"Theodore Sturgeon - The Sky Was Full of Ships" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

He's lookin' real happy about this torch of mine, an' he nods.
"Sure. Only you'll have to take a couple of weeks off. Go out West. Arizona. Cut a way into a cave
there."
"Cave, huh?" I said. "Is it legal?" I didn't want no trouble.
"Sure it's legal," he tells me.
"How much?"
He says he hates to argue.
"If you'll get me into that placeтАФand you can satisfy yourself as to whether it's legalтАФI'll give you five
thousand dollars," he says.

NOW, five thousand berries cuts a lot of ice for me. Especially for only two weeks' work. And
besides. I liked the old guy's looks. He was queer as a nine-dollar bill, mind you, and had a funny way of
carryin' on, but I could see he was worth the kind of money he talked.
He looked like he really needed help, too. Aw, maybe I'm just a boy scout at heart. As I say, I liked
him, money or no money, and chances are I'd have helped him out for free.
He came to see me a couple more times and we sweated out the details. It wound up with him and
me on the train and my torch and the other gear in the baggage car up front. Maybe some of you
remember the day we arrived here. He seemed to know a lot of people here. Mm? I thought so. He told
me how many years he bad been coming out to Switchpath
He told me lots of things. He was one of the talkin'est old geezers I ever did see. I understood about
one ninth of what he said. He was lonely. I guess. I was the first matt he ever called in to help him with his
work, and he spilled the overflow of years of work-in' by himself.
About this Switchpath proposition, he told me that when he was just a punk out of college, he was a
archyologist roamin' around the desert lookin' for old Indian stuff, vases and arrowheads and such stuff.
And he run across this here room in the rock, at the bottom of a deep cleft.
He got all excited when he told me about this part of it. Went on a mile a minute about plasticine ages
and messy zorics and pally o' lithographs or something. I called him down to earth and he explained to
me that this room was down in rock that was very oldтАФa couple of hundred thousand years, or maybe a
half million.
He said that rock had been there either before mankind had a start here on earth, or maybe about the
same time as the missing link. Me, I don't care about dead people or dead people's great grandfather's,
but Sykes was all enthusiastic.
Anyhow, it seems that this cave had been opened by some sort of an earthquake or something, and
the stuff in it must have been there all that time. What got him excited was that the stuff was machinery of
some kind and must have been put there 'way before there was any human beings on earth at all!
That seemed silly to me. I wanted to know what kind of machinery.
"Well," he says, "I thought at first that it was some sort of a radio transmitter. Get this," he says.
"Here is a machine with an antenna on top of it, just like a micro-wave job. And beside it is another
machine.
"This second machine is shaped like a dumbbell standing on one end. The top of it is a sort of
covered hopper, and at the waist of the machine is a arrangement of solenoids made out of some alloy
that was never seen before on this earth.
"There's gearing between this machine and the other, the transmitter. I have figured out what this
dumb-bell thing is. It's a recorder."
I want to know what is it recording. He lays one finger on the side of his nose and winks at me.
"Thought," he says. "Raw thought. But that isn't all. Earthquakes, continental shifts, weather cycles,
lots more stuff. It integrates all these things with thought."
I want to know how he knows all this. That was when he told me that he had been with this thing for
the better part of the last thirty years. He'd figured it out all by himself. He was real touchy about that part
of it.