"Robert Charles Wilson - Julian- A Christmas Story" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

you there, didn't I? Sitting in the back pews?)тАФto books and ideas that might strike a youth of your
background as exciting and, well, different. Am I wrong?"

"I could hardly say you are, sir."

"And much of what Julian may have described to you is no doubt true. I've traveled some myself, you
know. I've seen Colorado Springs, Pittsburgh, even New York City. Our eastern cities are great, proud
metropolisesтАФsome of the biggest and most productive in the worldтАФand they're worth defending,
which is one reason we're trying so hard to drive the Dutch out of Labrador."

"Surely you're right."

"I'm glad you agree. Because there is a trap certain young people fall into. I've seen it before.
Sometimes a boy decides that one of those great cities might be a place he can run away toтАФa place
where he can escape all the duties, obligations, and moral lessons he learned at his mother's knee. Simple
things like faith and patriotism can begin to seem to a young man like burdens, which might be shrugged
off when they become too weighty."

"I'm not like that, sir."

"Of course not. But there is yet another element in the calculation. You may have to leave Williams
Ford because of the conscription. And the thought that runs through many boys' minds is, if I must leave,
then perhaps I ought to leave on my own hook, and find my destiny on a city's streets rather than in a
battalion of the Athabaska Brigade . . . and you're good to deny it, Adam, but you wouldn't be human if
such ideas didn't cross your mind."

"No, sir," I muttered, and I must admit I felt a dawning guilt, for I had in fact been a little seduced by
Julian's tales of city life, and Sam's dubious lessons, and the HISTORY OF MANKIND IN
SPACEтАФperhaps I had forgotten something of my obligations to the village that lay so still and so
inviting in the blue near distance.

"I know," Ben Kreel said, "that things haven't always been easy for your family. Your father's faith, in
particular, has been a trial, and we haven't always been good neighborsтАФspeaking on behalf of the
village as a whole. Perhaps you've been left out of some activities other boys enjoy as a matter of course:
church activities, picnics, common friendships . . . well, even Williams Ford isn't perfect. But I promise
you, Adam: if you find yourself in the Brigades, especially if you find yourself tested in time of war, you'll
discover that the same boys who shunned you in the dusty streets of your home town become your best
friends and bravest defenders, and you theirs. For our common heritage ties us together in ways that may
seem obscure, but become obvious under the harsh light of combat."

I had spent so much time smarting under the remarks of other boys (that my father "raised vipers the
way other folks raise chickens," for example) that I could hardly credit Ben Kreel's assertion. But I knew
little of modern warfare, except what I had read in the novels of Mr. Charles Curtis Easton, so it might be
true. And the prospect (as was intended) made me feel even more shame-faced.

"There," Ben Kreel said: "Do you hear that, Adam?"

I did. I could hardly avoid it. The bell was ringing in the Dominion church, calling together one of the
early ecumenical services. It was a silvery sound on the winter air, at once lonesome and consoling, and I
wanted almost to run toward itтАФto shelter in it, as if I were a child again.