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

together again when I've had a chance to examine the pieces."
"Cannibalization I can understand," said Jacko, "but why the resurrection?"
"Because," said Fritz Van Noon, "if it's the last thing I do I'm going to put the subways of Tazoo back
in operation. We obviously can't build a transportation system on the sur-face, but here we have a
ready-made nucleus which already goes halfway to meet the problem."
"I demand to be invalided out of the Service on the grounds of insanity," said Jacko, "your
insanity. I thought we'd had enough of railways up on Cannis."
"That was different," said Fritz. "There we were merely up against physical obstacles such as errant
volcanoes. This is specifically an exercise in matching technologies. All we have to do is to determine
which part of the railway sys-tem moves and which part is intended to stay still. That shouldn't be too
difficult, now should it?"
"Not when reduced to such basic terms," Jacko agreed dourly. "But I know you. You never realize
when you're beaten,"
"I've told you before," said Fritz sternly, "there's no such thing as a physical impossibility. A limitation is
a state of mind, not a question of fact. Here we are faced with the work of a completely alien race who
nevertheless had a technological and scientific level roughly comparable to our own. Providing we hold
that one fact paramount we ought to be able to unscramble any device this planet has to offerтАФ and
make it function for our own service if we wish."
"Providing one thing holds good," said Jacko. "We have first to be able to recognize a thing for what it
is. It's no good dismantling a Tazoon milk-strainer if we're under the impression that it ought to be a
transistor superhetтАФor vice-versa, come to think of it."


five

Fritz reported back to Philip Nevill. The latter listened to the details of the find with the air of suppressed
jubilation which was rapidly becoming his permanent expression. Then he ran his fingers through his
untidy hair and searched for his pipe with a distracted grin.
"Fritz, my boy, this is perfectly marvellous. What a day we've had! We've opened up so many
promising new lines of research that the whole damned thing is getting out of hand. We could do with five
hundred trained archaeologists to digest the meat in this lot, and even then we couldn't do more than
scratch the surface. The impact of building tech-niques alone on Terra is going to be fantastic, and when
the whole complex is assembled into Terran know-how its impact on the human race will be so great that
our own culture will never be quite the same again.
"If you really want to make your mark on the enterprise, then take over this subway completely,
because I shan't be able to get round to it for five years at least. Do a complete technical run-down on it,
as detailed as you like. Do any-thing you like with it which won't impair its archaeological value. All I ask
is a comprehensive progress report in tune for each data shipment to Terra."
"Fair enough!" said Fritz. "I want to open up the build-ings directly above the station to look for
ancillaries."
Nevill glanced at his sketch map and drew a line through two diagrammatical blocks. "It's all yours," he
said, "but don't drive yourself daft trying to comprehend too much too fast. You'll find you have to
absorb Tazoon environments rather than understand them. Sooner or later the pieces fit themselves into
place. And Heaven knows there's enough pieces available for fittingтАФa jigsaw embracing the life and
work of a complete culture."



"We've just got ourselves a subway," said Fritz, as he re-joined Jacko at the workings. "We're going
to open up the building here and see what's inside."