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

blur and cursing and wondering out loud why the Eoti were taking so long to tag a target as big and as
slow as the Khan...and suddenly you'd see a zombie clutching a broom in his rubbery hands and
sweeping the deck in the slack-jawed, moronic, and horribly earnest way they had...
I remember whole gun crews going amuck and slamming into the zombies with long crowbars and
metal-gloved fists; once, even an officer, sprinting back to the control room, stopped, flipped out his
side-arm and pumped bolt after bolt of jagged thun-der at a blue-skin who'd been peacefully wiping a
porthole while the bow of the ship was being burned away. And as the zombie sagged
uncomprehendingly and un-complainingly to the floor plates, the young officer stood over him and
chanted sooth-ingly, the way you do to a boisterous dog: "Down, boy, down, down, down, damn you,
down!"
That was the reason the zombies were eventually pulled back, not their own efficiency: the incidence
of battle psycho around them just shot up too high. Maybe if it hadn't been for that, we'd have got used
to them eventuallyтАФGod knows you get used to everything else in combat. But the zombies belonged to
something beyond mere war.
They were so terribly, terribly unstirred by the prospect of dying again!
Well, everyone said the new-model zombies were a big improvement. They'd bet-ter be. A
sling-shot might be one thin notch below an outright suicide patrol, but you need peak performance from
every man aboard if it's going to complete its crazy mission, let alone get back. And it's an awful small
ship and the men have to kind of get along with each other in very close quarters...
I heard feet, several pairs of them, rapping along the corridor. They stopped out-side the door.
They waited. I waited. My skin began to prickle. And then I heard that uncertain shuffling sound.
They were nervous about meeting me!
I walked over to the window and stared down at the drill field where old veterans whose minds and
bodies were too worn out to be repaired taught fatigue-uniformed zombies how to use their newly
conditioned reflexes in close-order drill. It made me remember a high-school athletic field years and
years ago. The ancient barking commands drifted tinily up to me: "Hup, two, three, four. Hup, two,
three, four." Only they weren't using hup!, but a newer, different word I couldn't quite catch.
 And then, when the hands I'd clasped behind me had almost squeezed their blood back into my
wrists, I heard the door open and four pairs of feet clatter into the room. The door closed and the four
pairs of feet clicked to attention.
I turned around.
They were saluting me. Well, what the hell, I told myself, they were supposed to be saluting me, I
was their commanding officer. I returned the salute, and four arms whipped down smartly.
I said, "At ease." They snapped their legs apart, arms behind them. I thought about it. I said, "Rest."
They relaxed their bodies slightly. I thought about it again. I said, "Hell, men, sit down and let's meet each
other."
They sprawled into chairs and I hitched myself up on the instructor's desk. We stared back and
forth. Their faces were rigid, watchful; they weren't giving anything away.
I wondered what my face looked like. In spite of all the orientation lectures, in spite of all the
preparation, I must admit that my first glimpse of them had hit me hard. They were glowing with health,
normality, and hard purpose. But that wasn't it.
That wasn't it at all.
What was making me want to run out of the door, out of the building, was some-thing I'd been
schooling myself to expect since that last briefing session in Arizona Base. Four dead men were staring at
me. Four very famous dead men.
The big man, lounging all over his chair, was Roger Grey, who had been killed over a year ago when
he rammed his tiny scout ship up the forward jets of an Eoti flagship. The flagship had been split neatly in
two. Almost every medal imaginable and the Solar Corona. Grey was to be my co-pilot.
The thin, alert man with the tight shock of black hair was Wang Hsi. He had been killed covering the
retreat to the asteroids after the Great Breakthrough of 2143. Ac-cording to the fantastic story the