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

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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.

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Shawn had come back here, looking for the threads he had lost in childhood. He was still seeking them.
He walked on through the stubble left from the harvested barley . . . and something seemed to whisper in
his veins.