"Arcady And Boris Strugatsky. Prisoners of Power" - читать интересную книгу автора

the sentry shouted something that was drowned out by the engine, and Maxim
shouted in reply: "Everything's in order. Stay where you are!"
The sentry couldn't make out his words either, but the expression on
his face indicated that he was satisfied. Waving the tank on, he returned to
his position in the middle of the road. Everything had turned out all right.
Turning his head, Maxim saw at close range what was swinging from the
crossbar. He glanced at it for a split second, sat down quickly, frowned,
and grabbed the controls. "Oh, God, I shouldn't have looked. What the hell
possessed me to turn my head! I should have kept going and never would have
known anything." He forced himself to open his eyes. "Damn it, I have to
face it! I have to get used to it. Now that I've undertaken this mission, I
don't have the right to look away. It must have been a mutant; even death
couldn't disfigure a person so terribly. Life itself can. It will do it to
me, too. I can't hide from it: must get used to it. Ahead of me may be
hundreds of miles of roads covered with gallows."
When he thrust his head through the hatch again and looked back,
neither the outpost nor its lone gallows by the road wen visible. If only he
could go home right now! He'd keep going in this tank, and, at the end of
his journey, there it would be - home. His parents and friends. He'd wake
up in the morning, wash, and, at breakfast, describe his nightmare about an
inhabited island. He tried to picture Earth, but he couldn't: it was almost
beyond his imagination to conceive of a place in the universe with clean,
cheerful cities, billions of good, intelligent people, and mutual trust
everywhere. "Well, you were looking for a job," he thought, "and you got it
all right. A rough job, a dirty job, bat I doubt that you'll ever find one
more important."
Ahead of him, on the other side of the road, appeared some sort of
vehicle, crawling slowly southward. It was a small caterpillar tractor,
pulling a trailer piled with metal trusswork. In its open cab sat a man in a
prison uniform smoking a pipe. He glanced indifferently at Maxim and the
tank and then turned away. "I wonder what kind of framework that is,"
thought Maxim. "It certainly looks familiar." He suddenly realized that it
was a section of a tower. "I ought to shove the works into a ditch and roll
over it a few times." He looked around; the expression on his face evidently
had intimidated the tractor's driver. The driver braked suddenly, getting
ready to jump out and run. Maxim turned away.
About ten minutes later he spotted the second outpost. It was the
advance outpost of a vast army of slaves in prison uniforms (although maybe
these slaves were, in a sense, the freest people in the country). There were
two modern houses with shiny zinc roofs. A squat gray guardhouse with
gunports like black slits rested on a small man-made hill. The first
sections of the tower were already rising above it; around the hill stood
cranes and tractors, and steel girders lay scattered about. For several
hundred yards to the right and left of the road, the forest had been
destroyed, and men in checkered clothing pottered about here and there along
the clearings. A long low barracks was visible behind the cottages. A gray
rag was drying on a clothesline in front of it. A short distance away, next
to the road, stood a wooden tower with a platform; a sentry in a gray
uniform paced along the platform, where a machine gun rested on a tripod.
More soldiers were gathered beneath the platform; their faces showed the