"de Camp, L Sprague - Employment UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Camp L Sprague)

EMPLOYMENT



R. F. D. No.
Carriesville, Indiana
August 28, 1960


Dear George:
Thanks for your information on the State Geological Survey, and for those civil service blanks. rye already sent them in.
If I land the job you'll probably be my boss, so you're entitled to an explanation of why I want to leave a well-paying private job and go to work for the state.
As you know, I was working for Lucifer Oil in x9g7 when the depression hit, and pretty quick I was out of a job, and with a family to support. Through one of the journals I got in touch with Gil Platt, my present employer, who was looking for an experienced geologist. You've probably heard of him-he started out in paleontology, but never worked ttp very high in that field because he was temperamentally unable to work under anybody. Then he took to inventing Prospecting devices, and for twenty years he's been as busy as a cat on fly paper, developing and patenting his gadgets and pursuing his paleo on the side. All the money he made in prospector royalties went into paleo expeditions and into litigation. In time he accumulated outstanding collections of patents, lawsuits pertaining thereto, and fossils.
About 1956 the Linvald Fund decided he'd done such good work as to deserve a little financial elbow room, and put him on their list. He'd designed a new prospector that looked quite wonderful, but that would take time and money to reduce to practice. So those monthly checks from Oslo were welcome.
Mrs. Staples and I were sorry to leave California for Indiana, both of us being natives of San Francisco, but in our business you can't be finicky about where you work.
I worked with Platt for about six months before we were ready to try it out. I'm not revealing any secrets by saying that it works by supersonic wave charting, like the old McCann prospector. The distinctive feature is that, by using two intersecting beams, Platt gets a stereoscopic effect and can chart the major discontinuities at any distance underground that he wants.
We tried it first mounted on a truck. We would set it for, say, two yards below the surface and buzz down the road to Fort Wayne- The truck purred down the outside lane of the concrete at a steady
fifteen miles an hour. Car after car swung to the inside lane and buzzed past, honking. Kenneth Staples, at the wheel, leaned back and shouted through the opening in the back of the cab: "Hey, Gil! Haven't we about reached the end of that strip?"
Something in the way of an affirmative floated back into the cab. Staples ran the truck off the concrete, stopped it, and went around to the rear. He was a big, hard-looking, rather ugly man, on whom the elements had stamped a look of more than his thirty-five years. Under his stiff-brimmed engineer's hat he was very bald. He wore a hat whenever decency permitted. Men who go prematurely bald have, perhaps, a slightly greater tendency than others to select outdoor careers, or to join the army, where hats are kept on heads.
Inside the truck, a smaller, gray-haired man was bending over a machine. The top part of the machine included a long strip of graph paper carried over spools. Above the paper was poised a rank of little vertical pens. While the truck moved, these pens dropped down at intervals to make dots on the paper as it was reeled under them. The dots made irregular outlines and patterns.
Gilmore Platt said: "C'mere, Ken, and see what you think of this. I know what it is but I can't think."
Staples stared at the dots. "Looks to me like the outline of a piece out of a jigsaw puzzle."
"No. No. It isn't-I know what it is! It's a section of a skull! One of the Fe1id~, probably FelLi atrox, from the size. We'll have to dig it up!"
"That squiggle? Well, maybe. You're the paleo man. But you
can't go digging holes in a State highway just because there's a fossil lion buried under it."
"But, Ken, a beautiful thing like that-"
"Take it easy, Gil. This little Pleistocene overlay runs back to your place. If we run the truck around your grounds for a few hours we ought to be able to find some fossils."
"It's a rodent. I thought it was a bear at first from the size of the skull, but now I see those front teeth."
"Right so far. But what rodent?"
Staples frowned at the little heap of bones beside the pit. "Seems to me the only North American rodent that size was the giant beaver, Castoroides."
"Fine! Fine! I'll make a paleontologist out of you yet. What's this bone?"
"Scapula."
"Right. That's easy though. This one?"
"Uh. . . humerus."
"No, ulna. But you're doing pretty well. Too bad there isn't more of this one. I think we've about cleaned it out. Do you realize what this means? Hitherto we've been confined to surface indications in barren country. Now we can ignore the surface and locate all the fossils in a given area within fifteen or twenty feet of it! Only that truck won't do. We need something to carry the prospector cross country. An airplane would fly too high and too fast. I have it, a blimp I"
"Yeah?" Staples looked a trifle startled. "Seems to me like a lot to spend on applying a new device. But it's the Fund's money, not mine."

In due course Platt took delivery on the Goodyear Company's good ship Darwin. After we learned how to fly it, we covered most of Indiana in a couple of months, and had located more fossils than we could dig up in fifty years. We made out a checklist of their locations and sent copies to all the museums and universities in the country. For the rest of the summer Indiana was one big bone hunters' convention. If you took a drive into the country, the chances were that you'd pass a field in which a couple of tough-looking parties were arguing with a farmer, and you'd know that they were probably paleontologists from the Field Museum or the University of California dickering with the owner of the field for permission to dig. Though Indiana isn't a very rich state as far as fossil ver
tebrates go. It's mostly Paleozoic with a little Pleistocene scattered around on top.

A friend of Platt's, a Dr. Wilhelmi of Zurich, arrived for a weekend. He was an archeologist and a dignified man. Staples felt a certain sympathy for him because he had even less hair than the geologist.
This Wilhelmi had been working in Anatolia, where he had found a carload of relics dating back to Tiridates the Great.
"You see, my fwiends," he explained, "they were mostly vessels and such of bwonze. Here is a picture of one as we found it. It is so corroded that it is nothing but a lump of oxide. Now, here is a picture of that one after we westored it by the anode pwocess."
"Say," said Staples, "are you sure that's the same one? The thing in the second picture looks like it was just fresh out of the shop."
"Ha-ha, that is witty. Yes, it is the same. We place it in an electwolytic bath, connected to one of the poles, and wun a current thwough. So all the copper and tin atoms in the oxide cwawl back to their pwoper places. It is quite wonderful to see."
After the Swiss gentleman had left, Platt went to Chicago for a consultation with his patent attorney. He returned looking thoughtful.
"Ken," he said, "let's play hooky for a few days."
Staples looked at him with a wary eye. "I suppose you mean to drop the prospector and work on your fossils for a while?"
"That's it exactly."
Thus it happened that the following day found them in the shop breaking a young Hyracodon-small hornless rhinoceros-out of its matrix. Staples remarked on what a dull piece the work was from a zoological point of view, compared to what it had been in times past.