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

Most of us, anyway. Many of the adults suffered bouts of nostalgic depression, a phenomenon that GC
doctors soon recognized as a variation on post-traumatic stress. A few committed suicide; others just
walked out of the settlement and were never seen again; but most of us who felt the old Earth longing just
toughed it out, and all the while Grant City grew younger. In ten years the population grew by three
hundred, and things got better.

At least that was what I thought when I was a little kid.
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There's only so many days and nights you can spend on another planet pretending you're the Cisco Kid.
When I was ten I wouldn't have believed this, but at twelve, goaded by incipient adolescence to look at
the world outside my head just so I had something to nurse a grudge against, I started to feel uncertain
about the self-imposed illusion that permeated Grant City.

I arrived at my first Boy Scout meeting to find that the troop leader, Detlef Hamann, had undergone a
rhinoplasty to look more like Karl Malden. While Hamann handed out our Boy Scout Handbooks and
taught us the oath, I had the small epiphany that all of Grant City was becoming a movie set. Hamann had
also gotten a haircut and adopted the moony earnestness of Malden's character Mitch Mitchell from A
Streetcar Named Desire. Which didn't even come out in the right year, but it didn't take me long to
figure out that Grant City's 1956 was just a placeholder for The Fifties as a whole, and anyway I don't
think I could have stood it if Hamann had decided he was Father Barry from On the Waterfront.

Hamann was the first I saw, but within a few months, people were having plastic surgery done so they
resembled Marilyn Monroe or Joe DiMaggio, Edward Teller or Jack Kerouac or Dolores Del Rio.
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By the time I was old enough to know what was going on, Grant City had sunk completely into its
pathological nostalgia. The colony shrank into itself, redirected its energies from survival on an alien world
to the recreation of a time on Earth that never was. Our new start became a simulacrum of a simulacrum.

This should have prepared me for you.
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I got in a fight once, when I was fourteen. Not much of a story except for the long-term consequences
make it interesting. This sixteen-year-old side of beef named Justin Rowe called me a pansy one too
many times because I was wearing spex. He was one of the kids the Lodge would later call Young
Wingtips, buying into 1956 because they could see which way the adults were goingтАФadults were just
WingtipsтАФand I guess the spex made it too hard for him to keep up the illusion. Even though I knew it
was dumb I took a swing at him.

Justin hit me flush on the right eye, and then the ground hit me on the left shoulder. My first thought was
Oh shit, what if they're broken? Next I started worrying that Justin was going to hit me again. When I
looked up he was already gone. I was lying in an eddy at the side of the main between-classes current,
and if anybody knew I was there they weren't letting it show.

As it turned out, the spex were tougher than the skin beneath. My eyelid swelled up until I could hardly
see out of that eye. My dad levered himself up off the bench when he saw the damage, and from various
sources I heard that my dad had nearly assaulted the school principal, a guy called Milt Bahrani, but
nothing came of it beyond that. Justin never hit me again, but that might have been because he'd made his
point. I stayed out of his way, even though I kept wearing the spex, and I sure never said a word about
the fact that it wasn't 1956. Bahrani was just like the rest of them. He'd invented a new history for
himself, claiming to have been an Iranian court aristocrat who fled the country when Mossadegh was
toppled by the CIA in 1953. Victor Arroyo claimed he'd won the Silver Star in World War II, and when