"Baxter, Stephen - Manifold 03 - Origin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baxter Stephen)

Loud runs. His hands are throwing dirt at the Mouth.

The Mouth scoops him up.

There is a flash of light. Fire can see nothing but blue. Loud screams.



Emma Stoney:

'Malenfant - you see it too, right?'

He laughed. 'It ain't no scratch in your contacts, Emma.' He seemed to be
testing the controls. Experimentally he veered away to the right. The ride got a
lot more rocky.

The blue circle stayed right where it was, hanging in the African sky. No
optical effect, then. This was real, as real as this plane. But it hung in the
air without any apparent means of support. And still she had no real sense of
its scale.

But now she saw a contrail scraped across the air before the wheel, a tiny
silver moth flying across its diameter. The moth was a plane, as least as big as
their own.

'Damn thing must be a half-mile across,' Malenfant growled. 'A half-mile across,
and hovering in the air eight miles high -'

'How appropriate.'

'My God, it's the real thing,' Malenfant said. 'The UFO-nauts must be going
crazy.' She heard the grin in his voice. 'Everything will be different now.'

Now she made out more planes drawn up from the dusty ground below, passing
before the artefact - if artefact it was. One of them looked like a fragile
private jet, a Lear maybe, surely climbing well beyond its approved altitude.

Malenfant continued his turn. The artefact slid out of sight.

Dusty land wheeled beneath her. She was high above a gorge, cut deeply into a
baked plain, perhaps thirty or forty miles long. Perhaps it was Olduvai itself,
the miraculous gorge that cut through million-year strata of human history, the
gorge that had yielded the relics of one ancient hominid form after another to
the archaeologists' patient inspection.

How strange, she thought. Why here? If this wheel in the sky really is what it
appears to be, an extraordinary alien artefact, if this is a first contact of a
bewilderingly unexpected type (and what else could it be?) then why here, high
above the cradle of mankind itself? Why should this gouge into humanity's