"Lisa Tuttle & Steven Utley - In the Hole" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tuttle Lisa)

found himself forced to another conclusion. During his long years of
captivity, he decided, when he had known nothing of the world outside, the
war must have mutated and spread like a disease until no part of the globe
was free of it. Like a monstrous incurable inescapable plague, it had
become a reality for everybody, but nobody wanted, nobody dared to talk
about it. Thus he found himself wondering, Who are we fighting now? Who
is the enemy? Who are we?

Still, somebody had told him: тАЬYour warтАЩs over, soldier, youтАЩre going
home,тАЭ and, yes, here he was, going home.

He originally dreamed of going home on the train, of arriving for the
first time at the railroad station that had loomed so large in his boyhood
fantasies of escape. He had spent what seemed in memory an inordinate
amount of time hanging around the platform, gazing yearningly down the
tracks, envying the grown-ups who had the money and the freedom to buy
tickets to go somewhere else, and promising himself that some day he,
too, would climb aboard and be gone.

The train no longer went through his town, however, nor anywhere
near it. Not for many years had there been an operative line so far out, not
for many, many yearsтАФand when Heath, shocked, had tried to argue with
the woman in the travel agency, she clattered the keys of her computer
keyboard and came up with a date that stopped his mouth: the last trains
had come through during the year he started high school, they had been
long gone even by the time he left to enlistтАФhow could he have forgotten?
He had left town on a bus, because there were no longer any trains.

And now he returned by bus. He disliked it. The bus smelled of other
people, of unwashed clothes impregnated with sweat and cigarette smoke,
of sickening food, tuna fish sandwiches and bananas and apples and
potato chips, and coffee turned sour on breath. Bags rustled, people
chomped their food noisily and talked, the air conditioner struggled weakly
to cope with their exhalations and body heat. Some previous occupant of
HeathтАЩs hard, lumpy seat had slashed it, and someone else had mended
the rents with strips of rough cloth-backed tape. The bus was a bad fit,
almost as bad a fit as the uniform they had given him to wear. Any clothes
at all felt wrong, for in the hole his only coverings had been darkness and
filth, but the uniform was an abomination, poking, pinching, itching in a
dozen places. His captors, the enemy, had worn uniforms, and though he
tried, though he knew his uniform was not the same, he sensed no
essential difference. He felt as though sewn into the skin of one of the
enemy.

But who were the enemy? Not the people he fought when his war
began, not the people who captured him. They were all dead. тАЬYour warтАЩs
over, soldier, youтАЩre going home,тАЭ his rescuers said, when they pulled him
out of the hole, when they finally made him understand. That could only
mean that before one war ended another had begun. He assumed it was
somewhere else, far away, and no concern of his, because he was going