"Damon Knight - Anachron" - читать интересную книгу автора (Knight Damon)

five hundred years in the future. There was a thick film of dust on every
exposed surface; rubbish and the carcass of some small animal had been swept
carelessly into a corner.
The sphere clouded.
When it cleared, there was an intricate trail of footprints in the
dust, and two of the showcases were empty.
The footprints were splayed, trifurcate, and thirty inches long.
After a moment's deliberation Peter walked around the workbench and
leaned down to look through the sphere from the opposite direction. Framed in
the nearest of the four tall windows was a scene of picture-postcard banality:
the sun-silvered bay and the foreshortened arc of the city, with Vesuvio
faintly fuming in the background. But there was something wrong about the
colors, even grayed as they were by distance.
Peter went and got his binoculars.
The trouble was, of course, that Naples was green. Where the city ought
to have been, a rankness had sprouted. Between the clumps of foliage he could
catch occasional glimpses of gray-white that might equally well have been
boulders or the wreckage of buildings. There was no movement. There was no
shipping in the harbor.
But something rather odd was crawling up the side of the volcano. A
rust-orange pipe, it appeared to be, supported on hairline struts like the
legs of a centipede, and ending without rhyme or reason just short of the top.
While Peter watched, it turned slowly blue.

One day further forward: now all the display cases had been looted; the
museum, it would seem, was empty.
Given, that in five centuries the world, or at any rate the department
of Campania, has been overrun by a race of Somethings, the human population
being killed or driven out in the process; and that the conquerors take an
interest in the museum's contents, which they have accordingly removed.
Removed where, and why?
This question, Peter conceded, might have a thousand answers, nine
hundred and ninety-nine of which would mean that he had lost his gamble. The
remaining answer was: to the vaults, for safety.
With his own hands Peter built a hood to cover the apparatus on the
workbench and the sphere above it. It was unaccustomed labor; it took him the
better part of two days. Then he called in workmen to break a hole in the
stone flooring next to the interior wall, rig a hoist, and cut the power cable
that supplied the time-sphere loose from its supports all the way back to the
fuse box, leaving him a single flexible length of cable more than a hundred
feet long. They unbolted the workbench from the floor, attached casters to its
legs, lowered it into the empty vault below, and went away.
Peter unfastened and removed the hood. He looked into the sphere.
Treasure.
Crates, large and small, racked in rows into dimness.
With pudgy fingers that did not tremble, he advanced the rheostat. A
cloudy flicker, another, a leaping blur of them as he moved the vernier faster
-- and then there were no more, to the limit of the time-sphere's range.
Two hundred years, Peter guessed -- A.D. 2700 to 2900 or thereabout --
in which no one would enter the vault. Two hundred years of "unliquidated