"Jerry Oltion - Artifacts" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

Sharrol asked, "What happens when you access one?"
Again that brief eye contact, then the other scientist said, "When I tried it I spent a week staring at my
navel before I came out of it. Anton disappeared into the warren and hasn't been seen since."
"You lost him?"
Julie shrugged. "There are fifteen of us. We searched as far as we could, but the rest of the station isn't
heated or pressurized. He couldn't have survived long in there even in a spacesuit."
"Then you should have found him." Brian couldn't believe her attitude. He'd thought Pierre was the
only one who thought that way.
A little testily, she said, "You're welcome to go have a look yourself if you want."
He planned to. The ship wasn't scheduled to return for a week; he wanted another look at the Artifact.
He hadn't had a chance to poke around since he'd first come here, and he felt responsible for everyone's
presence. If he'd said no, this was just another dead Outie station, it might have remained undisturbed for
another geological epoch or two. But it was a new design, probably built by a new race, and it was full of
nifty new stuff, so he'd called in the vultures.
Now he wondered if that was such a good idea. Nothing overt made him question it, but he'd learned
to trust the back of his neck, and it was definitely tingling. Something didn't feel right about Julie's story.
For one thing, neither she nor her companion looked like people who had spent a week in a coma after
playing with alien tech. They weren't afraid enough.
***


After dinner he set out to find out why. Julie tried to keep him at the party, but he brushed her off and
wandered the station. He explored the corridors that had already been pressurized first; no sense making
himself uncomfortable until he'd seen what was close at hand.
The spaghetti tubes wound around one another apparently at random. They were filled with living
quarters, storage rooms, open-air piles of machinery, and bare patches of dirty floor that might have once
held living things. Paths wound through it all, and portals occasionally connected one tube to another
when they touched. It would have been easy to get lost. The right-hand rule for finding one's way out of a
maze would be useless there.
And so would any kind of search pattern Brian could imagine. Unless he stationed a watcher at every
portal and examined the tube from end to end, checking every building along the way--a job for an
army--a person could never catch someone who wanted to stay hidden. For that matter, Brian wasn't
sure there was only one tube. Two of them coiled up in a heap would have looked pretty much like one.
The place was silent. Everyone else was off celebrating in the commons. Brian drifted along like a fish
over a reef, occasionally pushing off with a finger or a toe when he approached a wall, or pulling himself
inside a building when he got the whim to investigate something closer. He saw lots of ordinary alien stuff:
benches and beds and tables were pretty much universal. He saw lots of incomprehensible stuff as well,
but most of it looked pretty innocuous. Artwork, sculpture, maybe their equivalent of coffee makers. It
was obvious that this was once living space for a lot of aliens; not just an outpost. He wondered if they'd
been fleeing one of the wars elsewhere in the galaxy. Or maybe they'd been troops.
He found a few weapons. That wasn't disconcerting; every race they'd studied had weapons. These
looked like simple microwave lasers--masers--though it took a moment to find the business end. These
aliens had unusual hands. Brian resisted the urge to test fire one, remembering Phobos. But then he saw
what was obviously a power gauge along the side of the emitter and he realized its energy pack was long
dead. So the Artifact was at least old enough for batteries to drain. That would be about a thousand
years if these aliens used the same battery technology found in other outposts. Julie must have had to
recharge the memory gadget to make it work.
The tubes wound around and around each other, but after a while Brian realized there was a definite
direction to them. It was a subconscious feeling, and he wondered where it came from, but he knew he
was heading somewhere so he drifted onward, following the subliminal cues, and he eventually came to