"Finch,_Sheila_-_The_Old_Man_and_C" - читать интересную книгу автора (Finch Sheila)

"So good at words, and yet he can't pass his composition test!" his father mocked.
His mother smoothed his hair -- even as a young boy it had been unruly. "There's always more than one way, _Liebchen."_
"I think -- "
"Life's a great game of chance," Uncle Jakob said. He leaned back from the table and re-lit his pipe. "An uncertain ride on a merry-go-round at the Oktoberfest!"
"But Uncle, that's like saying God is a gambler, throwing the dice for our lives -- "
"The dice tell me you are no good in school!" his father roared. "I don't need God to advise me not to spend more money on a poor scholar!"
His mother pulled him to her, pressing his face against her starched apron. "Don't worry, _Liebchen._ I have money for music lessons. My money. Neither God nor your father shall have any say in how I spend it. I'll buy you a new violin."
* * * *
"Come, Papa. You haven't even tasted your champagne!"
Millie linked her arm through his and drew him through the crowded living room, past the neighbors, the friends from their musical circle, the rabbi and the priest of the local Catholic church deep in a discussion of the world soccer cup, past his sons who were arguing over the bomb the Americans had dropped on Korea.
"This atom they've split has unleashed a terrible demon in our world!" Eddie said.
"You don't understand. When the governments of the world are aware of the power of the atom, they'll finally make peace!"
Hans Albert had made the trip unexpectedly from Berlin on the _Schnellzug_. He was not fooled. One more gold medal was hardly cause enough for his oldest son's visit. They worried about his health. Strange, for he did not worry about it himself.
Rosa, flushed and shining in a new dress, stood by the refreshment table that Millie and the housekeeper had worked all afternoon to set up with Millie's heirloom silver and best china. The gold medal flamed like a sun on Rosa's chest. Her parents stood with her, thick-bodied, slow-thinking. They were good people from the farm, not quite sure they understood why all these elegant folk in silk and velvet and glittering rings had come in taxis to kiss their little Rosa on both cheeks and shake her father's hand. The future unfolded before them like a rose petal uncurling, and they did not have the wit to know it.
"Herr Einstein," Rosa called. "Thank you!"
She blew him a kiss with her fingertips that had so flawlessly reached high C. Then she turned to the young man beside her -- a cousin, he knew, a farm lad -- and tucked the hand with the gifted fingers in his.
Millie herded her husband to an armchair from which he could see everybody in the room. He sank into it, feeling for a moment like the apple whose falling to Earth had demonstrated gravity. Lisl promptly climbed on his lap, spilling champagne over the new grey trousers Millie had made him wear. His daughter-in-law retrieved the child and took her away to bed; her own cheeks were as rosy from champagne as the child's were from summer sun. Across the room, he caught sight of his oldest grandchild, a serious boy, much too old now to sit on a grandparent's knee. He showed signs of following his uncle into the sciences.
Hans Albert, still glowering from the argument with his brother, came to sit in the chair beside him.
"Grand theories are in the air now," Hans Albert said. "Wonderful ideas about extending the Poincare theory of dynamics to include gravitation. But some fools oppose the work."
"Ah. Who invents this?"
"Papa, physicists don't _invent._ They're not engineers. They propose theories and test them. Anyway, the ideas come from some Americans, Dyson and Feynman. And from our Heisenberg too, of course."
"Light," he said, gazing at the warm play of candlelight on silver.
Hans Albert nodded impatiently. "Of course! The role of light, following an innate curve made by matter, that's in the theory. And space and time too, threaded together and warped by matter. The equations describing this reduce to Newton's familiar prescriptions in the limit of essentially flat geometries. That's what's so exciting. I wish I could make you understand! You see -- "
"How heavy it is."
"What is?" His son frowned at the interruption.
"Each ray as subtle as a rose petal," he said dreamily, "bending down to the Earth."
"Something like that," the younger man said carefully.
"And everywhere it bends. If we go far enough away, does the light streaming out from the stars seem to curve?"
"Well, I don't -- "
"Even to the end of things? Mustn't light bend then, at least?"
Hans Albert stared at him. "No disrespect, Papa, but you're certainly not a physicist!"
* * * *
When Millie's back was turned, he slipped out of the crowded room.
The balcony was dark and empty, and the air rising off the lake was fresh. Overhead, a huge tapestry of stars blazed, a panoply of light streaking outward to the far horizons of the universe. It was a time to see not just backwards but forwards too. Someday, he thought, man would follow the elusive light of the stars, sailing out into the far reaches of space. Hans Albert could have told him how this would be done, but he already knew the truth of it in his heart.
He had a sense again tonight of endings, of a wave that had travelled so far finally curving on a distant shore. So be it. He was ready for it; there were few things to regret. All in all, it had been a good life.
Rosa had reached her C.
And yet -- and yet.
The book Eddie had left for him was wrong in one respect. The sharks who snatch away the victory were not external. They swam in the dark waters of the soul. The trick was not to let them.
He gazed up into the sky at the great gorgeous light.

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