"Reed, Robert - TreasureBuried" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Robert)

yourself at home."

"Come see," said Meiter. "We got it this morning."

It was a month later, softball season finished and volleyball season starting;
and Wallace looked up at Meiter, coming out of his daydream and asking, "What
are you talking about?"

"The hand! It's here!"

The yeti hand, sure. Wallace remembered hearing the minors, antiaircraft
missiles exchanged for a dismembered chunk of fossil tissue. Meiter took him to
the freezer, letting him peer in through the frost. "See? Mangled but whole. And
old. Maybe thirty thousand years old, we think. Some kind of anaerobic
circumstances preserved it. Peat moss. A deep cave. Something. Whatever it was,
there's virtually no decay. We're already running the first maps. Fossils don't
give whole cells, but the hand's never read the textbooks. We've got nice fat
whole ones. No need to jigsaw things together, it looks that good!"

"It looks human," Wallace mentioned. "Doesn't it?"

That disturbed Meiter. "Oh, I don't agree." Then he asked, "How would you know,
anyway? It could be an apish hand just as well --"

"Maybe so."

"And the good part, the best part, is that it's female. The skullcap's male, and
here we've got a lady. They're separated by three hundred centuries, which
assures genetic diversity. Mekal's saying that the big kids upstairs are
thinking about making a splash, playing up our charity in bringing yetis back.
They're even talking about buying up part of Nepal, making a preserve, planting
new forests and using human volunteers to carry the little critters part-term.
Neat, huh? You bet it is!"

Wallace looked at the ugly bunch of bone and brutalized meat, knowing it was
human. Chromosome numbers were the same between humans and half-humans; he
didn't fault Meiter. But what was, was. What any person believed never changed
what was real and true. That was the first lesson that he carried into work
every day -- the towering impotence of his hard-held opinions -- which helped
him think and rethink, always seeing the old as new.

Later Meiter came with the sorry news. "A human hand," he said bravely, "but
it's not all lost. It's got some primitive genetics, which means the academics
will be curious. Human evolution and all that stuff."

Wallace had a thought.

He asked, "Are you going to keep mapping? Because I'm not sure anyone's ever
done a total map of such an old, high-quality fossil."