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

disengaged from the worthless rust of his primitive automobile. With infinite care it was crated in a metal
case, and hauled into the flying machine.
Flashing flame, the latter arose, bear. ing the entire hundred members of the expedition. The craft
shot eastward at bullet-like speed. The spreading continental plateau of North America seemed to crawl
backward, beneath. A tremendous, sad desert, marked with low, washed-down mountains, and the
vague, angular, geometric mounds of human cities that were gone forever.
Beyond the eastern rim of the continent, the plain dipped downward steeply. The white of dried salt
was on the hills, but there was a little green growth here, too. The dead sea-bottom of the vanished
Atlantic was not as dead as the highlands.
Far out in a deep valley, Kar-Rah, the city of the rodents, came into view тАФa crystalline maze of
low, bubble-like structures, glinting in the red sunshine. But this was only its surface aspect. Loy Chuk's
people had built their homes mostly underground, since the beginning of their foggy evolution. Be sides, in
this latter day, the nights were very cold, the shelter of subterranean passages and rooms was welcome.
The mummy was taken to Loy Chuk's laboratory, a short distance below the surface. Here at once,
the scientist began his work. The body of the ancient man was put in a large vat. Fluids submerged it,
slowly soaking from that hardened flesh the alkali that had preserved it for so long. The fluid was changed
often, until woody muscles and other tissues became pliable once more.
Then the more delicate processes began. Still submerged in liquid, the corpse was submitted to a
flow of restorative energy, passing between complicated electrodes. The cells of antique flesh and brain
gradually took on a chemical composition nearer to that of the life that they had once known.

AT LAST the final liquid was drained away, and the mummy lay there, a mummy no more, but a
pale, silent figure in its tatters of clothing. Loy Chuk put an odd, metal-fabric helmet on its head, and a
second, much smaller helmet on his own. Connected with this arrangement, was a black box of many
uses. For hours he worked with his apparatus, studying, and guiding the recording instruments.
At last, eager and ready for whatever might happen now, Loy Chuk pushed another switch. With a
cold, rosy flare, energy blazed around that moveless form.
For Ned Vince, timeless eternity ended like a gradually fading mist. When he could see clearly again,
he experienced that inevitable shock of vast change around him. Though it had been dehydrated, his brain
had been kept perfectly intact through the ages, and now it was restored. So his memories were as vivid
as yesterday.
Yet, through that crystalline vat in which he lay, he could see a broad, low room, in which he could
barely have stood erect. He saw instruments and equipment whose weird shapes suggested alienness,
and knowledge beyond the era he had known! The walls were lavender and phosphorescent. Fossil
bone-fragments were mounted in shallow cases. Dinosaur bones, some of them seemed, from their size.
But there was a complete skeleton of a dog, too, and the skeleton of a man, and a second man-skeleton
that was not quite human. Its neck-vertebrae were very thick and solid, its shoulders were wide, and its
skull was gigantic.
All this weirdness had a violent effect on Ned VinceтАФa sudden, nostalgic panic. Something was
fearfully wrong!
The nervous terror of the unknown was on him. Feeble and dizzy after his weird resurrection, which
he could not understand, remembering as he did that moment of sinking to certain death in the pool at Pit
Bend, he caught the edge of the transparent vat, and pulled himself to a sitting posture. There was a
muffled murmur around him, as of some vast, un-Earthly metropolis.
"Take it easy, Ned Vince. . . ."
The words themselves, and the way they were assembled, were old, familiar friends. But the tone
was wrong. It was high, shrill, parrot-like, and mechanical. Ned's gaze searched for the source of the
voiceтАФlocated the black box just outside of his crystal vat. From that box the voice seemed to have
originated. Before it crouched a small, brownish animal with a bulging head. The animal's tiny-fingered
pawsтАФhands they were, reallyтАФwere touching rows of keys.