"Henry Kuttner - The Time Axis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

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"You saw it was a city?" De Kalb leaned forward quickly. "That's good. That's very good. It took
me three times to find that out."

"It didn't see it. IтАФI just knew."

I closed my eyes. Before me the empty landscape floated, dark, almost night, under the dim red
sky.

I knew the Face was enormous. The side of some mountain had been carved away to reveal it and, I
supposed, carved with tools by human hands. But you had the feeling that the Face must always have
been there, that one day it had wakened in the rock and given one great grirnace of impatience and
the mountainside had sloughed away from its features, leaving Ea to look out into eternity over
the red night of the world.

"There are people inside," I said. "I could feel them, being there. Feel their thoughts, I
suppose. People in an enormous city, a metropolis behind the Face."

"Not a metropolis," De Kalb said. "A nekropolis. There's a difference. ButтАФyes, it's a city."

"Streets," I said dreamily, sniffing the empty glass. "Levels of homes and public buildings.
People moving, living, thinking. What do you mean, nekropolis?"

"Tell you later. Go on."

"I wish I could. It's fading." I closed my eyes again, thinking of the Face. I had to force my
mind to turn around in its tracks and look, for it didn't want to confront that infinite
complexity again. The Face was painful to see. It was too intricate, too involved with emotions
complex beyond our grasp. It was painful for the mind to think of it, straining to understand the
inscrutable things that experience had etched upon those mountain-high features.

"Is it a portrait?" I asked suddenly. "Or a composite? What is the Face?"

"A city," De Kalb said. "A nation. The ultimate in human destinyтАФand a call for help. And much
more that we'll never understand."

"ButтАФthe future!" I said. "That boxтАФdidn't you say it was found in Crete? Dug up in old ruins? How
could something from the past be a record of our own future? It doesn't make sense."

"Very little makes sense, sir, when you come to examine

the nature of time." De Kalb's voice was ponderous again.-He heaved himself up a little and folded
his thick fingers, looking at me above them with veiled gray eyes.

"Have you read Spengler, Mr. Cortland?" he asked.

I grimaced and nodded.