"Lester Del Rey - 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.'

64

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.

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Where had men lost whatever they had lost? History had