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

cooked, they compared rocks, tilting them to catch the lantern light.
Over the meal, I asked what stories the new rocks told.
"Nothing more. That animal might as well have come from another
planet," Anna said.
"Why couldn't it?" One visit in half a billion years made sense to me.
Anna gave me a disappointed teacher face, but Nikolai disagreed. "Do
not dismiss that idea too fast, Anna. Look at all the planets the astronomers
have found around other stars. Mars may have had life once, and that would
have been a short trip."
"No, Nikolai, that's much worse," she said. "A few paleontologists
might believe an animal that evolved from the anomalocarids. That's vaguely
within their concept of reality. But they would laugh at extraterrestrials.
You can't tell them too many things they don't want to believe."
The Russian sighed. "Why is it worse? We do not have to change all of
evolution if our creature came from another planet. It is early yet. We have
many questions to ask and much to learn. From where did it come? How did it
build?"
"I don't know," Anna said, studying the scarred table. "I don't know. I
wanted something easier."
"Nothing big is easy." Nikolai sipped water from his cup; rain dripped
from the tarp. "They did not want to believe in asteroid impacts or plate
tectonics, either."
We were too tired to argue. Nikolai, exhausted, went back to the car
soon after dinner, saying nothing more about rocks or love. As we lay in the
tent listening to the rain Anna worried again that we should have kept our
discovery to ourselves. "I'm not ready for this, Vern. I want to do the right
thing, but I don't know what's right. I know it's wrong to suppress evidence,
but it's wrong to make wild claims without any support. It would have been
simpler if just you and I had come here and worked on this at our own speed."
"I don't know," I said. I didn't know what I had really wanted. "I try
to do the right thing, but it isn't easy to tell what that is."
"Isn't it easier to be an engineer, where the numbers give you clear
and clean answers?"
I started to tell her about the judgement calls you have to make in
cost-performance tradeoffs, but we both drifted to sleep before I could
explain that engineering is as uncertain as life.
****
Anna and Nikolai discussed what they should do over breakfast, as
drizzle fell around the tarp. Nikolai already had drafted a paper on his
ruined city; he wanted to add our find to his and make Anna a coauthor. "You
can be first," he offered with a broad sweep of his right hand. "I will not
say they were extraterrestrials. But it is time to publish. I am an old man,
and I have already waited too long. I want answers in my lifetime. Visit my
site; my rocks will convert you to the truth."
"We don't have an answer yet," Anna warned. "We may never have an
answer," she whispered to me later, not wanting to wound the old Russian.
Cautious Anna wanted to wait and do more research. She had to organize
students to haul the big slab out of the woods and look for other fossils. She
wanted our fossil examined by experts on anomalocarids and eurypterids, the
many-legged animals she thought might be related to it. She had to juggle her