Читать книгу The Radio Beasts онлайн

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And yet were they to be blamed? For many generations, through five hundred years of servile peace, they had been the slaves of the ants; and, had it not been for the advent of Cabot the Minorian upon their planet, they never would have tasted even this brief two years of freedom.

All that they knew of warfare had been taught them as a game, under Cabot’s competent leadership. Leadership! That was the key to the situation. Leadership, and an ideal, a rallying point. In the great War of Liberation, Myles Cabot had furnished the leadership, and King Kew the Twelfth had furnished the rallying point with his now famous speech, which I always like to compare with Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. In fact, Cabot, too, had furnished the slogan with which that successful war had begun: “Forward into Formia, for Cupia, King Kew and Princess Lilla!”

Now, Kew lay dead in the stadium with a bullet through his loyal and sturdy heart. Lilla, their beloved Princess, was a thousand stads away to the northward. And Cabot the Minorian lay shackled in jail, deprived of his wonderful electrical headset, without which he was a mere deaf and dumb earthbeast, with no means to hold communication with his fellows, and in fact with no claim to being even human.