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

observers told, his ship had still been firing after it had been scrambled fully three times. Almost every
medal imaginable and the Solar Corona. Wang was to be my engineer.
The darkish little fellow was Yussuf Lamehd. He'd been killed in a very minor skirmish off Titan, but
when he died he was the most decorated man in the entire TAF. A double Solar Corona. Lamehd was
to be my gunner.
The heavy one was Stanley Weinstein, the only prisoner of war ever to escape from the Eoti. There
wasn't much left of him by the time he arrived on Mars, but the ship he came in was the first enemy craft
that humanity could study intact. There was no Solar Corona in his day for him to receive even
posthumously, but they're still nam-ing military academies after that man. Weinstein was to be my
astrogator.
Then I shook myself back to reality. These weren't the original heroes, probably didn't have even a
particle of Roger Grey's blood or Wang Hsi's flesh upon their re-constructed bones. They were just
excellent and very faithful copies, made to minute physical specifications that had been in the TAF
medical files since Wang had been a cadet and Grey a mere recruit.
There were anywhere from a hundred to a thousand Yussuf Lamehds and Stanley Weinsteins, I had
to remind myselfтАФand they had all come off an assembly line a few floors down. "Only the brave
deserve the future," was the Junkyard's motto, and it was currently trying to assure that future for them by
duplicating in quantity any TAF man who went out with especial heroism. As I happened to know, there
were one or two other categories who could expect similar honors, but the basic reasons behind the
hero-models had little to do with morale.
First, there was that little gimmick of industrial efficiency again. If you're using mass-production
methods, and the Junkyard was doing just that, it's plain common sense to turn out a few standardized
models, rather than have everyone differentтАФlike the stuff an individual creative craftsman might come up
with. Well, if you're using standardized models, why not use those that have positive and relatively
pleas-ant associations bound up with their appearance rather than anonymous characters from the
designers' drawing boards?
The second reason was almost more important and harder to define. According to the briefing
officer, yesterday, there was a peculiar feelingтАФa superstitious feeling, you might almost sayтАФthat if you
copied a hero's features, musculature, metabo-lism, and even his cortex wrinkles carefully enough, well,
you might build yourself another hero. Of course, the original personality would never reappearтАФthat
had been produced by long years of a specific environment and dozens of other very slip-pery
factorsтАФbut it was distinctly possible, the biotechs felt, that a modicum of clever courage resided in the
body structure alone...
Well, at least these zombies didn't look like zombies!
On an impulse, I plucked the rolled sheaf of papers containing our travel orders out of my pocket,
pretended to study it and let it slip suddenly through my fingers. As the outspread sheaf spiraled to the
floor in front of me, Roger Grey reached out and caught it. He handed it back to me with the same kind
of easy yet snappy grace. I took it, feeling good. It was the way he moved. I like to see a co-pilot move
that way.
"Thanks," I said.
He just nodded.
I studied Yussuf Lamehd next. Yes, he had it too. Whatever it is that makes a first-class gunner, he
had it. It's almost impossible to describe, but you walk into a bar in some rest area on Eros, say, and out
of the five sling-shotters hunched over the blow-top table, you know right off which is the gunner. It's a
sort of carefully bottled ner-vousness or a dead calm with a hair-trigger attachment. Whatever it is, it's
what you need sitting over a firing button when you've completed the dodge, curve, and twist that's a
sling-shot's attacking dash and you're barely within range of the target, al-ready beginning your dodge,
curve, and twist back to safety. Lamehd had it so strong that I'd have put money on him against any other
gunner in the TAF I'd ever seen in action.
Astrogators and engineers are different. You've just got to see them work under pressure before