
zombies! Most of them were as blue as the uniforms they wore, their breathing was so noisy it made you
think of asthmatics with built-in public address systems, their eyes shone with all the intelligence of
petroleum jellyтАФand the way they walked!
My friend Johnny Cruro, the first man to get knocked off in the Great Break-through of 2143, used
to say that they were trying to pick their way down a steep hill at the bottom of which was a large, open,
family-size grave. Body held strained and tense. Legs and arms moving slow, slow, until suddenly they'd
finish with a jerk. Creepy as hell.
They weren't good for anything but the drabbest fatigue detail. And even thenтАФif you told them to
polish a gun mounting, you had to remember to come back in an hour and turn them off or they might
scrub their way clear through into empty space. Of course, they weren't all that bad. Johnny Cruro used
to say that he'd met one or two who could achieve imbecility when they were feeling right.
Combat was what finished them as far as the TAF was concerned. Not that they broke under battle
conditionsтАФjust the reverse. The old ship would be rocking and screaming as it changed course every
few seconds; every Irvingle, scrambler, and nucleonic howitzer along the firing corridor turning bright
golden yellow from the heat it was generating; a hoarse yelping voice from the bulkhead loudspeakers
pour-ing out orders faster than human muscles could move, the shock troopsтАФtheir faces ugly with
urgencyтАФrunning crazily from one emergency station to another; every-one around you working like a