"Jeff Hecht - The Rumor of the Ruined City" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hecht Jeff)

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The Rumor of the Ruined City
by Jeff Hecht
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Copyright (c)1999 by Jeff Hecht
First published in Asimov's, April 1999

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Science Fiction


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We met the mad Russian at the Pratt Museum at Amherst College. Its
mounted skeletons and glass-cased models were there long before interactive
displays came into fashion. Anna had smilingly promised me a serious museum
when I picked her up at the Boston airport. I could have spent hours exploring
it, but she insisted I follow her and the curator to the basement.
Downstairs, they opened a heavy door that led into a musty stone room
full of fossils. Some were on benches as massive as the room itself; others
were in cabinets or in drawers built below the work tables. Some stood on
their own low stands. The stone framing of the basement and the cabinets dated
from the mid-nineteenth century.
The Russian was leaning over a rock slab, peering through the sort of
hand lens geologists always carry. He had been expecting us. He looked up and
smiled at Anna, a gold tooth gleaming. "I am pleased to meet you, Professor
Bouton." Barely over five feet, with thick white hair swept back from his
forehead, and a suit shiny from wear, he looked small beside sturdy Anna.
Smiling in return, Anna shook his hand. "And I am pleased to meet you,
too, Professor Khokhlov. This is Vern Jackson, who found the site with me."
The Russian reached out to me, "I am Nikolai Khokhlov. I am pleased to
meet you." Anna had told me about him on the long-distance line from her
lonely Raleigh apartment. She called him "the mad Russian," for his obsession
with strange old fossils that he described in rambling e-mail messages and
photographed in black and white with delicate shadings. She wanted to show him
what we had found in the hills of upstate New York, and it was a good excuse
to get together again. He seemed sane enough as we shook hands. His English
was accented, but clear for a man who had never visited America before.
The curator introduced us to the jewels of his basement, the fossil
footprints that Professor Edward Hitchcock had collected in the nineteenth
century. In 1802, a farm boy named Pliny Moody had found the first footprints