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