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

for better places to live; they searched for a route leading to the North, a
route skirting the legionnaires' machine guns, skirting the terrible regions
where they died on the spot of excruciating headaches. Others had settled on
farms in hamlets, after surviving the war and three atom bombs. One had been
dropped on this city, and two in the suburbs, leaving miles of defoliated
earth covered with glistening slag. The settlers sowed scrawny, degenerate
wheat; cultivated their weird vegetable gardens where tomatoes were as small
as berries and berries as large as tomatoes; and they raised ghastly cattle
whose appearance took away your appetite. These were a pitiful people -
mutants, the wild southern degens about whom all sorts of stupid tales and
legends had been told. He, too, had woven such stories. They were quiet,
sickly, deformed caricatures. Only the old folk here were normal, but very
few were left; all of them were ill and doomed to die soon. Their children
and grandchildren were not long for this world either. They bore many
children, but almost all of them died at birth or in infancy. Those who
survived were weak and suffered constantly from unknown ailments. The
deformed ones were horrors to behold. But all of them appeared to be
intelligent. There was no denying that the mutants were good, kind,
hospitable, peaceful people. But, thought Guy, it was impossible to looklook
at them. Initially Maxim, too, agonized at the sight of this strange
spectacle, but he quickly grew accustomed to it. After all, he was the
master of his emotions.
Guy inserted the magazine in his gun, rested his head in his hands, and
pondered his predicament.
No question about it. This time Maxim had undertaken an obviously
senseless mission. He was rounding up the mutants, arming them, and planning
to drive back the Legion, for the beginning at least, to the Blue Snake
River. Ridiculous! They could scarcely walk; many would die if they had to
walk a mile. Merely lifting a sack of grain was enough to kill some of them
- and he wanted to attack the Legion with them! Untrained, weak - totally
unfit. Even if he rounded up those... their intelligence agents... their
entire army could be wiped out by one captain single-handed. That is, their
army without Maxim. And with Maxim, one captain and his company could finish
them off. Guy thought, "Maxim has been running around the forest for a solid
month, from village to village, from commune to commune, trying to persuade
the old men and influential citizens to support him. I've been running
around, too, and he's dragged me with him everywhere. He's given me no
peace. The old men don't want to join him, nor will they permit their
intelligence agents to join him. So now they are having a meeting about it
- but I'm not going!"
The world seemed brighter to him now. Looking around him, he didn't
feel quite as miserable; his pulse had quickened and vague hopes stirred
within him, hopes that today's meeting would end in failure, that Maxim
would return and say: "OK, enough. There's nothing more we can do here."
They would move on, further south, to the desert. They said it was also
inhabited by mutants, but not as ghastly and sick as these. More like
people. Supposedly they had some sort of government, even an army. Maybe
they could make some headway with them. True, everything was radioactive
there; one bomb after another had been dropped on them in order to
contaminate the region. He had heard about such special contamination bombs.