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

valuable trick in New York, where land is almost priceless, but to do it, you'd have to transfer Martian
gravitation there!
'Well, since you can't very well land a rocket in a city street, we put down right next to the canal side
of the city, took our small cameras and revolvers, and started for a gap in the wall of masonry. We
weren't ten feet from the rocket when we both saw the explanation for a lot of the queerness.
'The city was in ruin! Abandoned, deserted, dead as Babylon! Or at least, so it looked to us then,
with its empty streets which, if they had been paved, were now deep under sand.'
'A ruin, eh?' commented Harrison. 'How old?'
'How could we tell?' countered Jarvis. 'The next expedition to this golf ball ought to carry an
archeologist - and a philologist, too, as we found out later. But it's a devil of a job to estimate the age of
anything here; things weather so slowly that most of the buildings might have been put up yesterday. No
rainfall, no earthquakes, no vegetation is here to spread cracks with its roots - nothing. The only aging
factors here are the erosion of the wind - and that's negligible in this atmosphere - and the cracks caused
by changing temperature. And one other agent - meteorites. They must crash down occasionally on the
city, judging from the thinness of the air, and the fact that we've seen four strike ground right here near the
Ares.'
'Seven,' corrected the captain. 'Three dropped while you were gone.'
'Well, damage by meteorites must be slow, anyway. Big ones would be as rare here as on earth,
because big ones get through in spite of the atmosphere, and those buildings could sustain a lot of little
ones. My guess at the city's age - and it may be wrong by a big percentage - would be fifteen thousand
years. Even that's thousands of years older than any human civilization; fifteen thousand years ago was
the Late Stone Age in the history of mankind.
'So Leroy and I crept up to those tremendous buildings feeling like pygmies, sort of awe-struck, and
talking in whispers. I tell you, it was ghostly walking down that dead and deserted street, and every time
we passed through a shadow, we shivered, and not just because shadows are cold on Mars. We felt like
intruders, as if the great race that had built the place might resent our presence even across a hundred
and fifty centuries. The place was as quiet as a grave, but we kept imagining things and peeping down the
dark lanes between buildings and looking over our shoulders. Most of the structures were windowless,
but when we did see an opening in those vast walls, we couldn't look away, expecting to see some
horror peering out of it.
'Then we passed an edifice with an open arch; the doors were there, but blocked open by sand. I got
up nerve enough to take a look inside, and then, of course, we discovered we'd forgotten to take our
flashes. But we eased a few feet into the darkness and the passage debauched into a colossal hall. Far
above us a little crack let in a pallid ray of daylight, not nearly enough to light the place; I couldn't even
see if the hall rose clear to the distant roof. But I know the place was enormous; I said something to
Leroy and a million thin echoes came clipping back to us out of the darkness. And after that, we began to
hear other sounds - slithering rustling noises, and whispers, and sounds like suppressed breathing - and
something black and silent passed between us and that far-away crevice of light.
'Then we saw three little greenish spots of luminosity in the dusk to our left. We stood staring at them,
and suddenly they all shifted at once. Leroy yelled 'Ce sont des yeux!' and they were! They were eyes!
Well, we stood frozen for a moment, while Leroy's yell reverberated back and forth between the distant
walls, and the echoes repeated the words in queer, thin voices. There were mumblings and mutterings
and whisperings and sounds like strange soft laughter, and then the three-eyed thing moved again. Then
we broke for the door!
'We felt better out in the sunlight; we looked at each other sheepishly, but neither of us suggested
another look at the buildings inside - though we did see the place later, and that was queer, too - but
you'll hear about it when I come to it. We just loosened our revolvers and crept on along that ghostly
street.
'The street curved and twisted and subdivided. I kept careful note of our directions, since we couldn't
risk getting lost in that gigantic maze. Without our thermo-skin bags, night would finish us, even if what