"Severna Park - The Three Unknowns" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Severna)

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Roger and his crew stayed in someone else's boxcar that night. Althea watched their lights go out as she
sat at her own window with a cup of tea, listening to the windblown sand scratch against the side of her
boxcar. Every word she said to Roger tomorrow would be historic. It surprised her, how much doing the
interview scared her, since history was her profession, but it was a comfort to know that the same little
finger bone affected even gutsy souls, like Hoshi. She stirred her tea and wondered if Hoshi'd ever
actually felt this kind of trepidation. Althea hadn't, not since her own dissertation twenty years ago.
She'd done her post-graduate work at Princeton, where her sponsoring professor, Canton Ramsey, was
younger than Elliot, with more to prove. Rumors about him said that he stole his candidates' research,
cultivated favorites, then dumped them. It didn't pay to be too original because no matter how supportive
he acted, Canton was, bottom line, a thief. Althea remembered a defining conversation with a bitter
post-doc in the back of a coffee shop six months before her dissertation was due. How did she think
Ramsey got to be chair of such a prestigious institution? Honest research? Original papers? The post-doc
let out a skeptical laugh and hunched over his coffee. That wasn't the way the real academic world
worked. Not at all.

And so, by the time Althea was ready to present her dissertation, it was a masterpiece of
sand-bagging—not like Hoshi, who went all out, without any fear of plagiarizing profs. If Hoshi treated
her dissertation like opening a bottle of champagne, Althea's was plain tap water. Her moderate
conclusions shed only a newish light on research already picked over by many others. Her paper lacked
invention, but it was also rock-solid and worthy of the degree. In the end, it would have looked peculiar
if her work hadn't produced a PhD. In the end, it was one of the reasons she thought Elliot had hired
her.

Now, on Mars, she sat shivering at her desk despite the hot air blowing down from the ceiling, trying to
imagine her department and every student she'd ever taught watching CNN as she held up Hoshi's
un-conservative, barely documented, utterly inventive finger bone, knowing exactly what she had to lose.

The next afternoon, Roger sat down with Althea, the bone, her laptop, and, against her better judgment,
a camera.

He looked at the bone carefully but didn't touch it. "How old is it?"

The camera was about as big as Althea's two fists, silent as it recorded their conversation, but its
presence in the room was enormous. "Between three and four thousand years." Her mouth was dry. The
ends of her fingers were cold, and her feet were freezing. "Its DNA originates in the British Isles."

Roger took a palm reference out of his pocket—it was stamped with a blue CNN logo—tapped the
screen and studied the results. "Neolithic? That would more or less coincide with the construction of
Stonehenge."

She put her cold fingers between her knees. "Mr. Dodd, I'm not here to entertain any stupid speculations.
I'm here to tell you what this is, where we found it, and what it seems—seems—to indicate. But I'm not
going to talk about Chariots of the Gods or any other idiocy. Am I making myself clear?"