"Mark S. Geston - The Allies" - читать интересную книгу автора (Geston Mark S)

The Minds brought the Ship into low orbit. Most of the large scale geography was
familiar, but the world had otherwise been remade as Eden. Our sensors found
such richness everywhere that we wondered if we had returned to the right place.
It was possible that I had botched the intricate process of unfolding and
folding the quantum dimensions so that we might have transgressed certain
barriers and landed in a reality that only superficially resembled the one we
had left. I reviewed my procedures and the Minds rechecked them, but the best
conclusion was that we had returned to the same Earth and not some coexistent
shadow world.

I had expected the occupied territories to be lush and filled with wildlife, and
that the defeat of mankind would have extended their expanse to most of the
globe. But the enemy's triumph must have been complete. All our cities were gone
and even the aggregations of rare isotopes that should have marked our presence
for centuries, like cesium, and iodine from our power establishments, were gone.
There were no concentrations of cadmium from mining or organic polymers from
plastics. The roads were all gone. The Minds were barely able to detect sunken
ships in the oceans' deepest places.

There was evidence of the enemy's presence. Some structures and fortifications
remained and the oxidized hulks of what must have been some of their spacecraft
were spotted around landing strips m the Yucatan and the Crimea. But the enemy
was gone from all these places. Their physiologic signatures had always been
easily detectable and the Ship should have been able to find single individuals
on the ground. There were none.

But the Earth flourished. The deserts, even those that had not been created
during the war, had retreated, and they had been cleansed and purified where
they remained. Life rioted everywhere else. The grasses had reclaimed the middle
of America and swept uninterruptedly through east Africa; the steppes of central
Asia were as they were before the Mongols lurched west. The South American and
Asian jungles were restored. A forest of mystical impenetrability covered Europe
from the Pyrenees to the Urals again. The Minds whispered that analysis and
recataloguing of the Amazon Basin's new biosphere would require a month of their
undivided attention.

Everywhere the Ship looked, there was a profusion of life that exceeded our
records and memories. The bison herds that the enemy had restored to central
Europe the year before we left were now matched by even more stupendous herds on
the North American prairie (I could not help looking at where Kearney had been;
the cavern where the Sixth Ship had been built was a deep lake fed by pure
underground springs). Antelope crowded the high deserts of Utah, Idaho and
Oregon, just as there were dense masses of elk and deer in the alpine forests of
these vanished states. The ursine populations were what would have been expected
in the presence of such abundant food supplies.

We had been gone long enough for new species to have tentatively evolved. The
Ship detected new phyla of insects on the average of one for every two days the
Minds spent on observation. There was a new kind of hairy elephant inhabiting