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

"But how did the ship get there?" he asked. "Was there an early civilization on earth which had space
travel?"
"That was what we thought--until we found the ship. No, it was from the outside--a cargo freighter
lost from some

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galactic run. Either this world was an astrogation menace of the same type as a reef at sea, or there was
some other reason to cause forced landings here. We brought film from the Red time station
pinpointing about a dozen such wrecks. And some of those were on this side of the Atlantic."
"You're planning to dig for one of those here?"
Ashe laughed. "What d'you think we'd find after about fifteen thousand years and a lot of land
upheaval, even local volcanic activity? We want our ship in as good condition as possible."
"To study?"
"With caution. If you'd check with Ross Murdock he'd give you a good reason for the caution. He was
one of our agents who was actually aboard the ship the Reds were plun-dering. When they cornered
him in the control cabin, he ac-cidentally activated the com system and called in the real owners. They
weren't too pleased with the Reds--came down and destroyed their time base on that level and then
followed them through the other way stations, destroying each. Remember that hush-hush bang in the
Baltic early this year? That was the 'space patrol,' or whatever they call them-selves, putting finis to the
Red project. So far as we know they didn't discover that we were and are interested in the same thing.
So if we find our ship here, we walk softly along its corridors."
"You want the cargo?"
"In part. But mostly we want the knowledge--what its designers had--the key to space."
The thrill of that touched Travis. Mankind had reached for the stars for almost two generations. Men
had had small successes, many searing failures. Now--what was a satisfac-tory flight to the barren
moon compared to star flight and what lay far out?
Ashe, reading his expression, smiled. "You feel it too, don't
you?"

27

GALACTIC DERELICT

The Apache nodded absently, gazing down the canyon, trying to believe that somewhere about here,
trapped in the solid wall of time, there lay a wrecked star ship waiting for them. But he could not even
visualize this country as it must have been in pluvial times. When rain fell most of the year, it must
have made a morass of the lands outside the encroach-ing arms of the shrinking glaciers lying not too
far northward. "But why the Folsom points?" Out of the welter of facts and half facts he picked that as
a starting point.
"We've sent back agents disguised as pre-Celts, as Tartars-- or their remoter ancestors--as Bronze

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Age Beaker Traders, and in half a hundred other character parts. Now there's a chance we may have to
produce a few Folsom spearmen. One of the first and most important rules of this game, Fox, is that
one does not interfere with time by introducing any modernisms. There must be no hint of our agents'