"Robert F. Young - Passage to Gomorrah" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

credit to his countrymen. But the bravest of men can collapse when sufficient pressure is applied, and
Captain Eberhardt actually died a hero's death. We are all of us merely human, and we should keep this
in mind when we pass judgment on our fellow menтАФ"
He was conscious of the other kids looking at him out of the corners of their eyes, and he kept his
own eyes focused on his desktop. Eberhardt, Eberhardt, Eberhardt Cross, he could hear them calling
him after the bell had sounded, after Miss Tenthyear had retired to her case behind the desk and had
turn-ed herself off. And he could hear his own voice now, his own voice deep inside him, silently
shouting the old re-frain, but with something added this time: "I'll show 'em! Space is a tree, in a way.
Space is a tremendous tree reaching up into infinity, and I'll climb as high into it as I can get and I'll laugh
back down at them in their silly suburban houses and I'll gather a handful of stars and throw them down
to Earth like shining acorns. . . .

Her tears had smeared the purple ink, making the pas-sages of the letter illegible. But she had read
them once, and once was enough to tell her that her father was never coming back, that his prom-ises
were the same old lies, his cheerful phrases the same old cliches, she had read a dozen тАФa
hundredтАФtimes before.
How strange that she should remember him so well after eight interminable years, that she should still
want him to come back. She had been a gawky girl of 10 when he had gone away for the last time; now
she was a worldly young woman of 18тАФold enough, surely, to be above such child-ish needs as parental
attach-mentsтАФ
She heard the doorbell ring downstairs, and the sound of male voices on the doorstep, and she knew
her mother was in business again. She got up from her vanity and went over to the window and looked
out at the summer night. There was an apple tree growing beside the house and the apple tree was in
blossom. She turned off the electronic screen, reached out and broke off a nearby bough. She held it to
her nostrils, rejoicing in the sweetness and the purity of the blossoms.
She raised her eyes and saw the summer stars pulsing in the black immensity of the sky. She picked
out the patterns of the constellationsтАФthe long straggling line of Scorpius, the riotous burgeoning of
Sagittarius, the tetrahedron of Libra, the filmy blur of Coma Berenices . . . Subtly, what she breathed and
what she saw, what she needed and what she had been denied, blended into a single impres-sion, and
she thought: A lady of the starsтАФthat's what I'll be. A lady of the stars ... And she saw herself,
brightly-gowned and glamorous, step-ping from star to star, the legions of her lovers following
worshipfully behind her. She paused on a global cluster and glanced disdainfully down to the blue-green
mote of Earth, and she thought contemptu-ously of her prosaic mother carrying on her petty assigna-tions
in her petty parlor, of her father absconding again and again from reality; then she laughed, and leaped
light-ly to the Greater Magellanic Cloud, where the Emperor of the Universe humbly awaited her. ...
"But don't you see?" his father said. "Space is for mis-fits. A normal man simply doesn't give up his
rights as an Earth citizen, his right to marry and have children, just for the privilege of traveling to far-off
places."
Cross shifted uncomfortably on the front steps. It was a clear night in August, and the stars were so
bright and close that they seemed to brush the topmost branches of the maples lining the subur-ban
street.
"Think about it, Nate," his father went on, puffing self-righteously on his suburban pipe. "You're still
young. You're only 19. Why don't you wait for a whileтАФa year, any-way. Maybe you'll change your
mind by then."
Cross shook his head. "No," he said. "You don't understand. It's something I have to do ...
Something тАж I тАж have ... to ... do...."

Cross massaged his limbs, got slowly to his feet. The control room had regained solid-ity, but he was
not fooled. The Pandora had merely reached the relatively stable center of the stormтАФthe eyeтАФand any
attempt to throw her back into normal space now would tear her apart, along with everything and