"Jack Vance - Assault on a City" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vance Jack)

a moment admiring the prospect: the walks and slideways leading here
and there across landscaped vistas, the white halls under great elms, the
great Enoie Memorial Clock Tower, formed from a single quartz crystal
four hundred and sixty feet high. Students passed in their picturesque
garments, each a small lonely cosmos exquisitely sensitive to the psychic
compulsions of his environment. Alice gave her head a wistful shake and
went to an information placard where the component structures of the
Academy were identified: the Halls of Physical Science, Biologies,
Mathematics, Human History, Anthropology and Comparative Culture,
Xenology, Cosmology, Human Ideas and Arts, a dozen others. She read an
informational notice addressed to visitors:
 Each hall consists of a number of conduits, or thematic passages,
equipped with efficient pedagogical devices. The conduits are
interconnected, to provide a flexible passage through any particular
discipline, in accordance with the needs of the individual. The student
determines his special field of interest, and is issued a chart designating
his route through the hall. He moves at a rate dictated by his assimilative
ability; his comprehension is continuously verified; when the end is
reached he has mastered his subject.



Alice proceeded to the Hall of History. Entering, she gazed in awe
around the splendid lobby, which enforced upon the visitor an almost
stupefying awareness of the human adventure. Under a six-inch floor of
clear crystal spread a luminous map of the terrestrial surface, projected by
some curious shifting means which minimized distortion. The dark-blue
dome of the ceiling scintillated with constellations. Around the walls,
somewhat above eye-level, ran a percept-continuum where marched a
slow procession of men, women and children: straggling peasants;
barbarians in costumes of feathers and leather; clansmen marching to a
music of clarions and drums; heroes striding alone; prelates and
sacerdotes; hetairae, flower-maidens and dancing girls; blank-faced folk in
drab garments, from any of a dozen ages; Etruscans, Celts, Scythians,
Zumbelites, Dagonites, Mennonites; posturing priests of Babylon, warriors
of the Caucasus. At one side of the hall they appeared from a blur of fog;
as they marched they turned an occasional glance out toward those who
had come to visit the Hall of History; to the far side of the great room they
faded into the blur and were gone.
Alice went to the information desk, where she bought a catalog. Listed
first were the basic routes through the conduits, then more complicated
routes to encompass the aspects of special studies. Alice settled upon the
basic survey course: Human History: from the origin of man to the
present. She paid the three-dollar fee for noncredit transit, received a
chart indicating her route through the conduits. A young man in a dark
shirt immediately behind her, so she chanced to notice, elected the same
course: evidently a subject popular with the students.
Her route proved to be simple enough: a direct transit of Conduit 1,
with whatever detours, turn-offs, loops rnto other conduits, which
happened to arouse her interest.