"Robert F. Young - The Worlds of Robert F. Young" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

writes about so lovingly, he can see Canada—a sight on which he is sometimes reluctantly obliged to
draw the curtain in order to continue writing. He knows people, books, machinery, as well as scenery,
and—equally lovingly—this knowledge is reflected in his writing. I'm writing about Robert F. Young, a
man known to and appreciated by the editors, publishers, and readers of science fiction. One reason why
this book is a good thing is that it will acquaint a lot of people with him who perhaps don't often read the
genre. There are, of course, many good reasons for not reading it; you won't find any of them here,
though. No cowboy or knighthood-gone-to-seed stories set on Betelgeuse, no
tonight-we-overthrow-the-23rd-century-Caligula yarns, no accounts of computers Taking Over,
thousand-times-twice-told tales of Doomsday and The Bomb, not a single insectoid or reptilian
Earth-conquering monster—with or without bug-eyes. None.
What you will find, though, is—as I've said above—love. Calm. Compassion. Rational imagination.
Laughter. Sense. Excitement. Scorn. Integrity. And hope. There's the sun and the moon, and night
and day, brother—all good things. . . . There's the wind on the heath, brother. I could gladly live
for that.
Nor, in dealing with Some Aspects of the Future, has Mr. Young ignored certain musty corners of
the present. Quasi-compulsory conformity and consumption, quiz shows, symbiosis on several times six
cylinders, planet-plundering, and quite a few others—all are carried to a logical confusion in sentences
which never stumble over one another. If Mr. Young, like the personal aides of Gulliver's Laputa,
thwacks us now and then with a pea-filled bladder, it is to waken the dozers among us from their daze.
No tax-free foundations subsidize him to give the world yet another damned dull book, nor is his eye
forever on the word rate. Once, in the dear, dead days when I was an editor, I said of someone that He
writes with love. Someone else wrote in, promptly and tartly, Ink would be better. Robert F. Young
uses both.
—AVRAM DAVIDSON


THE GIRL WHO MADE TIME STOP
LITTLE DID Roger Thompson dream when he sat down on the park bench that Friday morning in
June that in a celibate sense his goose was already in the oven and that soon it would be cooked. He may
have had an inkling of things to come when he saw the tall brunette in the red sheath walking down the
winding walk some several minutes later, but that inkling could not conceivably have apprised him of the
vast convolutions of time and space which the bowing out of his bachelorhood would shortly set in
motion.
The tall brunette was opposite the bench, and it was beginning to look as though Roger's goose was
in no imminent danger of being roasted after all when one of those incidents that so much inspire our
boy-meets-girl literature occurred: one of her spike heels sank into a crevice in the walk and brought her
to an abrupt halt. Our hero rose to the occasion admirably—especially in view of the fact that he was in
the midst of a brown study concerning a particularly abstruse phase of the poetic analysis of science
which he was working on and was even less aware of girls than usual. In a millisecond he was at her side;
in another he had slipped his aim around her waist. He freed her foot from the shoe, noticing as he did so
that there were three narrow golden bands encircling her bare leg just above her ankle, and helped her
over to the bench. "I'll have it out of there in a jiffy," he said.
He was as good as his word, and seconds later he slipped the shoe back upon the girl's dainty foot.
"Oh, thank you, Mr. . . . Mr. . . ." she began.
Her voice was husky, her face was oval; her lips were red and full. Looking into the pearly depths of
her gray eyes, he had the feeling that he was falling—as in a sense he was—and he sat dizzily down
beside her. "Thompson," he said. "Roger Thompson."
The pearly depths grew deeper still. "I'm glad to meet you, Roger. My name is Becky Fisher."
"I'm glad to meet you, Becky."
 So far, so good. Boy has met girl, and girl has met boy. Boy is suitably smitten; girl is amenable. Both