Lester Del Rey - Return Engagement

VIP免费

2024-11-24 0 0 29.52KB 11 页 5.9玖币

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/Lester%20Del%20Rey%20-%20Return%20Engagement.txt

RETURN ENGAGEMENT By Lester Del Rey

IT WAS later than Daniel Shawn had thought when they filially came out of the little farm house and

headed for the big car of Tommy Rogers. It was almost sundown. And there had been a light rain.

He took a slow breath, almost tasting the vigour of the air.

Strange that it should be late, though. Time had seemed to go so slowly. The whole visit of Professor

Rogers had been a mistake that was hard on both of them. Now it was ending clumsily, as it had begun

and continued in awkwardness. Once Tommy had been his friend. But that was before Tommy went into

Administration and Shawn had given it all up to come back here to the little Minnesota farm where he

had been born.

'A rainbow!' Tommy exclaimed suddenly. 'I haven't seen one in years.'

'Nor missed it, I'll warrant,' Shawn guessed, raising his eyes to see it. It lay in the gap between the locust

trees, adding a jewelled light to their dark greenness.

Tommy laughed his administrator's unoffended laugh and glanced back over the little farmyard before

climbing into the car. 'What do you find here, Dan? Kerosene lamps, outdoor plumbing, not even a

radio. I still say it's no place for you -when you could take over the Chair of History if you'd be sensible.'

'I was born here,' Shawn replied, evading the part of the question he didn't want to answer.

' But that was forty-five years ago!'

Shawn nodded. 'Yes. And sometimes, I think, so was the reality of myself. Let it be, Tommy, and I'll

ride into Utica with you.'

Tommy couldn't let it go, of course. There was that in the

man which hated any way of life he could not understand. Maybe that was why he'd once studied

sociology, only to find that the science could never supply enough answers. He repeated his question as

the motor started.

'I don't know,' Shawn answered slowly, fumbling for his pipe as he tried again to answer it to himself.

'Something I almost saw as a child and then lost. Maybe all of us lost it once. That's why I turned to

history, to find where it went. But I never found it. You used to do a lot of reading once, Tommy. You

tell me. What was in Spencer, in Coleridge a little, in Orlando - only like an echo, but now it's gone from

all our writing.'

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswi...paar/Lester%20Del%20Rey%20-%20Return%20Engagement.txt (1 of 11)23-2-2006 22:33:46

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswijk/Mijn%20documenten/spaar/Lester%20Del%20Rey%20-%20Return%20Engagement.txt

'I never thought there was anything like that,' Tommy said flatly.

Shawn sighed. He should have known the answer that was a part of the man. Then they reached the little

village, no more than a mile from the farm. He got out, putting out a hand.

But Tommy wasn't ready to end it yet. 'If you're going to eat here, I'll join you,' he suggested.

Shawn shrugged, then nodded. He was sorry that he had given in to the man's importunings over the

phone and let him make the useless drive from Chicago. There should have been an end to it now. Yet

Shawn had intended to dine here, since his own cooking was no better than it should be.

He picked up tobacco and the paper at a little store before leading the other to the restaurant beside the

gas station. They ordered and waited for the food, with nothing to say between them.

The paper, Shawn saw from the headlines, had been another mistake, but he glanced at it while

consuming the tasteless food. There was a dark ugliness in the news. As there always was. The lilt of life

was lacking in every part of it. It was heavy and ponderous, even when it tried to be witty. And around

him, the few diners were filled with a heaviness that made their laughter' a deliberate effort and gave

them no pleasure in the stories they told endlessly to each other.

'Why?' Shawn asked abruptly, pointing to the headlines.

'You're still a sociologist, Tommy. Tell me, why all the dark ugliness ?'

For a moment, it seemed that there was a measure of understanding in the man. He sighed. 'Sociologists

don't know much more about the present cultural matrix than anyone else, Dan. Too much technology,

maybe, before the culture can absorb it. Or maybe this is just one of the plateaux in an evolution towards

a sense of group maturity.' 'Maturity?' Shawn questioned bitterly.

'It could be.' And now the administrator's optimism was creeping back into the face. 'Oh, I know, there's

still hate and ugly conflict. But think of the earlier ages, Dan. Look at the superstitious panics, the

persecutions, the witch-burnings. There was a time when anything different from what was considered

human was to be killed on sight. Children ostracize or fight with anyone who differs from the group

norm. Seems to me we've improved a lot in that respect - at least in this country. We're trying to

understand other peoples. Why right now, Dan, if little green men got out of a saucer, most people

would be delighted to meet them. Lots of men are hoping to find alien races - look at Project Ozma. Or

look at the case of that priest who is writing about the question of redemption for non-human beings. If

there were werewolves today, I'll bet that there'd be a lot more scientific interest in them than fear or

hatred. There wouldn't even be any persecution of witches, unless they went in for criminal activity.

That could be considered a form of maturity.'

file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry%20kruiswi...paar/Lester%20Del%20Rey%20-%20Return%20Engagement.txt (2 of 11)23-2-2006 22:33:46

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Lester Del Rey - Return Engagement.pdf

共11页,预览2页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Lester Del Rey - Return Engagement

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: