"Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

those words, or any of those on the dozens of pages that followed.
"I've got to stop," he said aloud. "The condition I'm in, I can't be trusted not to screw things up."
He listened to the words carefully, and decided that they made sense. Wearily, he wrapped up the head
in aluminium foil and placed it in the refrigerator, ejecting a month-old carton of grapefruit juice and a six-
pack of Diet Pepsis to make room for it. He didn't have a padlock, but a little rummaging came up with a
long orange extension cord, which he wrapped around the refrigerator several times. With a Magic
Marker, he wrote, Danger!!! Botulism experiment in progress -- DO NOT OPEN!!! on a sheet of paper,
and taped it to the door.
Now he could go home.
But now that the head -- the impossible, glorious head -- was no longer in front of him soaking up his
every thought, he was faced with the problem of its existence.
Where had it come from? What could possibly explain such a miracle? How could such a thing exist?
Time Travel? No.
He'd read a physics paper once, purporting to demonstrate the theoretical possibility of time travel. It
required the construction of an extremely long, large, and dense cylinder massing as much as the Milky
Way Galaxy, and rotating at half the speed of light. But even if such a monster could be built -- and it
couldn't -- it would still be of dubious utility. An object shot past it's surface at exactly the right angle
would indeed travel into either the past or the future, depending on whether it was travelling with the
cylinder's rotation or against it. But how far it would go, there was no predicting. And a quick jaunt to the
Mesozoic was out of the question -- nothing could travel to a time before the cylinder was created or after
it's destruction.
In any event, current physics wasn't up to building a time machine, and wouldn't be for at least another
millenium. If ever.
Could someone have employed recombinant engineering to reassemble fragments of dinosaur DNA
like in that movie he used to love back when he was a kid? Again, no. It was a pleasant fantasy. But DNA
was fragile. It broke down too quickly. The most that had ever been recovered inside fossil amber had
been tiny fragments of insect genes. That business of patching together the fragments? Ridiculous. It


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 Michael Swanwick - Bones of the Earth

would be like trying to reconstruct Shakespeare's plays from the ashes of a burnt folio, one that yielded
only the words never and foul and the. Except that the ashes came not from a single folio, but from a
hundred-thousand volume library that would have included Mickey Spillane and Dorothy Sayers, Horace
Walpole and Jeane Dixon, the Congressional Record and the complete works of Stephen King.
It wasn't going to happen.
One's time could be better spent, alas, trying to restore the Venus de Milo by searching the beaches of
the Mediterranean for the marble grains that had once been its arms.
Could it be a fake?
This was the least likely possibility of all. He had cut the animal apart himself, gotten its blood on his
hands, felt the grain and give of its muscles. It had recently been a living creature.
In his work, Leyster followed the biological journals closely. He knew exactly what was possible and
what was not. Build a pseudo-dinosaur? From scratch? Scientists were lucky if they could put together a
virus. The simplest amoeba was worlds beyond them.
So that was that. There were only three possible explanations, and each one was more impossible than
the next.
Griffin knew the answer, though! Griffin knew, and could tell, and had left behind his card. Where was
it? It was somewhere on his desk.
He snatched up the card. It read: