"Blish, James - Midsummer Century" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

tuning it, and cranking the gain up all the way—a setting which should have effectively relocated the campus of Sockette State in the heart of Ursa Major No. z, a cluster of galaxies half a billion light-years away—he crossed the parabolic aluminum basketwork of the steerable antenna and scrambled up the wave guide, field strength detector in hand; awkwardly, it was too big to be put into a pocket.
Gaining the lip of the wave guide, he sat down for a rest, feet dangling, peering down the inside of the tube. The program now was to climb clown into there slowly in a tight spiral, calling out the field intensity readings at intervals to the technicians on the floor.
Redbrick polytechnics insist that their physical scientists also be engineers, but they neglect to turn them into steeple-jacks as well. Martels was not even wearing a hard hat. Settling one sneakered foot into what appeared to be a perfectly secure angle between one girder and another, he slipped and fell headlong down the inside of the tube.
He did not even have time to scream, let alone hear the shouts of alarm from the technicians, for he lost consciousness long before he hit bottom.
In fact, he never hit bottom at all.

It would be possible to explain exactly and comprehensively what happened to John Martels instead, but to do so would require several pages of expressions in the metalanguage in-vented by Dr. Thor Wald, a Swedish theoretical physicist who unfortunately was not scheduled to be born until the year 2060. Suffice it to say that, thanks to the shoddy workmanship of an unknown welder, Sockette State’s radical new radio telescope did indeed have an unprecedented reach—but not in any direction that its designers had intended, or could even have conceived.


2


“Ennoble me with the honor of your attention, immortal Qvant.”
Swimming upward from blackness, Martels tried to open his eyes, and found that he could not. Nevertheless, in a moment he realized that he could see. What he saw was so totally strange to him that he tried to close his eyes again, and found he could not do that, either. He seemed, in fact, completely paralyzed; he could not even change his field of view.
He wondered briefly if the fall had broken his neck. But that shouldn’t affect his control of his eye muscles, should it? Or of his eyelids?
Besides, he was not in a hospital; of that much, at least, he could be sure. What was visible to him was a vast, dim hall in bad repair. There seemed to be sunlight coming from overhead, but whatever there was up there that was admitting it was not letting much through.
He had a feeling that the place ought to be musty, but he seemed to have no sense of smell left. The voice he had heard, plus a number of small, unidentifiable echoes, told him that he could still hear, at least. He tried to open his mouth, again without result.
There seemed to be nothing for it but to take in what little was visible and audible, and try to make as much sense as


possible of whatever facts that brought him. What was he sitting or lying upon? Was it warm or cool? No, those senses were gone too. But at least he cUd not seem to be in any pain— though whether that meant that that sense was gone too, or that he was either drugged or repaired, couldn’t be guessed. Nor was he hungry or thirsty—again an ambiguous finding.
About the floor of the hail within his cone of vision was a scatter of surpassingly strange artifacts. The fact that they were at various distances enabled him to establish that he could at least still change his depth of focus. Some of the objects seemed to be more decayed than the hail itself. In a number of instances the state, if any, of decay was impossible to judge, because the things seemed to be sculptures or some other kind of works of art, representing he knew not what, if anything at all, for representational art had been out of fashion all his life, anyhow. Others, however, were plainly machines; and though in no case could he even guess their intended functions, he knew corrosion when he saw it. This stuff had been out of use a long, long time.
Something was still functioning, though. He could hear the faintest of continuous hums, like a 50-cycle line noise. It seemed to come from somewhere behind him, intimately close, as though some spectral barber were applying to the back of his skull or neck a massaging device intended for the head of a gnat.
He did not think that the place, or at least the chamber of it that he seemed to be in, was exceptionally large. If the wall that was visible to him was a side rather than an end—which of course he had no way of determining—and the remembered echoes of the voice were not misleading, then it could not be much bigger than one of the central galleries in the Alte Pinakothek, say the Rubens room. . .
The comparison clicked neatly into place. He was in a museum of some sort. And one both without maintenance and


completely unpopular, too, for the floor was thick with dust, and there were only a few footprints in that, and in some cases none at all, near the exhibits (if that was what they were). The footprints, he registered without understanding, were all those of bare feet.
Then, there came that voice again, this time with rather a whining edge to it. It said:
“Immortal Qvant, advise me, I humbly pray.”
And with a triple shock, he heard himself replying:
“You may obtrude yourself upon my attention, tribesman.” The shock was triple because, first of all, he had had no intention or sensation of either formulating the reply or of uttering it. Second, the voice in which it came out was most certainly not his own; it was deeper, and unnaturally loud, yet seemed to be almost without resonance. Third, the language was one he had never heard before in his life, yet he seemed to understand it perfectly.
Besides, my name is not and has never been Qvant. I don’t even have a middle initial.
But he was given no time to speculate, for there now sidled into sight, in a sort of cringing crouch which Martels found somehow offensive, something vaguely definable as a human being. He was naked and dark brown, with what Martels judged to be a mixture of heredity and a deep tan. The nakedness also showed him to be scrupulously clean, his arms short, his legs long, his pelvis narrow. His hair was black and crinkled like a Negro’s, but his features were Caucasoid, except for an Asian eyelid fold, rather reminding Martels of an African bushman—an impression strengthened by his small stature. His expression, unlike his posture, was respectful, almost reverent, but not at all frightened.
“What would you have of me now, tribesman?” Martels’ new voice said.
“Immortal Qvant, I seek a ritual for the protection of our


maturity ceremonies from the Birds. They have penetrated the old one, for this year many of our new young men lost their eyes to them, and some even their lives. My ancestors tell me that such a ritual was known in Rebirth Three, and is better than ours, but they cannot give me the details.”
“Yes, it exists,” Martels’ other voice said. “And it will serve you for perhaps two to five years. But in the end, the Birds will penetrate this too. In the end, you will be forced to abandon the ceremonies.”
“To do this would also be to surrender the afterlife!”
“That is doubtless true, but would this necessarily be a great surrender? You need your young men here and now, to hunt, procreate, and fight the Birds. I am barred from any knowledge of the afterlife, but what gives you any assurance that it is pleasant? What satisfactions can remain for all those crowded souls?”
In some indefinable way, Martels could tell from Qvant’s usage that “birds” was capitalized; he had caught no hint of this in the speech of the petitioner, whose expression had now changed to one of subdued horror. He noticed also that Qvant spoke to the presumable savage as anyone would address an educational equal, and that the naked man spoke in the same way. But of what use was the information? For that matter, what was Martels, presumably a man miraculously recovering from a major accident, doing in a moldering museum, helplessly eavesdropping upon an insane conversation with a naked “tribesman” who asked quaestiones like a medieval student addressing St. Thomas Aquinas?
“I do not know, immortal Qvant,” the petioner was saying. “But without the ceremonies, we shall have no new generations of ancestors, and memory in the afterlife fades rapidly. Who in the end should we have left to advise us but yourself?”
“Who indeed?”
From the faint tone of irony in his voice, Qvant had proba


bly intended the question to be rhetorical, bсt in any case Martels had had enough. Mustering every dyne of will power he could manage to summon, he strove to say: