"Robert A. Heinlein - Time Enough for Love" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

the Senior's memoirs collated, the Trustees can, in the Senior's ancient
idiom, take this job and shove it.)
What sort of man is our Senior, my ancestor and probably yours, and
certainly the oldest living human being, the only man who has taken part in
the entire pageant of the crisis of the Human Race and its surmounting of
crisis through Diaspora?
For surmount it we have. Our race could now lose fifty planets, close
ranks, and move on. Our gallant women could replace the casualties in a single
generation. Not that it appears likely that this will happen; thus far we have
encountered not one race as mean, as nasty, as deadly as our own. A
conservative extrapolation indicates that we will reach in numbers that
preposterous figure given earlier in a few more generations-and move on out of
this Galaxy into others before we finish settling this one. Indeed, reports
from farther out indicate that Human intergalactic colony ships are already
headed out into the Endless Deeps. These reports are not verified-but the most
virile colonies are always a long way from the most populous centers. One may
hope.
At best, history is hard to grasp; at worst, it is a lifeless collection
of questionable records. It is most alive through the words of
eyewitnesses...and we have but one witness whose life spans the twenty-three
centuries of crisis and Diaspora. The next oldest human being whose age this
office has been able to verify is only a little over a thousand years old.
Probability theory makes it possible that there is somewhere a person half
again that age-but it is both mathematically and historically certain that
there is no other human alive today who was born in the twentieth century.* (*
When the Howard Families seized the Starship New Frontiers only a few were
more than a century and a quarter old; all of that few-save the Senior-are
dead, at times and places on record. (I except the strange and possibly
mythical case of life-in-death of Elder Mary Sperling.) Despite genetic
advantage and access to the longevity therapies known collectively as "the
immortality option," the last died in 3003 Gregorian. By the records it would
seem that most of them died through refusing further rejuvenation-that being
still the second commonest cause of death today. JF.45th)
Some may question whether this "Senior" is the member of the Howard
Families born in 1912 and also the "Lazarus Long" who led the Families in
their escape from Old Home in 2136, etc. -- pointing out that all the ancient
methods of identification (fingerprints, retinal patterns, etc.) can now be
beaten. True, but those methods were adequate for their time and the Howard
Families Foundation had special reason to use them with care; the "Woodrow
Wilson Smith" whose birth was registered with the Foundation in 1912 is
certainly the "Lazarus Long" of 2136 and 2210. Before those tests ceased to be
reliable, they were supplemented by modern unbeatable tests based first on
clone transplants and, more lately, on absolute identification of genetic
patterns. (It is interesting to note that an impostor showed up about three
centuries ago, here on Secundus, and was given a new heart from a cloned
pseudobody of the Senior. It killed him.) The Senior whose words are quoted
herein has a genetic pattern identical with that of a bit of muscle tissue
removed from "Lazarus Long" by Dr. Gordon Hardy in the Starship New Frontiers
about 2145, and cultured by him for longevity research. Q.E.D
But what sort of man is he? You must judge for yourself. In condensing