"Larry Niven - Eye Of An Octopus" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

"It's dirty nitric acid, not too strong. Next time you'll believe me."
"Harry, they didn't send us here to make astute guesses. They did ,ill the guessing when they built the ship. We came to find out for ,.,lire, right? Right."
"See you in ten minutes." Click.
Luden let his eyes drift back across the desert. It was a moment before he realized what had caught his eye. One of the dunes was irregular The curves were wrong, asymmetrical. The normal crescent ,,,.ad left one sprawling' trailing arm. It stood out like a pear in a line 4 apples.
He had ten minutes' and the dune wasn't far. Luden got up and started walking.
He stood under the dune and looked back. The well was clearly The distance was even shorter than he had thought. He had been deceived by the nearness of the horizon.
The lip of the dune was some fourteen feet high.
What had distorted it? An upthrusting spire of rock' perhaps' not quite high enough to show through the sand. They could find it with the sonar later.
It had to be under the one sprawling' twisted arm of sand.
"Chris! Where the hell are you? Chris?"
Chris jumped. He'd forgotten Henry. "Look due south of the well a -id you'll see me."
"Why don't you stay where you're put' you idiot? I thought you'd been buried by a sandstorm."
11 Sorry' Harry. I got interested in something." Chris Luden was now standing on the twisted arm of sand. He sounded preoccupied. "Try scratching the blocks of the well with your ring."

"That's an odd thought," Henry laughed.
"Do it."
Silence. Luden felt the wind, looked down at the sand' tried to imagine what obstruction had dropped it here. Something not necessarily very large. It would not be beneath the dune; it would be on the windward side ... at the beginning of the arch ... there.
"I scratched it' Chris. There's a scratch all right. So that effectively takes-Ooops. Aaargh! Chris' you're doomed! Only death can save you from my wrath!"
"Why are you irritated with-"
"My diamond! It's ruined!"
"Relax. You could replace it a million times over with just one block from the well."
"Say, that's true. But we'll need the laser to cut it loose. They must have used diamond dust for the cement' too. And the fuel to get it back-"
"Harry, do me a favor. Bring-"
"That last favor cost me a three-thousand-dollar ring."
"Bring the Marsmobile out here. I want to do some digging."
"Be right there."
A minute later Henry stopped the machine alongside Chris's green suit. His smile showed that the scratches on his ring had not permanently scarred his psyche. "Where do we dig?"
"Right where I'm standing."
The Marsmobile was equipped with two down-thrusting compressed-air jets for getting over steep obstructions. A large tank under the vehicle's belly held the heavily compressed air' compressed directly from the thin Martian atmosphere by the motor. Henry turned on the jets and hovered over the spot where Chris had been standing, shifting his weight to keep the machine in place. Sand sprayed out in sheets. Chris ran to get out from under, and Henry grinned and doubled the thrust to send the fine grains showering over him. In half a minute the pressure became too low. Henry had to land. The Marsmobile shuddered and vibrated as its motor struggled to refill the pressure chamber.
"I hate to ask," said Henry, "but what's the point of all this?"
"There's something solid down there. I want to expose it."
"Okay, if you're sure we're in the right place. We've got six months of time to waste."
They wasted a few minutes silently watching the Marsmobile fill its pressure tank.
"Hey," said Henry. "You think we could stake a claim on this diamond mine?"
Chris Luden, sitting on the steep side of the dune, thoughtfully scratched the side of his helmet. "Why not? We haven't seen any live Martians, and it's for sure that nobody else has a claim. Sure, we'll file our claim; the worst they can do is disallow it."
"One thing. I didn't mention it before because I wanted you to see for yourself, but the heck with it. One of those blocks is covered solid with deep scratches."
"They all are."
"Not like these. These are deep' and they're all at forty-five degree angles, unless my imagination is fooling me. They're too fine to be ,tire, but I think it's some kind of writing."
And without waiting for an answer' Henry took off on the air jets. He was good at it. He was like a ballet dancer. You could see Henry shifting weight, but the scooter never seemed to move.
Something was emerging from the sand. Something not a rock.
Something like a piece of modern metal sculpture' with no use and no meaning but with a weird beauty nonetheless. Something that had been a machine and was now-nothing.
Henry Bedrosian balanced above the conical pit his jets had dug. The artifact was almost clear now. Something else showed beside it.
A mummy.
The Marsmobile settled on the last of its air. Chris plunged down the side of the pit as Henry climbed off.
The mummy was humanoid, about four feet long, with long Arms, enormous fragile tapered fingers, and a traditionally oversized skull. No fine detail was visible; it had all been worn away. Chris couldn't even be sure how many fingers the-hominid-had had. One hand still held two; the other only one, plus a flattened opposable thumb. No toes showed on the feet. The thing lay face down.
'1 'he artifact, now uncovered, showed more detail. Yet the detail
had no meaning. Thick bent metal bars, thin twisted wires' two enormous crumpled circles with something rotted clinging to what lead been their rims-and then Henry's imagination clicked, the same visual knack that had gotten him A's in topology, and he said, "It's a bicycle."
"You've lost your mind."
"No, look. The wheels are too big, and-"
It was a fantastically distorted bicycle' with wheels eight feet across, a low, dwarf-sized saddle' and a system of gears to replace the chain. The gear ratio was very low. The saddle was almost against the rear wheel, and a tiller bar, now bent to scrap' had been fixed to the hub of the front wheel. Something had crumpled the bicycle like a crush-proof cigarette pack in a strong man's hand, and then nitric acid rust had done its worst to the metal.