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

papers, butтАУobviously tooтАУit was designed to be opened and closed, and might contain a scrap or two of
information for the Memorabilia. Nevertheless, remembering the fate of Brother Boedullus and others, he
sprinkled it with holy water before attempting to pry it open, and he handled the ancient relic as
reverently as was possible while battering at its rusty hinges with a stone.
At last he broke the hinges, and the lid fell free. Small metal tidbits bounced from trays, spilled
among the rocks, some of them falling irretrievably into crevices. But, in the bottom of the box in the
space beneath the trays, he beheldтАУpapers! After a quick prayer of thanksgiving, he regathered as many
of the scattered tidbits as he could, and, after loosely replacing the lid, began climbing the hill of debris
toward the stair well and the thin patch of sky, with the box hugged tightly under one arm.
The sun was blinding after the darkness of the shelter. He scarcely bothered to notice that it was
sinking dangerously low in the west, but began at once to search for a flat slab on which the contents of
the box could be spread for examination without risk of losing anything in the sand.
Minutes later, seated on a cracked foundation slab, he began removing the tidbits of metal and glass
that filled the trays. Most of them were small tubular things with a wire whisker at each end of each tube.
These, he had seen before. The abbeyтАЩs small museum had a few of them, of various size, shape and
color. Once he had seen a shaman of the hill-pagan people wearing a string of them as a ceremonial
necklace. The hill people thought of them as тАЬparts of the body of the godтАЭтАУof the fabled Machina
analytica, hailed as the wisest of their gods. By swallowing one of them, a shaman could acquire
тАЬInfallibility,тАЭ they said. He certainly acquired Indisputability that way, among his own peopleтАУunless he
swallowed one of the poison kind. The similar tidbits in the museum were connected together tooтАУnot in
the form of a necklace, but as a complex and rather disorderly maze in the bottom of a small metal box,
exhibited as: тАЬRadio Chassis: Application Uncertain.тАЭ
Inside the lid of the carrying case, a note had been glued; the glue had powdered, the ink had
faded, and the paper was so darkened by rusty stains that even good handwriting would have been hard
enough to read, but this was written in a hasty scrawl. He studied it intermittently while emptying the
trays. It seemed to be English, of a sort, but half an hour passed before he deciphered most of the
message:

CarlтАУ
Must grab plane for [undecipherable] in twenty minutes.
For GodтАЩs sake, keep Em there till we know if weтАЩre at war.
Please! try to get her on the alternate list for the shelter. CanтАЩt get her a seat my
plane. DonтАЩt tell her why I sent her over with this box of junk, but try to keep her
there till we know [undecipherable] at worst, one of the alternates not show.
I.E.L.
P.S. I put the seal on the lock and put TOP SECRET on the lid just to keep Em
from looking inside. First tool box I happened to grab. Shove it in my locker or
something.

The note seemed hasty gibberish to Brother Francis, who was at the moment too excited to
concentrate on any single item more than the rest. After a final sneer at the notewriterтАЩs hasty scrawl, he
began the task of removing the trayracks to get at the papers in the bottom of the box. The trays were
mounted on a swinging linkage which was obviously meant to swing the trays out of the box in stair-step
array, but the pins were rusted fast, and Francis found it necessary to pry them out with a short steel tool
from one of the tray compartments.
When Brother Francis had removed the last tray, he touched the papers reverently: only a handful
of folded documents here, and yet a treasure; for they had escaped the angry flames of the Simplification,
wherein even sacred writings had curled, blackened, and withered into smoke while ignorant mobs
howled and hailed it a triumph. He handled the papers as one might handle holy things, shielding them
from the wind with his habit, for all were brittle and cracked from age. There was a sheaf of rough