"Robert F. Young - One Love Have I" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

a vast man-made desert. Then he saw the lofty metallic towers pointing proudly into the afternoon sky,
and presently he realized that they weren't towers at all, but ships instead.
He stared at them, half-frightened. They were one of the phenomena of the new era for which he was
unprepared. There had been spaceships in his own era of course, but there hadn't been very many of
them and they had been rather puny affairs, strictly limited to interplanetary travel. They bore no
resemblance to the magnificent structures spread out before his eyes now.
The Sweike Drive hadn't been discovered till the year of his trial, and he began to realize the effect it
had had on space travel during the ensuing century. In a way it was not surprising. Certainly the stars
were a greater incentive to man than the lifeless planets of the home system ever could have been.
Alpha Centauri, Sirius, Altair, VegaтАФone of the ships had gone as far as Arcturus, the Rehabilitation
Director had told him. It had returned scarcely six months ago after an absence of almost sixty-five years.
Philip shook his head. It was data he could not accept, data too fantastic for him to accept.
He had always considered himself modern. He had always kept abreast of his age and accepted
change as a part of the destiny of man. Scientific progress had never dismayed him; rather, it had
stimulated him, and in his chosen field of political philosophy he had been far ahead of his
contemporaries, both in vision and in practical application. He had been, in fact, the epitome of modern
civilized man . . .
One hundred years ago . . .
Wearily he turned his eyes from the window and regarded the gray walls of the compartment. He
remembered his cigarette when it nipped his fingers, and he dropped it into the disposal tray. He picked
up the magazine he had been trying to read some time before and tried to read it again, but his mind
stumbled over unfamiliar words, over outrageous idioms, faltered before undreamed-of concepts. The
magazine slipped from his fingers to the seat again and he let it lie there.
He felt like an old, old man, yet, in a subjective sense he wasn't old at all. Despite the fact that he had
been born one hundred and twenty-seven years ago, he was really only twenty-seven. For the years in
the Deep Freeze didn't countтАФa hundred-year term in suspended animation was nothing more than a
wink in subjective time.
He lay his head back on the headrest again. Relax, he told himself. Don't think of the past. The past is
past past past . . . Tentatively he closed his eyes; The moment he did so he knew it had been a mistake,
but it was too late then, for the time stream already had eddied back more than a hundred years to a
swiftly flowing September current . . .

It had been a glorious day for a picnic and they had discovered a quiet place on a hill above the
village. There was a cool spring not far away, and above their heads an enormous oak spread its
branches against a lazy autumn sky. Miranda had packed liverwurst sandwiches in little pink bags and
she had made potato salad. She spread a linen tablecloth on the grass, and they ate facing each other,
looking into each other's eyes. A light wind gamboled about them, left ephemeral footprints on the
hillside.
The potato salad had been rather flat, but he had eaten two helpings so that she wouldn't suspect that
he didn't like it; and he'd also eaten two of the liverwurst sandwiches, though he didn't care for liverwurst
at all. After they finished eating they drank coffee, Miranda pouring it from the large picnic thermos into
paper cups. She had been very careful not to spill a drop, but she had spilt a whole cup instead, on his
shirtsleeve. She had been contrite and on the verge of tears, but he had only loved her all the more;
because her awkwardness was as much a part of her as her dark brown hair, as her blue eyes, as her
dimples and her smile. It softened the firm maturity of her young woman's body, lent her movements a
schoolgirlish charm; put him at ease in the aura of her beauty. For it was reassuring to know that so
resplendent a goddess as Miranda had human frailties just as lesser creatures did.
After the coffee they had reclined in the shade, and Miranda had recited "Afternoon on a Hill" and
Philip had remembered some of Rupert Brooke's "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester." Miranda was in her
final year at the university тАФshe was twenty-oneтАФand she was majoring in English Literature. That had