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

real general. Before the war he had j been a worker on an assembly line,
then was admitted to a school for junior officers, fought in the infantry,
and finished the war as a captain. He knew Captain Chachu well and had old
scores to settle with him - there had been some sort of trouble right after
the war. Anyway, he had been pursuing Chachu for a long time without
success. Although he was attached to underground headquarters, he frequently
fought in operations and was a good soldier and a competent commander. He
enjoyed working in the underground but could scarcely imagine what the
future would be like after victory. Actually, he really didn't believe in
victory. A born soldier, he adjusted easily to any and all conditions and
never looked beyond the next ten to twenty days. His ideas had been picked
up haphazardly, a little here and a little there; from one-armed Vepr, from
Ketshef, from headquarters. But the ideas hammered into him at the school
for junior officers remained foremost in his consciousness. Expounding his
theories, he would display a strange mixture of opinions: the power of the
wealthy must be overthrown (this from Vepr, who Maxim assumed was some sort
of socialist or communist); engineers and technicians should be our
country's leaders (this from Ketshef); cities should be leveled and we
should live in communion with nature (from some bucolist at headquarters).
All this could be accomplished by absolute obedience to one's superiors and
with considerably less discussion of abstract subjects.
Maxim had clashed with him twice. Why destroy towers, sacrificing
courageous comrades, time, money, and weapons, contended Maxim, when the
towers would be restored in ten days anyway? Everything would continue the
same as before, except that the inhabitants of neighboring villages would be
convinced that the degens were inhuman devils. The General could not explain
clearly to Maxim why they engaged in these diversions against the towers.
Either he was concealing something, or he himself did not understand why
they were necessary. He would repeat the same phrases on each occasion:
orders are not to be discussed; every attack on a tower was a strike against
the enemy; people must not be prevented from fighting back or hatred would
corrode them and they would have nothing to live for,
"We must find the Center!" Maxim would insist. "We must strike at the
Center with all our forces at once! What kind of brains do they have at
headquarters if they can't understand such a simple thing?"
"Headquarters knows what it's doing," the General would thunder. "In
our situation, discipline comes first! We don't need any anarchists, thank
you. Mac, everything has its time. You'll get your Center, too, if you live
long enough." Still, the General respected Maxim and eagerly sought his help
when radiation strikes caught him in Forester's cellar.
"I'm still against it," said Memo stubbornly. "Suppose they pin us down
with their fire? Suppose we need six minutes rather than five to do the job?
It's an insane plan."
"We'll be using linear charges for the first time," explained the
General. "Using our old method of tearing through the barbed wire, the fate
of the operation will be decided in three or four minutes. If we catch them
by surprise, we'll have one or even two minutes to spare."
"Two minutes is a long time," said Forester. "In two minutes I could
strangle them all with my bare hands. If I could get my hands on them."
"Yeah, if we could get our hands on them." Green grimaced. "Right,