"Kim Stanley Robinson - Vinland" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

"There's beer on the hill."
"Something stronger. I have a bottle of cognac I
haven't opened yet. . ."
"Let's get it and take it up there with us."


Experimental Methods. The graduate students and
volunteer laborers were gathered around the fire, and the
smell of roasting hot dogs filled the air. It was nearly
eleven, the sun a half hour gone, and the last light of the
summer dusk slowly leaked from the sky. The fire
burned like a beacon. Beer had been flowing freely, and
the party was beginning to get a little more boisterous.
The minister and the professor stood near the fire,
drinking cognac out of plastic cups.
"How did you come to suspect the story of
Vinland?" the minister asked as they watched the
students cook hot dogs.
A couple of the volunteer laborers, who had paid
good money to spend their summer digging trenches in a
bog, heard the question and moved closer.
The professor shrugged. "I can't quite remember."
He tried to laugh. "Here I am an archaelogist, and I can't
remember my own past."
The minister nodded as if that made sense. "I
suppose it was a long time ago?"
"Yes." He concentrated. "Now what was it.
Someone was following up the story of the Vinland map,
to try and figure out who had done it. The map showed
up in a bookstore in New Haven in the 1950s--as you
may know?"
"No," the minister said. "I hardly know a thing about
Vinland, I assure you. Just the basics that anyone in my
position would have to know."
"Well, there was a map found in the 1950s called the
Vinland map, and it was shown to be a hoax soon after
its discovery. But when this investigator traced the map's
history, she found that the book it had been in was
accounted for all the way back to the 1820s, map and all.
It meant the hoaxer had lived longer ago than I had
expected." He refilled his cup of cognac, then the
minister's. "There were a lot of Viking hoaxes in the
nineteenth century, but this one was so early. It surprised
me. It's generally thought that the whole phenomenon
was stimulated by a book that a Danish scholar published
in 1837, containing translations of the Vinland sagas and
related material. The book was very popular among the
Scandinavian settlers in America, and after that, you
know. . . a kind of twisted patriotism, or the response of
an ethnic group that had been made fun of too often. . .