"Keith Laumer & Eric Flint - Future Imperfect" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

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Printed in the United States of America
 A DISCOVERY OF MAMMOTH PROPORTIONS
The dying man stared at me with glass eyes in a skull face. "Listen," he croaked, "you
think I'm raving, but I know what I'm saying. Get clear of this town now. Got no time to
explain. Just move out."
I grabbed his shoulder, not gently. "Spit it out! Who are you? Why was he after you?
Why did he shoot at me? Who was he?"
"All right," he was gasping. His face was that of a mummy who had died in agony.
"I'll tell you. But you won't believe me."
"When the first quakes hit," he said, "they flew me in to Washington. Hell of a sight.
The Washington Monument sticking up out of twenty feet of water, the Capitol dome
down, a baby volcano building up where Mount Vernon used to beтАФ"
"I know all that. Who was the man I shot?"
He ignored me. "Admiral Hayle came up with a plan. The South Polar ice cap was
causing the crust of the Earth to slip. Send an expedition to the Pole, loaded with nuclear
generator plant gear. We made our landfall. Lost men scaling the ice cliffs. Never even
found the bodies.
"We reached our site, set up a base camp, and started in. We were sinking our shafts
at the rate of about two hundred feet a day. On the thirty-first day, I had a hurry-up call
from Station Four. They'd spotted dark shapes down in the ice. I went down to see for
myself.
"They had widened out a chamber down there, thirty feet wide, pumps whining, the
stink of decay. They'd smoothed off a flat place, like a picture window. They put the big
lights on it. Then I saw what the excitement was all about. Rocks, tufts of grass, twigs.
Looked as if they were floating in water. And way back you could see other thingsтАФ
bigger things."
"What kind of things?" I asked him, but he did not see me any longer.
"About forty feet away, a creature slumped sideways as though he'd leaned against a
wall for a rest. Looked like the old elephant they had in the zoo at home, when I was a
kid, except he had a coat of two-foot-long hair, reddish-black, plastered to his body."
"I know what a mammoth looks like," I said. "So you found one frozen; it's happened
before. What makes it important?"
He moved his eyes to look at me. "Not like this one, they haven't. He was buckled
into a harness like a circus pony. . . ."
тАФfrom Catastrophe Planet
 Baen Books by Keith Laumer,
edited by Eric Flint:
Retief!
Odyssey
Keith Laumer: The Lighter Side
A Plague of Demons & Other Stories
Future Imperfect
The Bolo Series:
The Compleat Bolo by Keith Laumer
Created by Keith Laumer:
The Honor of the Regiment
The Unconquerable
The Triumphant by David Weber & Linda Evans
Last Stand