"L. Sprague De Camp - The Gnarly Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Camp L Sprague)

"Why not?"
"Well-ah-how are you going to prove that he was or was not
alive a hundred years ago? Take one case: Clarence says he ran a
sawmill in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1906 and '07, under the name of
Michael Shawn. How are you going to find out whether there was a
sawmill operator in Fairbanks at that time? And if you did stumble on
a record of a Michael Shawn, how would you know whether he and
Clarence were the same? There's not a chance in a thousand that
there'd be a photograph or a detailed description you could check
with. And you'd have an awful time trying to find anybody who
remembered him at this late date.
"Then, Svedberg poked around Clarence's face, and said that no
human being ever had a pair of zygomatic arches like that. But when I
told Blue that, he offered to produce photographs of a human skull
that did. I know what'll happen: Blue will say that the arches are
practically the same, and Svedberg will say that they're obviously
different. So there we'll be."
Robinette mused, "He does seem damned intelligent for an
apeman."
"He's not an ape-man really. The Neanderthal race was a
separate branch of the human stock; they were more primitive in some
ways and more advanced in others than we are. Clarence may be slow,
but he usually grinds out the right answer. I imagine that he was-ah-
brilliant, for one of his kind, to begin with. And he's had the
benefit of so much experience. He knows us; he sees through us and
our motives." The little pink man puckered up his forehead. "I do
hope nothing happens to him. He's carrying around a lot of priceless
information in that big -head of his. Simply priceless. Not much
about war and politics; he kept clear of those as a matter of self-
preservation. But little things, about how people lived and how they
thought thousands of years ago. He gets his periods mixed up
sometimes, but he gets them straightened out if you give him time.
"I'll have to get hold of Pell, the linguist. Clarence knows
dozens of ancient languages, such as Gothic and Gaulish. I was able
to check him on some of them, like vulgar Latin; that was one of the
things that convinced me. And there are archeologists and
psychologists. . .
"If only something doesn't happen to scare him off. We'd never
find him. I don't know. Between a man-crazy female scientist and a
publicity-mad surgeon-I wonder how it'll work out."
The gnarly man innocently entered the waiting room of Dunbar's
hospital. He as usual spotted the most comfortable chair and settled
luxuriously into it.
Dunbar stood before him. His keen eyes gleamed with
anticipation behind their pince-nez. "There'll be a wait of about
half an hour, Mr. Gaffney," he said. "We're all tied up now, you
know. I'll send Mahler in; he'll see that you have anything you
want." Dunbar's eyes ran lovingly over the gnarly man's stumpy frame.
What fascinating secrets mightn't he discover once he got inside it?
Mahler appeared, a healthy-looking youngster. Was there