"Ian Watson - Stalin's Teardrops" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

for very fine work. The choice of a wrong quill easily exaggerates a
pathway into a major road or shrinks a river into a stream. Observe
how fluidly Andrey alters the contours of this lake on each new
tracing."
Andrey smiled in a preoccupied way. "This new brand of tracing
paper cockles nicely when you block in lakes of ink."
"Of course, being rag-based," I added, "it expands on damp days by,
oh, a good two percent. A trivial distortion, but it all helps."
The second studio was the scale room, where Zorov and assistants
worked with camera lucida and other tricks at warping the scales of
maps.
"En route to a final map we enlarge and reduce quite a lot," I
explained. "Reduction causes blurring. Enlargement exaggerates
inaccuracies. This prism we're using today both distorts and enlarges.
Now here," I went on, leading her to Frenzel's table, "we're reducing
and enlarging successively by the similar-triangles method."
"I do recognize the technique," answered Grusha, a shade frostily.
"Ah, but we do something else with it. Here is a road. We shrink a
ten-kilometre stretch to the size of one kilometre. We stretch the next
one kilometre to the length of ten. Then we link strand after strand
back together. So the final length is identical, but all the bends are in
different places. See how Antipin over here is inking rivers red and
railway tracks blue, contrary to expectation."
Antipin's trainee was filling little bottles of ink from a large bottle;
the stuff dries up quickly.
Onward to the blue studio, the photographic room where Papyrin was
shading sections of a map in light blue.
"Naturally, Grusha, light blue doesn't photograph, so on the final
printed map these parts will be blank. The map, in this case, is correct
yet cannot be reproducedтАФ"
Onward to the dot and stipple studioтАж Remarkable what spurious
patterns the human eye can read into a well-placed array of dots.
All of this, even so, was only really the icingтАж
Grusha flicked her shoulders again. "It's quite appalling, Colonel
Valentin. Well, I suppose we must simply go back to the original

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Stalin's Teardrops


maps and use those for the Atlas."
"What original maps?" I enquired. "Who knows any longer which are
the originals? Who has known for years?"
"Surely they are on file!"
"All of our maps are in a constant state of revolutionary
transformation, don't you see?"
"You're mocking."
"It wouldn't be very pure to keep those so-called originals from a
time of exploitation and inequality, would it?" I allowed myself a