"Charles L. Harness-The Araqnid Window" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

"Disease? Some nasty virus such as I have? (God protect them!) It might well have been a genocidal
epidemic.
"Yes, an epidemic. As we know, the population of Easter Island was wiped out in the early nineteenth
century by exposure to Europeans. The Mediterranean area was ravaged by a brand-new disease
brought back from the New World by Columbus's sailors. Today we know it as syphilis. Whole tribes of
North American Indians have been destroyed by a single exposure to variole, which used to be our
mildest form of smallpox." He wiped at his nose. "And even a little thing like the common cold was fatal
to thousands of Eskimos when they were first exposed to it by the early explorers looking for the
Northwest Passage. As a matter of fact, if I and my cold were transported back into Araqnia of three
thousand years ago, I myself might be a contributing cause to their destruction. To them the common cold
might be a lot worse than the Black Plague was to Europe in the Middle Ages.
"So much for disease and the fall of civilizations. Next week we shall divide the group into search
parties of two or three students, and we will all look for the lost city. And we shall find it. Have no doubts
about that. Just think. We shall stand there, looking out into a street that once was filled with these
remarkable beings. In our inner ear we shall hear the ordinary street noises of an ordinary Araqnid day.
We shall watch their wonderful cars and vehicles moved at tremendous speed up and down the airways
of the city."
The professor looked dreamily off into the distance. "What we need is a window on the past. A sort of
time machine that rolls back a couple of thousand years, and lets us see the natives as they really were,
what they wore, how they talked, and the million details of their everyday living."
At this point, unbeknownst to his listeners, he had a momentary flashback into his own past. For he
had stood on the steps of the Acropolis and looked down on Athens. He had stood on the steps of the
Roman Forum and had looked out on the Via Flaminia. He had looked out on the Egyptian desert from
the temple of Karnak. He had stood on the great tragic Mount Masada and looked down on the Dead
Sea. He had gazed forth from a ziggurat in Babylon, and from the Temple of the Sun near Mexico city.
From all these places he had let the times of the structure take over. The hoverbuses and modern
buildings and people in their twenty-second-century clothing had vanished, the millennia had rolled away,
and he had seen the ordinary people and carts and wagons and animals of bygone times. And he would
do the same here. He would find Araqnia, and a window in Araqnia, and he would look forth upon the
remains of the lost city, and for him it would come to life again. And when this happened, it would not
matter whether he had found a new post, or whether he would have to take his little University pension
and disappear. If he ever found the right window, he just might walk through it and be gone forever.
The professor sighed, then became embarrassed. "Well then, let's be off. All of us have work to do.
Dismissed!"
John Thorin looked covertly at his wife. "Nutty as a fruitcake."
"Don't talk like that. He loves his work."
***


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7. Poolside
***


Next day the sub-groups were named and assigned their search areas.
Thorin and Coret were named as one group. Their assignment was the Plateau of Sylva.
"But Professor, sir!" protested Thorin. "That's the only place on the planet where no Araqnid artifacts
have been found!"