"Robert F. Young - The Questenestal Towers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

that—"
"I do understand, senir. You want something to take home. Something that will make going home
easier. You want a memory that will not rust, that will remain dean and shining throughout the quiet years
of your life. Something lasting that you can hang on to when doubts assail you. A touchstone that your
own civilization is unable to provide." He lowered his eyes, staring at the dark red soil in his thin hand.
"All of us are like that, senir."
The Martian raised his eyes again. "I am proud that my humble race is able to lend you such a
touchstone," he said. He stood up slowly. Then he raised one arm in a wide gesture. "The Quetenestel
Towers, senir. Take them. Quetenestel was, as your guidebook states, a famous Martian artist. If, when
my people gaze upon his masterpiece, they know that they shall never build again, it is because they are
ashamed of their clumsy hands. It is because they are afraid that their noblest efforts can never touch the
consummate art work of the master."
He bowed. "I am sorry to have disturbed you," he said. "I was but passing to my batiqueno when I
saw you sitting here. I am grateful for the time of day you have so graciously granted me. And now, quis
san foruita. Farewell."
He turned and started tiredly up the slope to the canal path.
"Wait," Thorton said, rising, He felt vaguely dissatisfied, vaguely afraid that something essential had
escaped him. But the Martian did not pause. He climbed up the slope to the path and walked down the
path, blending finally into the deepening evening shadows.
Thorton would have followed, but he heard the high-pitched drone of the returning launch and knew
that the others were on their way back from the carnival town.
He waited there on the canal bank, and when the launch came in he helped his wife and his son up
the slope, losing, in the sudden cessation of the afternoon's loneliness, some of the doubts that had
infiltrated his mind. He took his wife's arm and his son's small hand and walked with them and the rest of
the tourists back to the neat row of prefabricated cottages facing the canal.
Behind him the kaleidoscopic veins of the carnival town flowed brightly through the intensifying night.
And then—Thorton paused on his small front lawn to watch —liquid light leaped vividly through the huge
vowels and consonants of the Quetenestel Towers, etching their creator's name in purest scarlet against
the star-haunted Martian night.
And suddenly Thorton's heart was full. Suddenly he was able to face tomorrow. His vacation had not
been in vain. He had his touchstone.
The matter probably would have ended there, and Thorton doubtless would have endured the abyss
of time separating him from his next vacation with more patience and equanimity than he could usually
summon to meet the rigors of civilized living. If he had not been curious; if, deep, deep in the innermost
reaches of his mind there had not lurked one tiny nagging doubt.
He had been home less than two months when the Tri-Planetary Historical Society announced the
opening of the first Martian micro-film library in Lesser New York. Thorton spent a whole week doing
battle with himself. He presented himself with a hundred excellent reasons why it would be a waste of
time for him to sit in a long narrow room ruining his eyes over 3-D films, listening to prosaic descriptions
of a planet he had seen at first hand.
"What can they tell me about Mars?" he asked himself again and 'again. "I've been there!"
The libro-specialist in the long narrow room—the Q—S room—said: "What topic, sir?"
Thorton was embarrassed. "The Quetenestel—" he began. Somehow he could not say the rest.
"Oh, the towers," the girl said. "Won't you sit down, sir?"
He was sweating. The seat was supposed to be form-adjusting, yet it failed utterly to align itself to his
shifting posture. The long room darkened and abruptly there was the blue canal flowing slowly across the
3-D screen before him, and just beyond it the crystalline towers rising, with patches of violet sky showing
exquisitely between their delicate fretworks.
A wave of such poignant nostalgia swept over, him that he felt that the room could no longer contain
him, the room, or Earth for that matter; that he must get up and flee; .run down the grassy bank of the