"Walter M. Miller - The Lost Masters - Volume 01" - читать интересную книгу автора (Miller Walter M)

rubble. At the far and of the room was a metal door, hinged to swing toward him, and tightly sealed by
the avalanche. Still legible in flaking paint on the door were the stenciled letters:

INNER HATCH
SEALED ENVIRONMENT
Evidently the room into which he was descending was only an antechamber. But whatever lay
beyond INNER HATCH was sealed there by several tons of rock against the door. Its environment
was SEALED indeed, unless it had another exit.
Having made his way to the foot of the slope, and after assuring himself that the antechamber
contained no obvious menace, the novice went cautiously to inspect the metal door at closer range by
torchlight. Printed under the stenciled letters of INNER HATCH was a smaller rust-streaked sign:

WARNING: This hatch must not be sealed before all personnel have been admitted, or before all
steps of safety procedure prescribed by Technical Manual CD-Bu-83A have been accomplished.
When Hatch is sealed, air within shelter will he pressurized 2.0 p.s.i. above ambient barometric level
to minimize inward diffusion. Once sealed, the hatch will be automatically unlocked by the
servomonitor system when, but not before, any of the following conditions prevail: (1) when the
exterior radiation count falls below the danger level, (2) when the air and water repurification system
fails, ( 3 ) when the food supply is exhausted, (4) when the internal power supply fails. See
CD-Bu-83A for further instructions.

Brother Francis found himself slightly confused by the Warning, but he intended to heed it by not
touching the door at all The miraculous contraptions of the ancients were not to be carelessly tampered
with, as many a dead excavator-of-the-past had testified with his dying gasp.
Brother Francis noticed that the debris which had been lying in the antechamber for centuries was
darker in color and rougher in texture than the debris which had weathered under the desert sun and in
the sandy wind before todayтАЩs cave-in. One could tell by a glance at the stones that Inner Hatch had
been blocked not by todayтАЩs rockslide but by one more ancient than the abbey itself. If Fallout ShelterтАЩs
Sealed Environment contained a Fallout, the demon had obviously not opened Inner Hatch since the time
of the Flame Deluge, before the Simplification. And, if it had been sealed beyond the metal door for so
many centuries, there was small reason, Francis told himself, to fear that it might come bursting through
the hatch before Holy Saturday.
His torch burned low. Having found a splintered chair leg, he set it ablaze with his waning flame,
then began gathering bits of broken furniture with which to build a dependable fire, meanwhile pondering
the meaning of that ancient sign: FALLOUT SURVIVAL SHELTER.
As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet.
The way nouns could sometimes modify other nouns in that tongue had always been one of his weak
points. In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like servus puer meant about the
same thing as puer servus, and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity
ended. He had finally learned that house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or
possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without
inflection. But what of a triple appositive like fallout survival shelter? Brother Francis shook his head.
The Warning on Inner Hatch mentioned food, water, and air; and yet surely these were not necessities
for the fiends of Hell. At times, the novice found pre-Deluge English more perplexing than either
Intermediate Angelology or Saint LeslieтАЩs theological calculus.
He built his fire on the slope of the rubble pile, where it could brighten the darker crannies of the
antechamber. Then he went to explore whatever might remain uncovered by debris. The ruins above
ground had been reduced to archaeological ambiguity by generations of scavengers, but this underground
ruin had been touched by no hand but the hand of impersonal disaster. The place seemed haunted by the
presences of another age. A skull, lying among the rocks in a darker corner, still retained a gold tooth in