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

"Nevill theorizes that to develop a high-level functional civilization the Tazoons must have had some
pretty good engineers who would have been making due allowance for the make-up of the Tazoon
atmosphere. Furthermore, the moist conditions don't penetrate very far down into the sand, so
that the deeper an artifact is buried the greater are its chances of almost infinite survival. Deep
exploration at a really promising site should give us a slice of Tazoon civilization in a very reasonable state
of preservation. We need only one good site to justify the whole Tazoon enter-prise."

The next day Fritz found Philip Nevill in the Archaeological H.Q., apparently none the worse for his
previous day's exposure.
"Hullo, Fritz, my boy! What can we do for you?"
"I hope you can answer a question. Do you know what happened to the Tazoons themselvesтАФI mean,
why did they become extinct so swiftly when they had achieved such an apparently high
technological level?"
Nevill scowled. "You're equating technology with the ability to manipulate environment and thus ensure
a higher survival potential. Well, I'm afraid I can't answer that. In-dications are that they abandoned the
populated areas en-masse and migrated towards the equatorial regions. From distribution figures it looks
as though the entire population set out for the tropics and were decimated on the way. This
suggests they were fleeing from something biologically intolerable which claimed a great number in flight."
"Drastic climatic change?" asked Fritz.
"Climatic, noтАФenvironmental, possibly. We looked for evi-dence of major climatic changes, but
there's nothing sig-nificant that we can trace. The only thing that is recent, geologically speaking, is the
sand."
 "The sand?"
"Mm! Probably the result of some ecological imbalance. The major plains appear to have once
included prolific forests such as are still to be found in places around the temperate belts. For some
reason, drought or fire or blight perhaps, these forests died. The results were typically Ter-ran in their
pattern."
"Soil erosion?"
"Yes, and on a catastrophic scale. Once the sand got to work on the unprotected soil nothing
thereafter got the chance to germinate. We're still picking up viable seeds from the deep diggings, but all
the shallow seeds are either dead or had started growth and been uprooted."
"When did this happenтАФthe erosion?"
"We can't tell with certainty, but it appears to slightly pre-date the extinction of the Tazoons
themselves. Whether these two factors are related is something only further re-search can prove. Does
that answer your question?"
"Yes, but only to pose another," said Fritz. "I don't un-derstand how any culture technically able to
explore the neighbouring satellites could have been wiped out by any-thing as foreseeable and reversible
as soil erosion. And why migrate to the tropics when the soil fertility remained in the temperate belts?"
"I don't know," said Nevill. "It's a difficult problem. The Tazoons were not even humanoid, and
the probability is that neither their physiology nor their logic had anything in common with
our own. It could be misleading if we at-tempted to interpret their actions by simple extrapolation of
what we might have done in similar circumstances."
"A good point," said Fritz. "I don't necessarily agree with it, but I'll bear it in mind. Thanks, Philip,
you've given me something to think about."
Having established that the U.E. squad was reasonably well quartered, Fritz turned his
attention to the transport problem. This brought him back to Jacko who had compiled a transport
survey which he presented with as much en-thusiasm as if it had been his own death
warrant.
"We're in trouble, Fritz. Of the hundred ground-cats originally provided for the enterprise
only twenty are still functioning. Two hundred hours operating life on Tazoo reduces a cat to