"Lafferty, R A - Among the Hairy Earthmen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lafferty R A)

The only new body he acquired was another one just like
his own. Even this he didn't acquire as did the other Children
theirs. He made it laboriously in his shop, and animated it.
Hobble and the Hobble Creature worked together thereafter,
and you could not tell them apart. One was as dull and
laboring as the other.
The Eretzi had no effect whatsoever on the Children, but
the Children had great effect on the Eretzi. The Children had
the faculty of making whatever little things they needed or
wanted, and the Eretzi began to copy them. In this manner
the Eretzi came onto many tools, processes, devices and arts
that they had never known before. Out of ten thousand, there
were these:
The Astrolabe, Equatorium, Quadrant, Lathes and Travers-
ing Tools, Ball-Bearings, Gudgeons, Gig-Mills, Barometers,
Range-Finders, Cantilever Construction, Machine-Saws, Screw-
Jacks, Hammer-Forges and Drop-Forges, Printing, Steel that
was more than puddled Iron, Logarithms, Hydraulic Rams,
Screw-Dies, Spanner-Wrenches, Flux-Solder, Telescopes, Mi-
croscopes, Mortising Machines, Wire-Drawing, Stanches
(Navigation-Locks), Gear Trains, Paper Making, Magnetic
Compass and Wind-Rhumb, Portulan Charts and Projection
Maps, Pinnule-Sights, Spirit-Levels, Fine Micrometers, Por-
celain, Fire-Lock Guns, Music Notation and Music Printing,
Complex Pulleys and Snatch-Blocks, the Seed-Drill, Playing
Cards (the Children's masquerade faces may still be seen on
them), Tobacco, the Violin, Whisky, the Mechanical Clock.
They were forbidden, of course, to display any second-
aspect powers or machines, as these would disrupt things. But
they disrupted accidently in building, in tooling, in armies and
navies, in harbors and canals, in towns and bridges, in ways
of thinking and recording. They started a thing that couldn't
be reversed. It was only the One Afternoon they were here,
only two or three Eretzi Centuries, but they set a trend. They
overwhelmed by the very number of their new devices, and it
could never be simple on Eretz again.
There were many thousands of Eretz days and nights in
that Long Afternoon. The Children had begun to tire of it,
and the hour was growing late. For the last time they
wandered off, this time all Seven of them together.
In the bodies of Kings and their Ladies, they strode down a
High Road in the Levant. They were wondering what last
thing they could contrive, when they found their way blocked
by a Pilgrim with a staff.
"Let's tumble the hairy Eretzi," shouted Ralpha. "Let him
not stand in the way of Kings!" For Ralpha was King of
Bulgaria that day.
But they did not tumble the Pilgrim. That man knew how to
handle his staff, and he laid the bunch of them low. It was
nothing to him that they were the high people of the World