"Philip Jose Farmer - Jesus on Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

still forbidden to make images of sentient beings.
'Though not in holographic communication,' he said. 'And, since their
medical science seems to be highly advanced, they must use pictures of the
human body in textbooks and replicas of organs and so forth for the students. I
don't have the slightest idea whether or not they dissect corpses.'
The holographic TV sets in the apartment could be dialled to see and hear
the correct time. After three days' confinement, Orme and Bronski had learned to
read the numbers necessary to understand the system. Bronski, who on Earth
was a famed linguist in addition to being a premier areologist, had mastered the
words associated with the symbols. They had correlated their own chronometers
to the local time. But they didn't think they'd be going any place soon, so time
was of no special concern.
One of the few things they'd ascertained was that the tau and the omega
on the tunnel door were not of Greek origin. That language was spoken by a few
here, but the arithmetical symbols on the TV sets came from a place far from
Earth.
Orme got up off the chair and walked to Bronski. Together they stared at a
scene that had become familiar by now, though it hadn't lost its fascination. Their
prison was about one hundred feet up on one wall of the vast hemisphere cut out
of solid basalt. The base of the wall opposite was an estimated thirty-five miles
away. The apex of the dome seemed to be a mile and a half high.
From where they stood, they could see seven enormous horseshoe-
shaped openings and twenty-one smaller ones. These must lead to
passageways opening into other hollows. They believed that this hollow was only
part of a gigantic underground complex.
Except for the floor of the dome, the stone was sky-blue. This was not the
natural colour of basalt, so it must have been spray-painted or treated with
something else. Whatever the method used, the dome looked just like the
heavens above Earth on a cloudless day.
About one hundred feet below the highest point of the hemisphere hung a
sun-bright globe. A half-hour before 18:00 in the 'evening', it began to dim. By
18:00 it was shining feebly, as if the sun had turned into the moon. This was the
only light aside from that coming from the windows of houses, until 06:00, when
the 'sun' began to wax.
The luminary didn't seem to be hanging from a cable though it was difficult
to see past the brightness. But if it was suspended without attachment, it was
held up by some sort of antigravity device. Until now Orme and Bronski had been
sure that antigravity machines were possible only in science fiction; that is,
unless you labelled stairs, ladders, elevators, balloons, airships, airplanes, and
rockets as such.
So far, the luminary was the only thing they'd seen without visible means
of support. The people they saw either walked or rode horses or horse-driven
buggies and wagons or bicycles or the few wheeled-powered vehicles.
The cavern floor was neither level nor curving downward to form a
horizon. Instead, it had a gentle gradient upward from the centre in all directions,
ending at the wall. Water flowed from holes at the base of the wall and formed
winding brooks, creeks, and two rivers. The latter were each about three-quarters
of a mile wide. The smaller streams flowed into the rivers, which emptied
eventually into a roughly hourglass-shaped lake in the centre. This was half a
mile wide at the broadest parts and two miles long.