"Andre Norton - Operation Time Search" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

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Operation Time Search
By Andre Norton



"ATLANTIS? A fairy tale!" The man by the window
half turned. "You can't be serious-" He began that
protest confidently, but that confidence ebbed when
there was no change in the expression on his companion's face.
"You saw the films of the first three runs. Did those
look like the product of someone's imagination? You
have inspected all the security measures devised to
make sure they were not. A fairy tale, you say." The
quiet gray-haired man leaned a little farther back in
his seat. "I wonder what does lie buried at the roots of
some of our traditional tales. Norse sagas, once dismissed
as fiction, have long since been proven to be chronicles
of historic voyages. Much of our folklore is distorted
clan, tribal, or national record. Dragons-now- Our
planet did have an age in which armored dragons
marched the earth-"
"But not in the memory of mankind!" Hargreaves
came away from the window, his hands resting on his
hips, his chin outthrust as if he welcomed battle, verbal at least.
"Don't you ever wonder why certain tales have
persisted, why they continue to linger over centuries,
told again and again? The man-devouring dragon-"
Hargreaves smiled. "I always heard it that the proper
dragon preferred a diet of tender young maidens-
until some doughty knight changed his mind for him
with sword or lance."
Fordham laughed. "But dragons, in spite of their
dietary habits, are firmly fixed in folklore around the
world. And their like did once roam the earth-"
"At a time, I repeat, which far antedated the arrival
of our most primitive ancestor."
"As far as we know," Fordham corrected. "What I say
is that there is a persistence of certain types of fairy
stories. When we set up this project-and you know the
reason for it---we had to have a starting point. Atlantis is
one of the most lasting of our legends. It has become so
much a part of our heritage that I think it is generally
accepted as fact-" .

"And all founded on a few sentences that were used by
Plato to hang some of his arguments on-"