"G. Stanley Weinbaum - The Best of Stanley G Weinbaum" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weinbaum Stanley G)

'They were weathered-edges rounded. Silica doesn't weather easily even on earth, and in this
climate!'
'How old you think?'
'Fifty thousands hundred thousand years. How can I tell? The little ones we saw in the morning were
older - perhaps ten times as old. Crumbling. How old would that make them? Half a million years? Who
knows?' Jarvis paused a moment. 'Well,' he resumed, 'we followed the line. Tweel pointed at them and
said 'rock' once or twice, but he'd done that many times before. Besides, he was more or less right about
these.
'I tried questioning him. I pointed at a pyramid and asked 'People?' and indicated the two of us. He
set up a negative sort of clucking and said, 'No, no, no. No one - one - two. No two - two - four,'
meanwhile rubbing his stomach. I just stared at him and he went through the business again. 'No one -
one - two. No two - two - four.' I just gaped at him. '
'That proves it!' exclaimed Harrison. 'Nuts!'
'You think so?' queried Jarvis sardonically. 'Well, I figured it out different! 'No one - one - two!' You
don't get it, of course, do you?'
'Nope - nor do you!'
'I think I do! Tweel was using the few English words he knew to put over a very complex idea.
What, let me ask, does mathematics make you think of?'
'Why - of astronomy. Or - or logic!'
'That's it! 'No one - one - two!' Tweel was telling me that the builders of the pyramids weren't people
- or that they weren't intelligent, that they weren't reasoning creatures! Get it?'
'Huh! I'll be damned!'
'You probably will.'
'Why,' put in Leroy, 'he rub his belly?'
'Why? Because, my dear biologist, that's where his brains are! Not in his tiny head - in his middle!'
'C'est impossible!'
'Not on Mars, it isn't! This flora and fauna aren't earthly; your biopods prove that!' Jarvis grinned and
took up his narrative. 'Anyway, we plugged along across Xanthus and in about the middle of the
afternoon, something else queer happened. The pyramids ended.'
'Ended!'
'Yeah; the queer part was that the last one and now they were ten-footers - was capped! See?
Whatever built it was still inside; we'd trailed 'em from their half-million-year-old origin to the present.
'Tweel and I noticed it about the same time. I yanked out my automatic (I had a clip of Boland
explosive bullets in it) and Tweel, quick as a sleight-of-hand trick, snapped a queer little glass revolver
out of his bag. It was much like our weapons, except that the grip was larger to accommodate his
four-taloned hand. And we held our weapons ready while we sneaked up along the lines of empty
pyramids.
'Tweel saw the movement first. The top tiers of bricks were heaving, shaking, and suddenly slid
down the sides with a thin crash. And then - something - something was coming out!
'A long, silvery-gray arm appeared, dragging after it an armored body. Armored, I mean, with scales,
silver-gray and dull-shining. The arm heaved the body out of the hole; the beast crashed to the sand.
'It was a nondescript creature - body like a big gray cask, arm and a sort of mouth-hole at one end;
stiff, pointed tail at the other - and that's all. No other limbs, no eyes, ears, nose - nothing! The thing
dragged itself a few yards, inserted its pointed tail in the sand, pushed itself upright, and just sat.
'Tweel and I watched it for ten minutes before it moved. Then, with a creaking and rustling like - oh,
like crumpling stiff paper - its arm moved to the mouth-hole and out came a brick! The arm placed the
brick carefully on the ground, and the thing was still again.
'Another ten minutes - another brick. Just one of Nature's bricklayers. I was about to slip away and
move on when Tweel pointed at the thing and said 'rock'! I went 'huh?' and he said it again. Then, to the
accompaniment of some of his trilling, he said, 'No - no - ' and gave two or three whistling breaths.