"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - The Tenth Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

that Cross had more going for him than just luck.
Cross worked at Georgetown University and had, in the last fifteen years,
developed its archaeology department from one whose reputation was in decline
into one of the best in the world. Sometimes Bradshaw wished he were young
again, or young enough to justify going to Georgetown for some post-doc work.
He
would have loved to spend a semester listening to Dr. Leo Cross.
Bradshaw stretched, wishing the tall pines let some of the sun's warmth
through.
Later in the day he knew he would be thankful for those trees, but now he
wanted
just a little of the morning sun to take the chill off.
But maybe the chill he was feeling had nothing to do with the lack of
sunlight.
Maybe it had more to do with the mes-sage he had received from Cross.
Already, Bradshaw could recite it from memory:
Dr. Bradshaw:
Greetings. I see you are working a dig on the Oregon Coast this summer. Would
you please inform me if you find a thin layer of black residue covering your
site at any level?
Thank you for your consideration.
Leo Cross
The message had Georgetown's stamp, and Bradshaw used his EncryptionChek
program
to confirm that the message also used Cross's personal code. This had been
sent
by the man himself, not some automatic program sending a stan-dard e-mail
message every time someone updated a dig site on the archaeological bulletin
board.
Cross wanted information, and before Bradshaw replied, he wanted to make sure
he
had some to give.
He glanced once more at the tents. No one stirred. Thank heavens. He really
didn't want to discuss this message with anyone, not even his indispensable
graduate assistant.
Bradshaw walked quietly through the tents and down the worn trail toward the
site. The dig area was staked and roped off, carefully detailed so that any
discovery would be exactly placed in a numbered grid. Even the tiniest scrap
of
artifact could be traced back to an exact location, both in direction and
depth,
long after it was removed.
The site was under a rock bluff that had sheltered bands of Native Americans
from the cold winds in the winter, yet al-lowed them to remain close to the
ocean and the nearby river. This dig was focused on the Tillamook, who were
native to the area. Bradshaw had chosen the area because he knew, from some
of
the aerial photographs and the migration pat-terns of the tribe, that his
students would find something here. But he didn't expect it to be anything
important.