"Samuel R. Delany - High Weir" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delaney Samuel R)

very highly polished? Or are they some different material set in? I can't tell from
here."

Jimmi bent awkwardly and ran her glove over the broken surface. She who is dark
and slender and the definition of all grace, Rimkin thought, muffled against the
blazing ruin beneath deep turquoise skies.

"It's an inset, Dr. Smith." She made a blunted gesture, and Rimkin bent to see.

The eyes were cylinders of translucent material, perhaps nine inches in diameter and
a foot long. They were set flush into the face, and the front surfaces ground to
shimmering concavities.
"Lots of them are different colors," Mak noted.

Rimkin himself had noticed that the great row of eyes gave off an almost day-glow
quality from across the dunes; up close, they were mottled.

"What are they made of?" Hodges asked.

"The building's that marsite stuff," Jones said. The light, purplish rock "marsite" had
been found as soon as the military base at Bellona had grown larger than a single
bubble-hut. Rimkin, there with the Inter-Nal University group, had spent much time
looking at the worn fragments, playing after-dinner games with the military men
(who barely tolerated the contingent of scholars) speculating as to whether they
were carved or natural. The purple shards could have been Martian third cousins to
the Venus of Willendorf, or they could have simply been eroded fragments tossed
for millennia by the waterless waves.

"What are the eyes made of?" Hodges demanded. "Semiprecious stone? Is it
something smelted, or synthetic? That opens up a whole world of possibilities about
the culture."

"I can chip some off this broken one to take backтАФ"

"Rimkin! No!" Hodges shouted, and in a moment the bumpy air suit had scrambled
over the foundation. Hodges swayed on bloated feet. "Rimkin тАж look, wake up!
We've just had the first incontrovertible proof that there isтАФor at any rate, at one
time there wasтАФintelligent life beside us in the universe. In the solar system! And
you want to start chipping. Sometimes you come on like one of those brass-decked
thick skulls back at the base!"

"Oh, Hodges, cut it out!" Jimmi snapped. "Leave him alone. It's bad enough trying to
put up with those thick-skulls you're talking about. If we start this sort of
bickeringтАФ"

"Stop trying to protect him, Jimmi," Hodges countered. "All right, perhaps he's a
brilliant linguist in a library cubicle. But he's absolute dead weight on this expedition.
He spends all his time either completely uninterested in what's going on, or worse,
making absurd suggestions like breaking up the most important archaeological
discovery in human history with a sledgehammer!"