"Norton, Andre - Galactic Derelict" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

hand vigorously against his dusty breeches--"I don't care if a man is a blue Martian with two heads
and four mouths--if he can keep those mouths shut and do his job! It's the job which counts here, and,
accord-ing to Morgan, you have something uselful to contribute. Make up your mind and let me know.
If you don't want to play--well ship you out tonight, tell your brother that you're on government work,
and keep you quiet for a while. Sorry, but that's the way it will have to be."
Travis smiled at that promise. He thought he could get out of here safely on his own if he really wanted
to. But now he prodded the Major a little.
"Expedition back to catch a Folsom man--" But Kelgarries might not have heard, for he had already
turned away. Travis followed, to come upon Ashe.
The latter was engaged in assembling a tripod of slender rods with the care of one handling brittle and
precious ob-jects. He glanced up as Travis' shadow fell across his work.
"Decided to join us for a look-see into the past?"
"Do you really mean you can do that?"
"We've done more than look." Ashe adjusted a screw deli-cately. "We've been there."
Travis stared. He could accept the fact of a new and greatly improved Vis-Tex to provide a peephole
into history and prehistory. But time travel was something else.
"It's perfectly true," Ashe finished with the screw. His attention passed from the tripod to Travis. And
there was that in his manner which carried conviction.
"And we're going back again."

24

25


GALACTIC DERELICT

"After a Folsona man?" demanded the Apache incredu-lously.
"After a spaceship."




this was no dream, not even a very realistic one. There was Ashe, his fingers busy, his brown face
outlined against the red and yellow walls of the cliff and the crumbling ruins they enclosed. This was
here and now--yet what Ashe was saying, soberly, and in detail, was the wildest fantasy.
". . . so we discovered the Reds had time travel and were prospecting back into the past. What they
dredged up there couldn't be explained by any logic based on the history we knew and the prehistory
we had pieced out. What we didn't know then was that they had found the remains--badly
smashed--of a spaceship. It was encased in the ice of Siberia, along with preserved mammoth bodies
and a few other perti-nent clues to suggest the proper era for them to explore. They muddied the trail
as well as they could by establishing way stations in other periods of time. Then we chanced on one of
those middle points. And the Reds themselves, by capturing our time agents, showed us the ship they

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were plundering some thousands of years earlier."
The story made sense--in a crazy kind of way. Travis mechanically handed Ashe the small tool he
was groping for in the tangled grass.