"Raymond Z. Gallun - The Eternal Wall" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gallun Raymond Z)

there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life was visible. Even the hills had sagged
away, flattened by incalculable ages of erosion.
At a mile distance, a crumbling heap of rubble arose. Once it had been a building. A gigantic, jagged
mass of detritus slanted upward from its crest тАФred debris that had once been steel. A launching catapult
for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it wasтАФhalf a million years ago. Man was
gone from the Earth. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate
superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that.
"Kaalleee! . . . Tik, tik, tik! . . ." The sounds were not human. They were more like the chatter and
wail of small desert animals.
But there was a seeming paradox here in the depths of that gulch, too. The glint of metal, sharp and
burnished. The flat, streamlined bulk of a flying machine, shiny and new. The bell-like muzzle of a strange
excavator-apparatus, which seemed to depend on a blast of atoms to clear away rock and soil. Thus the
gulch had been cleared of the accumulated rubbish of antiquity. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler
of the Earth.
Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city
of KarRah. And he was very happy nowтАФflushed with a vast and unlooked-for success.
He crouched there on his haunches, at the dry bottom of the Pit. The breeze rumpled his long, brown
fur. He wasn't very different in appearance from his ancestors. A foot tall, perhaps, as he squatted there
in that antique stance of his kind. His tail was short and furred, his undersides creamy. White whiskers
spread around his inquisitive, pink-tipped snout.
But his cranium bulged up and forward between shrewd, beady eyes, betraying the slow heritage of
time, of survival of the fittest, of evolution. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his
kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century.
Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, around the things their digging
had exposed to the daylight. There was a gob of junkтАФscarcely more than an irregular formation of flaky
rust. But imbedded in it was a huddled form, brown and hard as old wood. The dry mud that had
encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled
clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. Metal had gone into decayтАФyes. But not this body.
The answer to this was simple тАФalkali. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A
perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert
dryness. The Dakotas had turned arid very swiftly. This body was not a mere fossil. It was a mummy.
"AALLEEE!" Man, that meant.
Not the star-conquering demigods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth,
and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. No wonder Loy Chuk and his
co-workers were happy in their paleontological enthusiasm! A strange accident, happening in a legendary
antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge.
At last Loy Chuk gave a soft, chirping signal. The chant of triumph ended, while instruments flicked in
his tiny hands. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with
complicated details. He held it over his eyes. On the tiny screen within, through the agency of focussed
X-rays, he saw magnified images of the internal organs of this ancient human corpse.
What his probing gaze revealed to him, made his pleasure even greater than before. In twittering,
chattering sounds, he communicated his further knowledge to his henchmen. Though devoid of moisture,
the mummy was perfectly preserved, even to its brain cells! Medical and biological sciences were far
advanced among Loy Chuk's kind. Perhaps, by the application of principles long known to them, this
long-dead body could be made to live again! It might move, speak, remember its past! What a
marvelous subject for study it would make, back there in the museums of Kar-Rah!
"Tik, tik, tik! . . ."
But Loy silenced this fresh, eager chattering with a command. Work was always more substantial
than cheering.
With infinite careтАФsmall, sharp hand-tools were used, nowтАФthe mummy of Ned Vince was