【英文读物】The Hoplite

【英文读物】The Hoplitechapter 1 Jord awoke to the purr of the ventilators billowing the heavy curtains at the doorway. Through them, from the corridor, seeped the cold, realistic, shadowless light that seemed to sap the color from man and matter and leave only drabness and emptiness.His eyes were sandy with sleep. He blinked. The optic nerves readied for sight, pupils focused, retina recorded. The primordial fear of unfamiliar things disappeared as he recognized the objects in the room, identified waking as a natural phenomenon and remembered the days objectives.He lay quietly on the pallet; dimly conscious of identity, clinging physically to the temporal death vanishing behind his opened eyes. Pale light, swollen bladder, sticky throat, quiescent body, unimportant hunger, dim fear of incipient living.He felt for the cigarettes on the floor beside his bed. His careful, sleepy fingers passed lightly over the ashy ashtray and fell on wrinkled cellophane. Dry tubes from a synthetic Virginia. He shook a cigarette from the pack and lay with it jutting from his lips. The steady, filtered, odorless breeze centered on his senseless frontal lobes and whispered down his silver cheeks.A light. His hand crawled, finger walking across the crimson carpet to the grouping, found the metal tube and flew back to his chest. He fumbled with the trigger. His muscles were lethargic and he pressed it hard with a childish impatience.Perseverance.Now the metal tip glowed orange as the radioactive motes in the tube destroyed themselves with rigid self-control. Careful suction, then, and a cubic foot of tobacco smoke howled down his esophagus into his lungs, examined each feathery cranny and left by muscular contraction.It tasted bad, but hed expected that it would.He didnt have to smoke all of it. The habit decently required only that he take a puff, leave it smolder, take another, allow himself to be scorched and futilely try to set the bed afire.He watched the smoke being plucked from the air by the purifiers to be expelled with other smokes, smells and gases into an atmosphere that consisted of little else.His last nights pleasure stirred, vainly fought the inevitable and fluttered its hands. "You awake, Soldier?"The room glowed with a rosy light."Approximately."The woman uncoiled herself and lay flat. Through the tangle of bronzed hair, one ear shone whitely. She brushed the hair from her eyes and her scarlet mouth opened in a feline yawn. The woman was pink and white; she quivered in voluptuous ecstasy and slithered on the satin with her own satiny, round and naked flesh."I didnt hear the alarm," she said, her voice thick with the residue of sleep. Her body pressed warm to his as she slid his cigarette from his fingers.He shared the cigarette, thinking of the distance between the bed and the bathroom. The clock told him he had eight minutes to wait for maximum emission. His physiological chart showed a tolerance of nine and one-third hours.Eight minutes to wait. Then he would have twenty minutes in which to shower, and fifteen to clothe himself in the shimmering, clinging opaque that, like the casing on a sausage, would cover him, leaving only his eyes, ears and mouth. These the neurologist would take care of before the mechanics fitted him into his machine for his next tour of duty.There was a time for eating, time for a last cigarette, time for briefing and a long, long time for the Galbth II.Time for everything but living.Gently he kissed the womans soft neck. "Whats your name?" he asked wistfully, his attention divided between the short gold hairs at the base of her head and the all important clock.The woman chuckled chidingly and toyed with his hands, tracing the veins that stood rigid on their backs where the tortured nerves had forced them to the surface like a maze of pale blue pipes.She did not answer. He could no more know her name than he could know her face behind the silver opaquethan he could know her voice behind the vocal distorterno more than he could know anyone, or that anyone could know him.Three times a week the Sex-Dispatcher sent him a woman. For all he knew it could be the same woman, or three different women."Can I tell the dispatcher that I pleased you?" The voice distorter had shifted and made her sound as though she had a cold. It was, of course, impossible. That scourge hadnt attacked the fortress in thirty years. In all probability it would never attack it again.He nodded, grinding the cigarette into the ashtray. "It would be nice," he said, "if we could know one another."She smiled. "Some day."The clock gave warning, counting backwards through thirty seconds. Jord patted the womans thigh in dismissal. "You may as well go now."She slid from the bed, neither reluctant nor impatient. Her simple tunic lay on the crimson rug where she had dropped it nine hours before. "Good-by, Soldier," she said.He was already on his way to the ba