"Spider Robinson - Triple Feghoot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

Spider Robinson -- Triple Feghoot
From Spider Robinson's Antinomy collection.

Through Time and Space With Ferdinand Feghoot
Even Ferdinand Feghoot could be outpunned on occasion--but he always
rose to the challenge. There was, for instance, the time he conducted a
crew of new S.A.R.H. (Society for the Aesthetic Rearrangement of
History -BJ) recruits--all from late twentieth-century Terra--on a
training study of Carter's World, a newly established agricultural
colony attempting to support itself by the export of edible nuts.
Barely into their second generation, and having yet to show a profit,
the colonists were technologically backward. Nevertheless, they showed
a surprising ingenuity in the use of their few advantages. It was this
resourcefulness that Feghoot was demonstrating to his rookies.
"Look at the perfection with which these streets are graded", exclaimed
one student. "Earth-moving machinery on this scale is strictly high
technology stuff. How can they do it?"
"A new alleyway is being constructed, nearby", said Feghoot. "Let us
walk that way while I explain." As they strolled, he told his students
that countless centuries before, the Carter's World system had been
inhabited by a now-vanished race of giants. This very planet had served
them for a nursery, and among the many artifacts they had left were
thousands of childrens blocks, immense and precision-cut. You simply
jack one up onto logs, bring it where you want it, put collapsible
jacks underneath, snake out the logs, spread soil more or less evenly
beneath, and collapse the jacks.
"I see", said the student. "It's not graded road at all; its a simple
hammered-earth base."
"That's right," Feghoot went on smoothly. "You just hit the road, jack,
and don't come back no mo."
His students registered dismay and anguish.
"Isn't that right, old-timer?," Feghoot demanded of an ancient
Carterian standing by the mouth of the newly completed alley they had
just reached.
"Ahm afraid not, suh", said the senior citizen, and the students
giggled at Feghoots discomfiture. "Oh, we used to do it that way, but
it was far too much trouble. It's the soil heah. You see, the very same
soil which produced our famous cashews is so high in clay content that
a child could roll out a road of it. Then, we simply use a system of
lenses to bake it into hardness. Ahve just completed this alley
mahself, and ahm just a retired professor of Sports History, much too
old and feeble to handle hydraulic jacks.
"So you see," he finished, eyes twinkling, "Mah hammered alley is
really cashews clay."
Howls of agony rose from the students, but Feghoot never hesitated.
"And he", he said, turning to his students, "is clearly the gradist."