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

with a white shirt and a sleeveless blue sweater. And Major Lindemann,
the engineer officer, and one of his assistants, arguing over some plans on
a drafting board. She hoped, drawing a pint of hot water to wash her
hands and sponge off her face, that they were doing something about the
pipeline.

She started to carry the notebooks and sketchbooks over to where Selim
von Ohlmhorst was sitting, and then, as she always did, she turned aside
and stopped to watch Sachiko. The Japanese girl was restoring what had
been a book, fifty thousand years ago; her eyes were masked by a
binocular loup, the black headband invisible against her glossy black hair,
and she was picking delicately at the crumbled page with a hair-fine wire
set in a handle of copper tubing. Finally, loosening a particle as tiny as a
snow-flake, she grasped it with tweezers, placed it on the sheet of
transparent plastic on which she was reconstructing the page, and set it
with a mist of fixative from a little spraygun. It was a sheer joy to watch
her; every movement was as graceful and precise as though done to music
after being rehearsed a hundred times.

"Hello, Martha. It isn't cocktail-time yet, is it?" The girl at the table
spoke without raising her head, almost without moving her lips, as though
she were afraid that the slightest breath would disturb the flaky stuff in
front of her.
 "No, it's only fifteen-thirty. I finished my work, over there. I didn't find
any more books, if that's good news for you."

Sachiko took off the loup and leaned back in her chair, her palms
cupped over her eyes.

"No, I like doing this. I call it micro-jigsaw puzzles. This book, here,
really is a mess. Selim found it lying open, with some heavy stuff on top of
it; the pages were simply crushed. She hesitated briefly. "If only it would
mean something, after I did it."

There could be a faintly critical overtone to that. As she replied, Martha
realized that she was being defensive.

"It will, some day. Look how long it took to read Egyptian hieroglyphics,
even after they had the Rosetta Stone."

Sachiko smiled. "Yes, I know. But they did have the Rosetta Stone."

"And we don't There is no Rosetta Stone, not anywhere on Mars. A
whole race, a whole species, died while the first Cro-Magnon caveartist
was daubing pictures of reindeer and bison, and across fifty thousand
years and fifty million miles there was no bridge of understanding.

"We'll find one. There must be something, somewhere, that will give us
the meaning of a few words, and we'll use them to pry meaning out of
more words, and so on. We may not live to learn this language, but we'll