"Jack Williamson - Afterlife" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

He had brought his gift for all mankind, he said. He wanted to carry it on to the capitol. The
blacksmith passed a hat for money to buy him a horse. The tailor gave him a jacket. The
sheriff deputized the schoolmaster to be his bodyguard and show him the way. He slept
that night at the doctor's house. When he left next morning, the doctor, the blacksmith, and
the schoolmaster rode away with him. My sister came out with me to watch them go by.
She broke into tears as they passed.

"An angel!" she whispered. "I'd die to be with him."

She stood in the dusty street looking after them till he was gone from sight, and waited with
the rest of us, hoping for him to return. He never did. She grew up to be a beautiful woman
and the mistress of our one-room school. The blacksmith's son courted her devotedly, but
she never forgot the stranger.

An artist of some talent, she painted a portrait of him, standing on a planet out in starry
space, a golden halo shining above his head. It hung in her room, above a candle and a
scrap of twisted metal from his ship. Once I caught her kneeling to it.

With nowhere else to go, most of us stayed at home in the village. The doctor's young
bride learned to make her living as a midwife. The blacksmith's son got his younger brother
to help at the forge and became a smith himself. News moves slowly on our planet, but we
began to hear tales of the miraculous Agent who had risen from death, won new believers
by the thousand, built a magnificent Temple of Eternity at the capitol. My sister longed to
follow him there, and cried when my father called him the Agent of Satan.

The doctor and the schoolmaster returned at last, in a coach drawn by four fine black
horses, a uniformed driver seated in front and a footman standing behind. Another
four-horse team pulled a long, black-painted wagon. They stopped on the village square.
Half a dozen men in long black robes climbed out of the wagon to set up a platform on one
side of the coach and a black tent on the other. They unpacked drums and trumpets and
instruments I had never seen, and brought the street to life with music I had never heard.

When a curious crowd had gathered, the schoolmaster hopped out of the black wagon,
still nimble on his wooden leg. No longer the shabby little mouse I remembered, he was
robed in gold and black velvet.

"My father?" The blacksmith's son limped anxiously to meet him. "Is he coming home?"

The trumpets drowned anything the schoolmaster said.

"Is he -- is he dead?"
"Alive." The schoolmaster waved his hand. The music stopped, and he lifted his voice for
the rest of us. "Alive forever, safe in Eternity."

He strutted to the coach and climbed to stand on the driver's seat. His voice pealed louder.
Our village was a sacred place, he said, because here the Agent had died and risen again
from death. He and the doctor had been blessed to witness that first miracle. As chosen
Voices of Eternity, they had now returned to share the blessing of eternal life with all of their
old friends who wished it.