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

that these countries harbored the most aggressive designs. They sent in
saboteurs and spies, provoked border incidents, and were preparing for war.
The purpose of such a war was not clear to Guy. He had never really given it
any thought. For him they were simply enemies to the north. That was all he
needed to know.
To the south, beyond the borderland forests, lay a desert, land that
had been totally defoliated by nuclear explosions. The desert covered the
territories of a whole group of countries that had once been the most active
militarily. No one seemed to know what was happening in those millions of
square miles, nor were they interested in knowing. The southern borders were
subject to constant attack by hordes of half-savage degens who infested the
forest beyond the Blue Snake River. The problem of the southern border was
an extremely critical one. It was so rough that the Fighting Legion's elite
forces were concentrated there. Guy had served there for three years and
told many incredible stories about his experiences.
It was possible that other countries still existed further south of the
desert, at the other end of the planet's only continent, but they kept
themselves well isolated. On the other hand, the Island Empire, on three
mighty archipelagos in the arctic zone, constantly made its menacing
presence known. A huge fleet of white submarines, equipped with the latest
technology of destruction, plied the radioactive waters with their crews of
specially trained cutthroats. Like phantoms, the submarines terrorized the
coastal regions with their unprovoked shellings and raiding parties. The
Legion had also to turn back the White threat.
Maxim was shaken by this picture of chaos and destruction. Here was a
planet with a glimmer of intelligent life, but life was on the point of
extinguishing itself once and for all.
Maxim heard Rada's calm and terrible account of how her mother had
received the news of her father's death. Her father, an epidemiologist, had
refused to leave a plague-ridden region, and since the government in those
days had neither the time nor the means to cope with an epidemic, a bomb was
simply dropped. After her mother's death, young Rada, to support little Guy
and helpless Uncle Kaan, worked eighteen hours a day as a dishwasher at a
deportation center, then as a chambermaid in a luxury hotel for speculators.
Later she spent some time in prison. After that she was unemployed and had
to beg for several months.
Maxim heard Uncle Kaan's story, too. Unc, once an eminent scientist,
told how the Academy of Sciences had been abolished during the first year of
the war and the Battalion of His Imperial Majesty's Academy had been formed;
how, during the famine, the founder of evolutionary theory had gone insane
and hanged himself; how they had made broth from grasshoppers and weeds; how
a starving crowd had attacked the zoological museum and seized specimens
preserved in alcohol, for food.
Maxim listened to Guy's ingenuous tales of the antiballistic missile
towers; how cannibals stole up to the construction sites at night and
kidnapped rehabs and Legion sentries; how ruthless vampires - part human,
part beast, part dog - struck in the darkness like silent ghosts. He
listened to his ecstatic praise of the ABM network, built at great sacrifice
during the final years of the war. By defending the country from the air,
the ABM network had halted enemy operations. Even today, the ABMs were their