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

stub-born and enormous upstream, on both sides of a river not done with its anger. Yet the Museum
stood. Aided by sunken rubble of other buildings of its kind, aided also by men because they still had
time to love it, the museum stood, and might for a long time yet—weather permitting.
The hawk floated out of sight above the Palisades into the field of the low sun.

The Museum of Human History covered an acre of ground north of 125th Street, rising a modest
fifteen stories, its foundation secure in that layer of rock which mimics eternity. It deserved its name; here
men had brought samples of everything man-made, liter-ally everything known in the course of human
creation since prehistory. Within human limits it was definitive.
No one had felt anything unnatural in the refusal of the Directors of the Museum to move the
collection after the building weathered the storm of 2057. In-stead, ordinary people donated money so
that a mighty abutment could be built around the ground floor and a new entrance designed on the north
side of the sec-ond. The abutment survived the greater tornado of 2064 without damage, although during
those seven years the sea had risen another eight feet in its old ever-new game of making monkeys out of
the wise. (It was left for Brian Van Anda, alone, in 2079, to see the waters slide quietly over the
abutment, opening the lower regions for the use of fishes and the more secret water-dwellers who like
shelter and privacy. In the '90s, Brian suspected the presence of an octopus or two in the vast vague
territory that had once been parking lot, heating plant, storage space, air-raid shel-ter, etc. He couldn't
prove it; it just seemed like a decent, comfortable place for an octopus.) In 2070 plans were under
consideration for building a new causeway to the Museum from the still expanding city in the north. In
2070, also, the last war began and ended.
When Brian Van Anda came down the river late in 2071, a refugee from certain unfamiliar types of
sav-agery, the Museum was empty of the living. He spent many days in exhaustive exploration of the
building. He did this systematically, toiling at last up to the Directors' meeting room on the top floor.
There he observed how they must have been holding a confer-ence at the very time when a new gas was
tried out over New York in a final effort to persuade the Western Federation that the end justifies the
means. (Too bad, Brian sometimes thought, that he would never know exactly what had become of the
Asian Empire. In the little splinter state called the Soviet of North America, from which Brian had fled in
'71, the official doctrine was that the Asian Empire had won the war and the saviors of humanity would
be flying in any day now. Brian had inadvertently doubted this out loud and then stolen a boat and gotten
away safely under cover of night.)
Up in the meeting room, Brian had seen how that up-to-date neurotoxin had been no respecter of
per-sons. An easy death, however, by the look of it. He observed also how some things endure. The
Museum, for instance: virtually unharmed.
Brian often recalled those moments in the meeting room as a sort of island in time. They were like the
first day of falling in love, the first hour of discovering that he could play Beethoven. And a little like the
curiously cherished, more than life-size half-hour back there in Newburg, in that ghastly year 2071, when
he had briefly met and spoken with an incredibly old man, Abraham Brown. Brown had been President
of the Western Federation at the time of the civil war. Later, retired from the uproar of public affairs, he
had devoted himself to philosophy, unofficial teaching. In 2071, with the world he had loved in almost
total ruin around him, Brown had spoken pleasantly to Brian Van Anda of small things—of
chrysanthemums that would soon be blooming in the front yard of the house where he lived with friends,
of a piano recital by Van Anda back in 2067 which the old man still remembered with warm enthusiasm.
Only a month later more hell was loose and Brian himself in flight.
Yes, the Museum Directors had died easily. Brood-ing in the evening sunlight, Brian reflected that
now, all these years later, the innocent bodies would be perfectly decent. No vermin in the Museum. The
door-ways and the floors were tight, the upper windows un-broken.
One of the white-haired men had had a Ming vase on his desk. He had not dropped out of his chair,
but looked as if he had fallen asleep in front of the vase with his head on his arms. Brian had left the vase
untouched, but had taken one other thing, moved by some stirring of his own never-certain philosophy