"Edgar Pangborn - A Master of Babylon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pangborn Edgar)

would no longer have the strength for hunting. He would lose the inclination to depart from his fortress for
trips to the mainland. He would yield to such timidity or laziness for days, then weeks. Sometime, after
such an interlude, he might find himself too feeble to risk climbing the cliff wall into the forest. He would
then have the good sense, he hoped, to destroy the canoe, thus making of his weakness a necessity.
There were books. There was the Hall of Music on the next floor above the water, probably safe
from its lessening encroachment. To secure fresh water he need only keep track of the tides, for the
Hudson had cleaned itself and now rolled down sweet from the lonely uncorrupted hills. His decline
could be comfor-table. He had provided for it and planned it.
Yet now, gazing across the sleepy water, seeing a broad-winged hawk circle in freedom above the
for-est, Brian was aware of the old thought moving in him: If I could hear voices—just once, if I could
hear human voices ...
The Museum of Human History, with the Hall of Music on what Brian thought of as the second floor,
should also outlast his requirements. In the flooded lower floor and basement the work of slow
destruction must be going on: Here and there the unhurried waters could find their way to steel and make
rust of it; the waterproofing of the concrete was nearly a hun-dred years old. But it ought to be good for
another cen-tury or two.
Nowadays the ocean was mild. There were moder-ate tides, winds no longer destructive. For the
last six years there had been no more of the heavy storms out of the south; in the same period Brian had
noted a rise in the water level of a mere nine inches. The windowsill, his port, stood six inches above
high-tide mark this year. Perhaps Earth was settling into a new ami-able mood. The climate had become
delightful, about like what Brian remembered from a visit to southern Virginia in his childhood.
The last earthquake had come in 2082—a large one, Brian guessed, but its center could not have
been close to the rock of Manhattan. The Museum had only shivered and shrugged—it had survived
much worse than that, half a dozen times since 1994. Long after the tremor, a tall wave had thundered in
from the south. Its force, like that of others, had mostly been dissipated against the barrier of tumbled
rock and steel at the southern end of the submerged island—an undersea dam, man-made though not
man intended—and when it reached the Museum it did no more than smash the southern windows in the
Hall of Music, which earlier waves had not been able to reach; then it passed on up the river enfeebled.
The windows of the lower floor had all been broken long before that. After the earthquake of '82
Brian had spent a month in boarding up all the openings on the south side of the Hall of Music—after all,
it was home—with lumber painfully ferried over from main-land ruins. By that year he was sixty-two
years old and not moving with the ease of youth. He deliberately left cracks and knotholes. Sunlight sifted
through in nar-row beams, like the bars of dusty gold Brian could remember in a hayloft at his uncle's
farm in Vermont.
That hawk above the Palisades soared nearer over the river and receded. Caught in the evening light,
he was himself a little sun, dying and returning.
The Museum had been finished in 2003. Manhat-tan, strangely enough, had never taken a bomb,
al-though in the civil war two of the type called "small clean fission" had fallen on the Brooklyn and New
Jer-sey sides—so Brian recalled from the jolly history books which had informed his adolescence that
war was definitely a thing of the past. By the time of the next last war, in 2070, the sea, gorged on melting
ice caps, had removed Manhattan Island from current history.
Everything left standing above the waters south of the Museum had been knocked flat by the
tornadoes of 2057 and 2064. A few blobs of empty rock still demon-strated where Central Park and
Mount Morris Park had been: not significant. Where Long Island once rose, there was a troubled area of
shoals and small islands, probably a useful barrier of protection for the receding shore of Connecticut.
Men had yielded their great city inch by inch, then foot by foot; a full mile in 2047, saying: "The flood
years have passed their peak, and a return to normal is expected." Brian sometimes felt a twinge of
sympathy for the Neanderthal experts who must have told each other to expect a return to normal at the
very time when the Cro-Magnons were drifting in.
In 2057 the Island of Manhattan had to be yielded. New York City, half-new, half-ancient, sprawled