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

could trace the complex vaulted roof rising to its apex in a series of panels shaped to some intriguing
alge-braic equation. At their feet the floor continued unchanged as far as the flash-beams could reveal,
while to their right the level dropped abruptly perhaps two metres to form a channel of about seven
metres width. Beyond the channel rose the walls again arching upwards.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" asked Fritz.
"Uh!" said Jacko. "No matter how you build it, a sub-way station is a subway station is a subway
station, and this is just one such."
"Good man," said Fritz. "I want to have a look at the rails."
Together they surveyed the channel, probing minutely with their flashlights.
"No lines," said Jacko at last, his voice tinged with dis-appointment. "It could be that we're wrong
about this place. Perhaps a sewer .. ."
"I'm not wrong," said Fritz. "I'd know a subway when I found one even if I was deaf, blind and shut up
in a box. It's part of the chemistry of whatever genes conspire to make an engineer. Here, help me down,
I want to explore."
"Don't you think we'd better go back and get some re-inforcements?" said Jacko. Fritz had started
along the chan-nel to where it entered a somewhat smaller tunnel undeni-ably reminiscent of a Terran
subway. "For Heaven's sake, Fritz, you don't know what you might find in there!"
"What's eating you, Jacko? Not losing your nerve all of a sudden?"
"No, it's just that walking down a tunnel that might con-tain an emergent subway train goes against my
finer sensi-bilitiesтАФeven if it is two million years behind schedule."
Fritz took fifteen paces into the tunnel and let out a whoop which paralysed Jacko with fright.
"Jacko, get down here quick! I've found one."
"Found one what?" asked Jacko when he had regained control of his vocal cords.
"A train, you idiot. I've found a blessed train! Fetch the other lamp."
Against his better judgment Jacko dropped into the channel and followed Fritz into the tunnel. Then
with a churning stomach and racing brain he examined the artifact which barred their further entry.
"That," he asked finally, "is a train?"
"It can't be anything else," said Fritz, not very happily. "It doesn't appear to be a signal box and there's
not much point in having a wrought-iron summer house this far under-ground. It appears to be the
right shape to fit the tunnel so it's probably either a highly ornate tunnelling machine or else it's a
train."
"Alien!" said Jacko in awe. "The connotations of that word get lost by common usage. It doesn't begin
to convey the mind-twisting sense that everything you know and believe has been scrunched up and
re-sorted by a different kind of logic. These people had different values and different basics, and it makes
the mind squirm even trying to re-adjust."
"They didn't have different basics," said Fritz, "they merely had a different emphasis on the relative
values of the same old basics. We can't yet try to comprehend the culture, but when it comes to
unravelling their engineering I think we shall find we have a great deal in common."
"Like an iron-lace potting-shed without wheels or tracks which we presume to be a train simply
because it doesn't appear to be anything else?"
"Just so," said Fritz. "We have to separate the mechanics from the culture. As far as we've gone we've
found very few Tazoon applications of principles of which we were com-pletely ignorant. Of course, they
were streets ahead of us in some fields and curiously lacking in othersтАФthey had no organic chemistry,
for instance. But they don't appear to have dabbled in the occult, so if that's a train it's only a matter of
time before we find out what made it go."
Cautiously they squeezed down between the curious ve-hicle and the tunnel wall, the better to examine
the struc-ture's complexity and strangeness.
 "It's a crazy, twisted birdcage," said Jacko finally. "An ap-pliance for containing crazy, twisted birds."
Fritz looked up from the complex of curiously wrought mechanisms. "We'd better get some more lights
down here, and muster some of the squad. I want this insane dumpling-container taken to pieces and put