"C M Kornbluth - The Adventurer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

Voyage, or the gory and rather out-of-date Battle For the Ten Suns." He paused while styli scribbled
across the notebook pages.

"The Middle Epic is marked, however, by what I might call the rediscovered ethos." From his voice,
every student knew that that phrase, surer than death and taxes, would appear on an examination paper.
The styli scribbled. "By this I mean an awakening of fellow-feeling with the Home Suns People, which
had once been filial loyalty to them when our ancestors were few and pioneers, but which turned into
contempt when their numbers grew.

"The Middle Epic writers did not despise the Home Suns People, as did the bards of the Old Epic.
Perhaps this was because they did not have to-since then: long war against the Home Suns was drawing
to a victorious close.

"Of the New Epic I shall have little to say. It was a literary fad, a pose, and a silly one. Written within
historic times, the sometwo scorepseudo-epics now moulder hi their cylinders, where they belong. Our
ripening civilization could not with integrity work in the epic form, and the artistic failures produced so
indicate. Our genius turned to the lyric and to the unabashedly romantic novel.

"So much, for the moment, of literature. What contribution, you must wonder, have archaeological
studies to make in an investigation of the wars from which our ancestry emerged?

"Archaeology offers-one-a check in historical matters in the epics-confirming or denying. Two-it
provides evidence glossed over hi the epics-for artistic or patriotic reasons. Three-it provides evidence
which has been lost, owing to the fragmentary nature of some of the early epics."

All this he fired at them crisply, enjoying himself. Let them not think him a dreamy litterateur, or, worse, a
flat precisionist, but let them be always a little off-balance before him, never knowing what came next,
and often wondering, in class and out. The styli paused after heading Three.

"We shall examine first, by our archaeo-literary technique, the second book of the Chant oj Remd. As
the selected youth of the Empire, you know much about it, of course-much that is false, some that is true,
and a great deal that is irrelevant. You know that Book One hurls us into the middle of things, aboard
ship with Algan and his great captain, Remd, on their way from the triumph over a Home Suns
stronghold, the planet Telse. We watch Remd on his diversionary action that splits the Ten Suns Fleet
into two halves. But before we see the destruction of those halves by the Horde of Algan, we are told in
Book Two of the battle for Telse."

He opened one of his books on the lectern, swept the amphitheater again, and read sonorously.

"Then battle broke And high the blinding blast Sight-searing leaped While folk in fear below Cowered hi
caverns * From the wrath of Remd-

"Or, in less sumptuous language, one fission bomb-or a stick of time-on-target bombs-was dropped. An
unprepared and disorganized populace did not take the standard measure of dispersing, but huddled
foolishly to await Algan's gunfighters and the death they brought.

"One of the things you believe because you have seen them hi notes to elementary-school editions of
Remd is that Telse was the fourth planet of the star, Sol. Archaeology denies it by establishing that the
fourth planet-actually called Marse, by the way-was in those days weather-roofed at least, and possibly
atmosphere-roofed as well. As potential warriors, you know that one does not waste fissionable material