"H. Beam Piper - Federation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

buildings when roofs had caved in and walls had toppled outward. Here
where she stood, the ancient streets were a hundred to a hundred and fifty
feet below the surface; the breach they had made in the wall of the
building behind her had opened into the sixth story. She could look down
on the cluster of prefabricated huts and sheds, on the brush-grown flat
that had been the waterfront when this place had been a seaport on the
ocean that was now Syrtis Depression; already, the bright metal was thinly
coated with red dust. She thought, again, of what clearing this city would
mean, in terms of time and labor, of people and supplies and equipment
brought across fifty million miles of space. They'd have to use machinery;
there was no other way it could be done. Bulldozers and power shovels and
draglines; they were fast, but they were rough and indiscriminate. She
remembered the digs around Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, in the Indus
Valley, and the careful, patient native laborersтАФthe painstaking foremen,
the pickmen and spademen, the long flies of basketmen carrying away the
earth. Slow and primitive as the civilization whose ruins they were
uncovering, yes, but she could count on the fingers of one hand the times
one of her pick-men had damaged a valuable object in the ground. If it
hadn't been for the underpaid and uncomplaining native laborer,
archaeology would still be back where Wincklemann had found it. But on
Mars there was no native labor, the last Martian had died five hundred
centuries ago.

Something started banging like a machine gun four or five hundred
yards to her left. A solenoid jackhammer, Tony Lattimer must have
decided which building he wanted to break into next She became
conscious, then, of the awkward weight of her equipment, and began
redistributing it, shifting the straps of her oxy-tank pack, slinging the
camera from one shoulder and the board and drafting tools from the
other, gathering the notebooks and sketchbooks under her left arm. She
started walking down the road, over hillocks of buried rubble, around
snags of wall jutting up out of the loess, past buildings still standing, some
of them already breached and explored, and across the brushgrown flat to
the huts.

There were ten people in the main office room of Hut One when she
entered. As soon as she had disposed of her oxygen equipment, she lit a
cigarette, her first since noon, then looked from one to another of them.
Old Selim von Ohlmhorst, the Turco-German, one of her two fellow
archaeologists, sitting at the end of the long table against the farther wall,
smoking his big curved pipe and going through a looseleaf notebook. The
girl ordnance officer, Sachiko Koremitsu, between two droplights at the
other end of the table, her head bent over her work. Colonel Hubert
Penrose, the Space Force CO, and Captain Field, the intelligence officer,
listening to the report of one of the airdyne pilots, returned from his
afternoon survey flight. A couple of girl lieutenants from Signals, going
over the script of the evening telecast, to be transmitted to the Cyrano, on
orbit five thousand miles off planet and relayed from thence to Terra via
Lunar. Sid Chamberlain, the Trans-Space News Service man, was with
them. Like Selim and herself, he was a civilian; he was advertising the fact