"Edgar Pangborn - A Mirror for Observers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pangborn Edgar)

where the stars twinkle; but the problem is not why there is such darkness, but what is
the light that breaks through it so remarkably; and granting this light, why we have eyes
to see it and hearts to be gladdened by it.
тАФ GEORGE SANTAYANA, Obiter Scripta
PERSONAL NOTE ACCOMPANYING REPORT OF ELMIS OF NORTHERN CITY FOR THE
YEAR 30, 963, TRANSMITTED TO THE DIRECTOR OF NORTH AMERICAN MISSIONS
BY TORONTO COMMUNICATOR
AUGUST 10, 30,963.

Accept, Drozma, assurance of my continuing devotion. For reasons of safety I write in
Salvayan instead of the English you prefer. This report was begun in greater leisure than
I now have, and it follows a humanly fashionable narrative form: I had your
entertainment in mind, knowing how you relish the work of human storytellers, and I
only wish I had their skill. I have blundered, as you will see. The future is clouded, my
judgment also. If you cannot approve what I have done and what I still must do, I beg
you will make allowance for one who admires human creatures a little too much.
 1

The bars are genial in Latimer in 30,963. A warmer life fills the evening streets than on
my last visit to the States seventeen years ago. People stroll about more, spend less time
rocketing in cars. It was a June Saturday when I reached Latimer, and found the city
enjoying its week end snugly. There was peace. A pine-elm-and-maple,
baked-beans-and-ancestors, Massachusetts sort of peace, to which I am partial. Getting
born in the Commonwealth would help, if one had to be a human being.

Latimer is too far from Boston to be much under the influence of what Artemus Ward
called the "Atkins of the West." Latimer can make its own atmosphere: five large
factories, a population over ten thousand, a fairly wealthy hill district, a wrong side of
the tracks, two or three parks. The town was more populous a few years ago. As
factories become cybernetic they move away from the large centers; the growth is in the
suburbs and the countryside. Latimer in this decade is comfortably static тАФ yet not quite
comfortably, for there is a desolation in boarded-up houses, a kind of latent grief that
few care to examine. In Latimer the twentieth century (human term) rubs elbows with
the eighteenth and nineteenth in the New England manner. There is a statue of Governor
Bradford half a block from the best movie theater. A restored-colonial mansion peers
across Main Street at a rail-bus-and-copter station as modern as tomorrow.

I bought a science-fiction magazine in that station. They still multiply. This one
happened to be dominantly grim, so I read it for laughs. Galaxies are too small for
humanity. And yet, sometime . . . ? Was our own ancestors' terrible journey thirty
thousand years ago only a hint of things to come? I understand men will have their first
satellite station in a very short while, four or five years. They call it "a device to prevent
war." Sleep in space, Salvay тАФ sleep in peace. . . !

No. 21 Calumet Street is an old brick house on a corner, two stories and basement, not
far from the inevitable Main Street, which travels from right to wrong side of the tracks.
No. 21 is on the wrong side, but its neighborhood is not bad, a residential backwater for
factory workers, low-pay white-collars, transients. Five blocks south of No. 21, Calumet
Street enters a slum where dregs settle to a small Skid Row, no less pitiable than the
massive human swamps in New York, London, Moscow, Chicago, Calcutta.