"Alex Irvine - Volunteers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Irvine Alexander C)

respectful distance from the reactor housing. And the cemetery.

I was still dizzy from the rush of feeling Iris's smile had started, and my confusion gave me a kind of
courage. I sat down next to my dad and said, "Dad. How do you know when you're in love?"

He looked me in the eye, and the brave surge I'd felt turned into the kind of scrambling apprehension you
feel when you know you've gotten in over your head.

"Love," he said. "Love is when you can let a thousand people die because you can't stand, not even for a
second, to tear yourself away from one."

He looked young as he said it, but as he told me the whole story I started to see the things that the
telomerase therapy couldn't touch: the tic at the corner of his mouth, the way he licked his lips when he
took a breath. I had been awake in the world for thirteen years, my father for more than thirteen squared.
That afternoon I began to understand the difference.
├Дt
He'd expected the depression that fell over him after the communication lag between Susan Constant
and Earth grew too long to really have a conversation. He still monitored transmissions from Earth, but
most people there had more pressing things to deal with than a Volunteer's loneliness. All he could do
was listen to military communiqu├йs, coverage of disaster after disaster after disaster, and then someone
finally took the last plunge and let loose the ICBMs. After that, transmissions slowed to a trickle, and the
last signal he heard, in 2144, was from a shortwave operator deep in the Siberian forest: I think I'm
going to go skiing for a while. Maybe that will make me feel better.

The next thirty years or so were an empty space in his memory. He followed all the protocols, dealt with
minor malfunctions, spent more and more VR time with a group of personas that Schimmel programmers
had installed to give him some semblance of a social dynamic. More and more it seemed to him that he
was dreaming the ship, his periodic rounds to run system checks and flush the reactor core.

You knew this would happen, Evelyn told him. It was included in your preparation.

He did know it, and after some timeтАФeven though the sensation didn't go awayтАФhe reached a kind of
accommodation with it. It was a lucid dream, he reasoned, unreal but under his control. That was
perhaps the best anyone could have done, but it only delayed his breakdown.

Schimmel puppetmasters had figured on that, too, and Evelyn put her psychiatric subroutines to work
after preventing my dad from going out the shuttle-bay airlock. After a while, around the time Susan
Constant turned around and began its long deceleration, she took the restraints off him. She was always
there, though, talking to him, encouraging him, reminding him of the importance of what he was doing,
and at some point during his convalescence my dad caught himself thinking that maybe he was falling in
love. "The patient falling for the nurse," he said. "God." And he laughed, but at the time he was ashamed.
"She wasn't even human."

I waited for him to mention my mother, but he didn't. I was thirteen, and my father was trying to tell me
about love without mentioning my mother, whose grave I had visited not an hour before.
Now I'm nineteen, and I don't resent him anymore.
├Дt
I am older than I am.

All of us feel that way sometimes, or so I've read. Einstein once explained relativity by noting that a