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

It had been a modest book, rather thin, with an academic jacket done in quiet blue. It had been
published during the fall of the same year he had married Miranda, and at first it had made no stir at all.
The name of it had been The New Sanhedrin.
Then, during the winter, it had caught the collective eye of that subdivision of the Congressional State
known as the Subversive Literature Investigative Body, and almost immediately accusations had begun to
darken the front pages of newspapers and to resound on the newscasts. The SUB had wasted no time. It
set out to crucify Philip, the way the high priests of the Sanhedrin had set out to crucify Christ over two
thousand years ago.
He had not believed they would go so far. In developing his analogy between the Congressional
State and the Sanhedrin, demonstrating how both guarded their supreme power by eliminating everyone
who deviated from the existent thought-world, he had anticipated publicity, perhaps even notoriety. He
had never anticipated imprisonment, trial, and condemnation; he had never dreamed that a political crime
could rate the supreme punishment of that new device of inhuman ingenuity which had supplanted the
chair and the gas chamber and the gallows—the Suspended Animation Chambers popularly known as
the Deep Freeze.
He had underestimated the power of his own prose and he had underestimated the power of the
group his prose had censured. He had forgotten that totalitarian governments are always on the lookout
for scapegoats; someone to make an example of, a person with few funds and with no political influence,
and preferably a person engaged in one of the professions which the mass of men have always resented.
Specifically, an obscure political philosopher.
He had forgotten, but he had remembered. He had remembered on that bleak morning in April, when
he heard the puppet judge intone the sentence—"One hundred years suspended animation for subversive
activities against the existent governing body, term to begin September 14, 2046 and to expire
September 14, 2146. Gradien cell locks to be employed, so that any attempt by future governing
authorities to alleviate said term shall result in the instant death of the prisoner . . ."
The months between April and September had fled like light. Miranda visited him every day, and the
two of them tried to force the rest of their lives into fleeting seconds, into precious moments that kept
slipping through their fingers. In May they celebrated Philip's birthday, and in July, Miranda's. The
celebration in each case consisted of a "Happy Birthday, darling," and a kiss stolen behind the
omnipresent guard's back.
And all the while he had seen the words in her eyes, the words she had wanted to say desperately
and couldn't say, the words, "I'll wait for you, darling." And he knew that she would have waited if she
only could have, that she would have waited gladly; but no woman could wait for you a hundred years,
no matter how much she loved you, no matter how faithful she was.
He had seen the words in her eyes in the last moment, had seen them trembling on her lips; and he
had known what not being able to say them had done to her. He had seen the pain in the soft lines of her
childlike face, in the curve of her sensitive mouth, and he had felt it in her farewell kiss—the anguish, the
despair, the hopelessness. And he had stood there woodenly before the elevator, between the guards,
unable to cry because tears were inadequate, unable to smile because his lips were stiff, because his
cheeks were stone, and his jaw granite.
She was the last thing he saw before the elevator door slid shut, and that was as it should have been.
She was standing in front of the Deep Freeze window and behind her, behind the cruel interstices of wire
mesh, the blue September sky showed, the exact hue of her eyes. That was the way he had remembered
her during the descent to the underground units and along the clammy corridor to his refrigerated cell ...

The days of dictatorships, whether they be collective or individual, are numbered. The budding
dictatorship of Philip's day was no more than an ugly memory now. The Sweike Drive had thwarted it,
had prevented it from coming into flower. For man's frustrations faded, when he found that he could
reach the stars; and without frustrations to exploit, no dictatorship can survive.
But the harm small men do outlives them, Philip thought. And if that axiom had been true before the