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

put them on common ground from the start, for Philip had loved literature since the moment he had
opened Huckleberry Finn as a boy, and during the ensuing years he had never lost contact with it.
He had been affecting a pipe at the time (a pipe lent you a deperately-needed dignity when you were
only twenty-six and commencing your first semester of teaching), and Miranda had filled it for him,
holding his lighter over the bowl while he puffed the tobacco into ruddy life . . . It had been such a
splendid afternoon, such a glorious afternoon, filled with September wind and September sunshine, with
soft words and quiet laughter. The sun was quite low when they prepared to leave, and Philip hadn't
wanted to leave at all. Miranda had seemed reluctant too, folding the linen tablecloth slowly, being far
more meticulous than she usually was when she folded things, and then picking up the bowl half-filled
with potato salad, intending to set it in the picnic basket. She didn't quite make the basket, however, for
the howl was large and clumsy and she was using only one hand. It escaped her fingers somehow, and
overturned, and his lap was just beneath. That had been the last time he had ever worn his Madagascar
slacks.
Her eyes had become so big and so round with dismay that he would have laughed if they had been
anyone else's eyes besides Miranda's. You could never laugh at Miranda's eyes; they were too deep and
too blue. He had only smiled instead, and said it didn't matter, and wiped his slacks with his
handkerchief. Then he had seen her tears, and he bad seen her standing there helplessly, tall and gawky,
a child really, a lovely child who had become a woman a little too soon, and a beautiful woman too. And
something within him had collapsed and a softness had spread all through him, and he bad taken her into
his arms and said, "Miranda, Miranda. Will you marry me, Miranda?"

The spaceport was far behind and the car was twisting through hills, humming on its overhead rail. It
skimmed the treetops of a forest and passed high above a river. Looking down at the river bank, Philip
saw his first familiar landmark.
It was nothing more than a pile of crumbled masonry now, overgrown with river weeds and sumac,
but once, he knew, yesterday or a hundred years ago, it had been a public villa, and he had spent an
afternoon on one of its sun-splashed patios, sipping cocktails and idly watching the white flurries of sails
on the blue water below. And thinking of nothing, absolutely nothing ...
Except Miranda.
Desperately he forced her out of his mind. It had been all right to think of her a century ago. It wasn't
now. He couldn't think of her now because thinking of her tore him apart; because he had a reality to
face and if he thought of her the way she had been a hundred years ago he wouldn't be able to face
itтАФhe wouldn't be able to search for her in the Cedarville cemetery and put flowers on her grave.
The Rehabilitation Director had told him that in a way his sentence had been merciful, merciful by
accident of course, and not design. It would have been far worse, the Rehabilitation Director had said,
for him to have been sentenced for only fifty years and then to have gone home, a man of twenty-seven,
to a wife who had just passed seventy-two.
But it was naive to speak of mercy, even accidental mercy, in connection with the age of the
Congressional Regime. An age that could condemn a man to suspended animation, tear him forcibly from
the moment in time where he belonged, to be resurrected decades later into a moment in time where he
did not belongтАФan age like that had no mercy, had no conception of the meaning of the word. Such an
age was brutal, or more brutal, or less brutal; but it was never merciful.
And an age like the present one, while it had rediscovered mercy, was incapable of bestowing it
upon a resurrected criminal. It could apologize to him for the cruelty of the preceding age, and it could
remunerate him handsomely for the lost years, make him independent for life; but it could not give him
back that moment in time that was uniquely his own, it could not bring back the soft smile and the
unforgettable laughter of the woman he loved.
It could not obliterate a cemetery lot with a grave that had no right to be there, a grave that had not
been there a subjective yesterday ago. It could not erase the words: Miranda Lorring, b. 2024, d. 20тАФ.
Or was it 21тАФ?тАФhe couldn't know of course, not yet, but he hoped she'd lived long and happily, and