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

had glowed with warmth and life.
The Rehabilitation Director had explained about the deserted villages, the emptying cities, the
approaching desuetude of Earth. Interstellar Travel had given back the dream that Interplanetary Travel
had taken away. Arid Venus and bleak Mars were uninhabitable, and the ice-choked outer planets
weren't planets at all, but wheeling glaciers glinting malevolently in pale sunlight. Alpha Centauri 4 was
something else, however, and Sirius 41 was a dream come true.
The Sweike Drive had delivered Man from the dilemma in which his proclivity to overproduce
himself had involved him, and Earth was losing its population as fast as ships could be built to transport
colonists to the stars. There were colonies as far out as Vega and before long there would be one in the
Arcturus system. Except for the crews who manned the ships, interstellar runs were a one-way
proposition. People went out to distant suns and settled in spacious valleys, in virgin timberlands, at the
feet of unexploited mountains. They did not return. And it was better that way, the Rehabilitation Director
had said, for a one-way ticket resolved the otherwise irresolvable problem of the Lorentz
transformation.
Philip looked out at the tumbled green hills through which the car was passing. It was late afternoon,
and long shadows lay coolly in deep valleys. The sun was low in the sky, reddening, and around it
cumulus clouds were becoming riotous with color. A wind wrinkled the foliage of new forests, bent the
meadow grass on quiet hillsides.
He sighed. Earth was sufficient for him. The stars could give him nothing that he could not find here: a
woodland to walk in, a stream to read by, a blue sky to soften his sorrow ...
The tumbled hills gave way to fields, and the fields ushered in a vaguely familiar stand of cedars. He
became aware that the car was slowing, and glancing up at the station screen, he saw the nostalgic name
spelled out in luminescent letters: CEDARVILLE. He got up numbly and pulled his slender valise from
the overhead rack. His chest was tight and he could feel a throbbing in his temple.
Through the window he caught glimpses of outlying houses, of collapsed walls and sagging roofs, of
moldering porches and overgrown yards. For a moment he thought that he couldn't go through with it,
that he couldn't force himself to go through with it. Then he realized that the car had stopped, and he saw
the compartment door slide open and the metallic steps leaf out. He descended the steps without
thinking, down to the reinforced platform. His feet had hardly touched the ancient timbers before the car
was in motion again, humming swiftly away on its overhead rail, losing itself in the haze of approaching
evening.
He stood without moving for a long time. The utter silence that precedes evening in the country was
all around him. In the west, the wake of the sun was deepening from orange to scarlet, and the first night
shadows were creeping in from the east.
Presently he turned and started up the street that led to the center of the village. He walked slowly,
avoiding the clumps of grass that had thrust up through the cracks and crevices in the old macadam,
ducking beneath the low limbs of tangled maples. The first houses began to appear, standing forlornly in
their jungles of yards. Philip looked at them and they looked back with their sunken staring eyes, and he
looked quickly away.
When he reached the point where the street sloped down into the little valley where the village proper
lay, he paused. The cemetery was on the opposite slope of the valley and to reach it he would have to
pass Maple Street, the community hall, the university, and half a hundred other remembered places. No
matter how much he steeled himself, he would experience the tug of a thousand associations, relive a
thousand cherished moments.
Suddenly his strength drained from him and he sat down on his upended valise. What is hell? he
asked himself. Hell, he answered himself, is the status reserved for the individuals of a totalitarian state
who voice truths contrary to the rigid credo of that state; who write books criticizing the self-appointed
guardians of mass man's intellectual boundaries.
Hell is what remains to a man when everything he loves has been taken away ...