"Baker, Kage - Lemuria Will Rise" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baker Kage)

Two small figures were struggling up the face of the opposite dune, carrying each a basket of piled shells. From the prints in the sand ahead of them, I could see that this was not their first trip, and their destination was an indistinct domed something that lay in a shimmer of blue just over the top of the dune.
My jaw worked, I spat out sand and shouted, "Hey!" They turned around and I had the impression that they were a pair of English children in white hooded snowsuits, their facial features tiny and perfect, their skin ashy pale. They wore enormous black goggles. When they saw me they squeaked in horror and ran, plowing up the dune face in their efforts to get away from me and not drop the heavy baskets.
My legs took me down the sand like a juggernaut. I picked up speed across the lawn and started up after them, gaining back more and more of my coordination as I went. They were nearly to the top of the dune now and I could see there was something not quite human in their proportions. Head circumference too big, tubby little bodies, spindly arms and legs. What the Hell? I searched my index for information on related subjects and was rewarded with a host of terribly earnest UFO titles from the late 20th century, all illustrated with drawings of these same spindly little people. _Aliens? _From outer space? Were _these _the Ascended Masters from whom the Hermit had been stealing his sacred fire, his memorized scraps of improbable knowledge? As I gained on them they began crying openmouthed in their terror, desperately trying to clamber over the top of the dune.
One of them made it but the other stumbled, dropping his basket, and a single clamshell bounced out and went skating down the sand wall toward me. My right hand shot out and closed on it like a trap, in as fine an example of bonehead priority programming as I've ever seen, because if I'd been able to ignore it and keep going past I'd have caught the little so-and-so. As it was, in my wasted second he managed to grab up his basket again and hands-and-knees drag it over the top, where his friend had hung back long enough to help him to his feet. They scampered away down the other side just seconds before I was able to pull myself up off the slope.
I looked down into a wide valley of sand, featureless but for the great white circle of a shell midden. There was an airship parked on it.
Now this was 1860, mind you, and here was this thing that looked like an Easter egg designed by Jules Verne sitting on a prehistoric shell midden. It was all of some purply-silver metal and it had portholes, and riveted plates, and scrollwork and curlicues that made no kind of aerodynamic sense. It wasn't one of our ships, certainly. It bore no resemblance to a silver saucer; but then, this was 1860, wasn't it? Nearly a hundred years before anything crashed in a place called Roswell.
The little figures ran for it, sobbing in alarm to the others who stood around the ship. They all turned to stare at me, except for one who was crouched over, trying to pull a snowsuit on up around himself. As all the others screamed at the sight of me, he straightened up and looked. It was the hermit.
"O, not to worry," he told them. "I know her." He put his hands up to form a trumpet around his mouth and shouted, "I regret I was not at home when yez come to call! It seems They've decided to take me to Mount Shasta to live with Them permanent-like! Ain't dat a grand thing, now?"
"Your Library!" I croaked. The little creatures were frantically tossing basket after basket of shells in through the open door of the airship, and two of them grabbed the hermit's arms to try to hurry him the rest of the way into his suit. He gave me a slightly shamefaced shrug.
"Well, They found me out about that, and They're confiscating it ; but They're good fellows, like I told yez, and They say I can open a school in Lemuria when she comes up. They say They'll have to test me worthiness some more, but dat's all right." One of them zipped up the front of his suit and pressed a pair of goggles into his hands, signing several times that he should put them on at once. The others were vanishing inside the ship as fast as they could get through the door.
But I wasn't about to follow them now, priority or no priority, not after the brain-scrambling I'd got when they'd overflown me. My self-preservation program was finally working again, and I stood rooted in place watching the hermit fit the goggles on over his spectacles while the one remaining creature gibbered and tugged on his arm.
"Half a minute, there, I can't see through this -- there now. Why, it's all funny-looking. Say," he called across to me, "Yez might see if the Sisterhood's interested in coming out here to the Dunes. I still think it's a capital place for a great center of learning." The ship began to tremble and hum, and the creature turned to dart through the door, pulling the hermit after him. I recoiled from the waves of radiation that flooded outward. The hermit paused in the doorway, looking back to me, and went on shouting:
"Because, ye know, the vibrations hereabouts is so powerful yez can almost -- " the door slid shut with a dull bang, trapping a lock of his beard as the ship began its ascent into the sky. The ascent paused, the door slid open a half-inch and the beard vanished inside; the door slammed again and the ship zoomed upward a few hundred meters, until without turning it sped off at an angle and vanished from sight.
I stood staring for a long moment. Aware that I was still clutching the one clamshell I had managed to grab, I raised my hand painfully and examined it. I nearly screamed.
It was a nice little study of ducks paddling happily on a lake. And look: here were some children on the shore of the lake, feeding the ducks. At least, they might have been children. Oh, who was I kidding? They weren't children, they were Visitors from Somewhere who had found a unique life form in these Dunes. Like me, they had tested a sample; like me, they were transplanting it.
I let my arm drop to my side. Now that the ship had gone I could see across the midden to the high dune beyond, where clamshell letters ten feet high shouted silently:
_NOT ALONE._