"Robert A. Heinlein - If this goes on" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

тАЪIf This Goes On-тАЪ

It was cold on the rampart. I slapped my numbed hands together, then
stopped hastily for fear of disturbing the Prophet. My post that night was just
outside his personal apartments-a post that I had won by taking more than
usual care to be neat and smart at guard mount...but I had no wish to call
attention to myself now.
I was young then and not too bright-a legate fresh out of West Point, and a
guardsman in the Angels of the Lord, the personal guard of the Prophet
Incarnate. At birth my mother had consecrated me to the Church and at
eighteen my Uncle Absolom, a senior lay censor, had prayed an appointment
to the Military Academy for me from the Council of Elders.
West Point had suited me. Oh, I had joined in the usual griping among
classmates, the almost ritualistic complaining common to all military life, but
truthfully I enjoyed the monastic routine-up at five, two hours of prayers and
meditation, then classes and lectures in the endless subjects of a military
education, strategy and tactics, theology, mob psychology, basic miracles. In.
the afternoons we practiced with vortex guns and blasters, drilled with tanks,
and hardened our bodies with exercise.
I did not stand very high on graduation and had not really expected to be
assigned to the Angels of the Lord, even though I had put in for it. But I had
always gotten top marks in piety and stood well enough in most of the
practical subjects; I was chosen. It made me almost sinfully proud-the holiest
regiment of the ProphetтАЩs hosts, even the privates of which were
commissioned officers and whose Colonel-in-Chief was the ProphetтАЩs Sword
Triumphant, marshal of all the hosts. The day I was invested in the shining
buckler and spear worn only by the Angels I vowed to petition to study for the
priesthood as soon as promotion to captain made me eligible.
But this night, months later, though my buckler was still shining bright, there
was a spot of tarnish in my heart. Somehow, life at New Jerusalem was not
as I had imagined it while at West Point. The Palace and Temple were shot
through with intrigue and politics; priests and deacons, ministers of state, and
Palace functionaries all seemed engaged in a scramble for power and favor
at the hand of the Prophet. Even the officers of my own corps seemed
corrupted by it. Our proud motto тАЪNon Sihi, Sed DeiтАЩ now had a wry flavor in
my mouth.
Not that I was without sin myself. While I had not joined in the struggle for
worldly preference, I had done something which I knew in my heart to be
worse: 1 had looked with longing on a consecrated female.
Please understand me better than I understood myself. I was a grown man in
body, an infant in experience. My own mother was the only woman I had ever
known well. As a kid in junior seminary before going to the Point I was almost
afraid of girls; my interests were divided between my lessons, my mother,
and our parishтАЩs troop of Cherubim, in which I was a patrol leader and an
assiduous winner of merit badges in everything from woodcraft to
memorizing scripture. If there had been a merit badge to be won in the
subject of girls-but of course there was not.
At the Military Academy 1 simply saw no females, nor did I have much to
confess in the way of evil thoughts. My human feelings were pretty much still
in freeze, and my occasional uneasy dreams I regarded as temptations sent