"Colin Kapp - The Subways of Tazoo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kapp Colin)

tractors was such that the path of the move was plainly marked with a trail of abandoned vehicles spread
broadly across the sandy steppes. Indeed, by the end of the day only five cats remained in operation.
After organizing a team to recover any repairable cats, Jacko went to look for Fritz and found him in
the work-shop idly strumming the Tazoon harp with the air of a man evoking the muses as an aid to
inspiration.
"You know, Jacko, I wish I could work out what hap-pened to the Tazoons. I simply can't understand
why such a highly advanced and organized culture should suddenly fall to pieces. There's no suggestion
of a major war, and there's not sufficient radioactive material on the planet to make a nuclear holocaust a
possibility. It's a highly disturbing thought that a catastrophe which could destroy a race with that level of
technology could leave so little trace. It's as though they suddenly closed up their cities and walked out to
die on a mass trek to the equator."
"What about famine?" asked Jacko.
"Possibly. That's virtually what Nevill suggestedтАФwide-spread soil erosion. For some reason the
major forests in this zone died suddenly. That rather suggests a prolonged droughtтАФbut you'd think a
major technology fighting for survival could cope with even that. The sea is an atrocious mineral stew, but
I'm willing to bet you could distil enough water to maintain a pretty fair agricultural belt if the need arose."
"But without nuclear energy where would you get that sort of power?" asked Jacko. "Distillation of
sea-water on that scale would take a great deal of energy."
"Power!" Fritz sat up. "Now there's an idea! Come to think of it, where did they get their power from
anyway? Let's put a few facts together. We know that at a certain stage in the history of Tazoo
something happenedтАФsome-thing which in the span of a couple of centuries destroyed the civilized
inhabitants of the planet. Curiously, the wild-life forms survived for a considerable time afterwards, and
some are still to be found in the forest belts. Now the basic difference between civilized and wild-life
forms is that the former are power dependent animals while the latter are not. Jacko, my dear fellow, you
may have hit upon some-thing there."

"It's just a gift," said Jacko modestly.
"Then seeing it didn't cost you anything, see if you can stretch it a little further. Let's play for a moment
with the assumption that the Tazoons had become power-dependent animalsтАФas we have ourselves.
What would their basic source of energy have been if it could have failed suddenly and disastrously?"
"Oil or natural gas, perhaps," said Jacko.
"Not very convincing. By all appearances the Tazoons were great power users. From what Nevill's
uncovered recently I'd say the power consumption in this area alone must have been quite fantastic even
by Terran standards. Now, you don't develop a heavy power-consuming technology unless you've a
good idea that you have the resources to maintain it. To do otherwise would be technological suicide."
"That's assuming they thought about the problem in the same way that a human being would."
"I wouldn't know about human beings," said Fritz drily, "but engineers I do know about, and their
thought processes must be essentially similar whether they have one head or six. There are an infinite
number of ways of solving any engineering problem, but the simpler answers will always look familiar.
It's just the nature of the beast. Give a ten-armed Dingbat a head of steam and tell him to convert it into
electrical energy. I don't care what the influence of his racial characteristics, training or personal
geometry, somewhere, at some point, he's going to fall into a chain of logic familiar to engineers
of similar calibre anywhere. Ergo, I don't think we can go far wrong if we tackle this problem from our
own standpoint, and currently we are assuming they had a power supply which appeared infallible yet
failed. Now we need to know what was the source of that energy. If we knew that maybe we could
work out why it stopped."
The telephone rang and Fritz answered it. Nevill had been searching for him,
"Fritz, I'd like to see you first thing in the morning. There's something I want you to
take a look at."
"Right! Something promising?"