"(ss) Return Engagement" - читать интересную книгу автора (Del Rey Lester)

Or maybe the human race was so unconsciously sick of its own sordiness that it would welcome even alien relief, Shawn thought.

But he let the conversation die. There was as little answer to the problem,in sociology as in history - as he had known all along.

He went out with Tommy at last, putting out his hand awkwardly in silence as the other reached his car.

'You sure you won't come back, Dan?' Tommy asked for the last time. 'You're definitely turning President Schuyler down?'

'I won't come back, Tommy.'

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He stepped back from the car and stood watching it drive away. Then he sighed and dismissed the whole unfortunate business from his mind.

It was already so far into dusk that the stars were shining as he turned to walk homeward. The Moon was full and start-lingly white in the dark sky. Wisps of clouds fleeced its path. The night was going to be one of loveliness. For a moment he was glad he had ridden in, since it gave him an excuse to travel back through the beauty of it.

The road went across the railroad tracks that led to all the earth, and yet the rails seemed to lead nowhere in the moonlight. It carried him on, past the school where once a teacher had touched his mind, then past the old cemetery, shaded with hollows of darkness. For a moment, there was a touch of the spiritual hush he had felt long before as he moved by the quiet place. Then it was shattered by a coarse laugh, and a burst of smut-tinged words of a juke song on a transistor radio.

Superstition was dying, as Tommy had said. At least, the older superstitious fear of things in the night. But the darkness of it was being replaced by an even darker veil of sordid ugliness.

Even the dead had no peace. A couple had found the retreat for their own use, but without even the respect of silence. And maybe these dead could never feel the lack, if they could know. Yet he felt his soul rubbed in dirt as he guessed the ages of the couple. They were using the time for what should have been an opening outward in them for things better reserved for later years.

The houses thinned out and were behind him, except for a single light back from the road half a mile ahead. Here the land dipped down, carrying the road with it. It had been a gravelled road once. Shawn missed the sound of the pebbles. But the Moon was the same he had known long ago, its light like a kiss across the fields. Even crops cultivated by great machines instead of horses could take on a difference in the silvering from above.

Where had men lost whatever they had lost? History had

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taught him nothing, though he had searched. And the keys in literature were too elaborately carved to fit the lock. Books were written to bury the feelings of a past generation, not to reveal what might be happening in the present.

There had been a magic iri men once. Oh, to be sure, it had been rare enough, and whole areas had missed it. Rome had been mighty in valour without it. Much of Greece had lost it, though it lay somewhere in the soft hint of legends older than Olympus. But there had been Persia. There had been Queen Maev and the Isle of Avalon, the sea warriors of Ys and the dreams that misted across man's rise from a beast. No time had ever been without it before.

Yet this time was lacking whatever it was. Save for a few bits borrowed from the past in Yeats, there was no song or dream in the poetry now; and nobody even read poetry to look for such things. The art was as ugly and machine-sym-boled as the thoughts of the little minds that made it.

The music was noise and the only legend was the legend of power.

A car filled with teenagers passed him. The top was down, but none of them were seeing the moonlight.

Shawn passed the sandstone ridge at the edge of his farm, lifted a wire gate and left the road. The woods still stretched along the road. They were his woods, as they had been once when he was a boy. There, along the little rutted trail through them, was the hazel bush, or one like the one he remembered. The wild grapes were ripe and sweet, beaded with the rain or dew. He fasted them and went meditatively on.

There had been a lilting in a few men's thoughts once -enough to lighten the others, and to echo still, faintly, out of the filter of older literature and legendry. It had gone. Maybe the industrial revolution? But that was a poor answer, since the revolution had touched only lightly on much of the world, yet the wonder had vanished just as quickly. Maybe the drive towards power? And yet, there had been power before without the death of the glamour he could sense without defining.

Something had gone out of men. In its place was only the body of man's work - the machines, the dark forces that drove

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him on to bombs and destiny, the rockets that could lift him towards outer space but hide the dancing of the stars. Hundreds of years before, the lilt - and there was no other word -had vanished.

History had failed to show a reason why.