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

Cambrian explosion. That was the first group of large complex animals. How
could something like this have evolved so fast? Where did it come from?" She
turned back to Nikolai, and I realized I was out of my depth. "What can we
do?" she asked him.
I looked at the mad Russian, and saw a tired, puzzled old man, unsure
of himself in a strange place. The late afternoon sun wrote shadow-lines
across his face. "I wish I knew," he said, slumping to sit beside the split
rock.
"Could it fit with your site?"
The Russian shrugged. "The rocks would fit. But everyone back in Russia
laughed at the rocks. We have some strange little fossils; I showed you two. I
have a photo in my bag that looks like the four fingers on the hand, but
smaller and all by itself. The bigger ones are not well-preserved. I gave up
showing them everything." His eyes closed, sighing deeply. "We had only the
rumor of the ruined city. Just a rumor. You have the skeleton of an
inhabitant."
Anna looked overwhelmed, like she had last year after we had talked
most of the night, talking about our discovery and sharing our lives. "They
won't believe it, Nikolai. They'll laugh at me, and leave me to wither into a
lonely old woman."
I didn't want to think of her as lonely. They would have stared at the
fossil all evening, if I had not warned them of the time. The slab was too
heavy for us to carry. Anna and I worried about Nikolai, he worried about
Anna, and I couldn't lift the big rock alone. We'd have to come back with help
or equipment to carry it out.
****
We sat around the weathered wooden picnic table talking late into the
night. While I brewed coffee on the camp stove, Nikolai explained what he had
found in Russia. I sat beside her as he sketched the layering of his rock
formations on the pages of a notebook. The features he saw were subtle. I
asked a few questions; Anna asked many more. Nikolai's answers sounded as if
he had heard most of our questions before.
It was all magic to me. As an engineer, I build optical instruments; it
takes a geologist to read the rocks' stories. Nikolai thought his ruins had
been a wall, built of stones neatly cut and laid on the mud flat so they fit
closely together. "It may have been more a town than a city, but it was in the
water. I think they lived in the sea."
Anna nodded as he said his site had been just south of the equator half
a billion years ago; so had New York. But I could see her grow uneasy as he
sketched a town built in the waters of a tropical sea. Years of graduate
school had taught Anna not to speculate wildly beyond the evidence. More than
once she had warned me not to take crazy ideas too seriously. Yet there we
sat, watching the mad Russian build a few odd stones into a city built by some
long-vanished creatures alien to all the science we knew. "How can you read
something so fantastic into the rocks?" she asked when he paused for breath.
"It is 40 years I have been a geologist. I know patterns of the Earth
like you know Cambrian index fossils. Come see them and you will understand.
When I stand before the rocks, I can see the ruined city as clearly as I can
see that you are lovers."
I don't know if Anna or I were more startled. We had tried to keep it