"Arthur C. Clarke - Transience" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clarke Arthur C)

hint of all that it would one day mean to man. Though the first gods of his
people stay lay far into the future, he felt a dim sense of worship stir
within him. He knew that he was now in the presence of something greater
than all the powers and forces he had ever met.
The tide was turning. Far away in the forest, a wolf howled once and was
suddenly silent. The noises of the night were rising around him, and it was
time to go.
Under the low moon, the two lines of footprints interlaced across the sand.
Swiftly the oncoming tide was smoothing them away. But they would return in
their thousands and millions, in the centuries yet to be.
The child playing among the rock pools knew nothing of the forest that had
once ruled all of the land around him. It had left no trace of its
existence. As ephemeral as the mists that had so often rolled down from the
hills, it too, had veiled them for a little while and now was gone. In its
place had come a checkerboard of fields, the legacy of a thousand years of
patient toil. And so the illusion of permanence remained, though everything
had altered save the line of the hills against the sky. On the beach, the
sand was finer now, and the land had lifted so that the old tide line was
far beyond the reach of the questing waves.
Beyond the sea wall and the promenade, the little town was sleeping through
the golden summer day. Here and there along the beach, people lay at rest,
drowsy with heat and lulled by the murmur of the waves.
Out across the bay, white and gold against the water, a great ship was
moving slowly to sea. The boy could hear, faint and far away, the beat of
its screws and could still see the tiny figures moving upon its decks and
superstructure. To the child - and not to him alone - it was a thing of
wonder and beauty. He knew its name and the land to which it was steaming;
but he did not know that the splendid ship was both the last and greatest of
its kind. He scarcely noticed, almost lost against the glare of the sun, the
thin white vapour trails that spelled the doom of the proud and lonely
giant.
Soon the great liner was no more than a dark smudge on the horizon, and the
boy turned again to his interrupted play, to the tireless building of his
battlements of sand. In the west the sun was beginning its long decline, but
the evening was still far away.
Yet it came at last, when the tide was returning to the land. At his
mother's words, the child gathered up his playthings and, wearily contented,
began to follow his parents back to the shore. He glanced once only at the
sea again. Without regret he left them to the advancing waves, for tomorrow
he would return and the future stretched endlessly before him.
That tomorrow would not always come, either for himself or for the world, he
was still too young to know.
And now even the hills had changed, worn away by the weight of years. Not
all the change was the work of nature, for one night in the long forgotten
past something had come sliding down from the stars, and the little town had
vanished in a spinning tower of flame. But that was so long ago that it was
beyond sorrow or regret. Like the fall of fabled Troy or the overwhelming of
Pompeii, it was part of the irremediable past, and could rouse no pity now.
On the broken sky line lay a long metal building supporting a maze of
mirrors that turned and glittered in the sun. No-one from an earlier age