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

"It is a polarizer, sir. It measures stress in transparent or translucent objects."
"Does it have any significance for an archeologist?"
"Well, suppose he found a piece of glass, or something like that, and he wanted to find out if it was in a
stressed condition ..."
 "Next item, Mr. Thorin."
"Well, this is an orientor."
"A compass?"
"No, sir. Actually, it is more than a compass. It is a tiny recording gyroscope. Once you set it you can
go on a very winding path, even in three dimensions, and it will record all the twists and turns and guide
you back when you are ready to return."
"A compass is much more reliable, Mr. Thorin. But what have we here?"
"A sonar device, sir. It sends sound pulses into rooms and chambers that you can't get into, and it will
give the position of things in the chamber."
"Indispensable, I am sure. And this?"
"I call it a flexiscope. It's a periscopic, extensible probe. An advanced model of the type that Carlo
Lerici used to lower into Etruscan graves in the twentieth century."
"Well, possibly. And what's this?"
"Infra-red scope, sir. You can shine it on any surface, and it will reflect back a heat image of anything
warm that has recently touched the surface."
"I am sure we have many warm-blooded creatures underground who will appreciate your interest in
them. And what have we here?"
"As you can see, sir, it is a pistolet."
"A weapon? My God!" The professor struck his palm to his forehead. "You think the mummies will
rise up and attack you? That perhaps the Araqnid skeletons will go after you with their tentacles? How
long do you think the government would permit us to continue to excavate if we came out of the digs
each morning wearing a gun like your ancient cowboy gangsters? Get that thing out of here! The whole
pack!"
***


After Thorin had slunk away the professor continued his lecture. "It is a great mystery. The Araqnids
certainly achieved interplanetary and interstellar travel thousands of years before we did. Their culture
and technology was vastly ahead of ours. And when we find their ruins, we may be the first to establish a
great archeological paradox: The buried culture is more advanced than that of the diggers. It has never
happened before, and even now it is difficult to imagine. For if they were that far advanced, they should
have been able to recover from earthquakes, flood, disease, even nuclear warfare." The professor
sneezed violently, then blew his nose. "The mistral has given me a cold, students. Take care you keep
yourselves warm when you are out in the wind." He returned to his theme.
"We have been able to study at first hand certain of our primitive arrested cultures which exist today as
they did five thousand years ago. For example, the Australian aborigines, the Eskimo, the Bedouin, the
bird-raisers of the planet Avia, the sea-harvesters of the planet Thallassa. But these cultures have been
limited, generally devoid of writing skills, permanent dwellings, or specialized professions. All men were
hunters or shepherds, for example. And so it is a bitter irony that these primitive cultures have survived,
and the marvelous civilizations of Memphis, Rome, and Araqnia have long vanished. Ah, what were the
sounds and smells in the Piraeus on an average day, and what was the chant of the slave gangs that raised
the great blocks of Cheops? What were the Araqnids like-- the scientists, their women, their families? All
is lost, except in our imaginations."
John Thorin had meanwhile crept back, and was listening on the fringes of the circle. The professor
was not poetic by nature, and Thorin conjectured that the archeologist must have read this somewhere.
No matter. It was all true.