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

Roger, who had been televised interviewing far bitchier authorities, just nodded. He leaned over the
bone. "Can I touch it?"

"Carefully."

He picked it up between his thumb and forefinger and turned so the camera could have a good look at
it.

"Do you know if this is from a man or a woman?"

"We don't. There's not enough of a skeleton to tell. You need a hip, or a jaw, or at least part of a leg." In
his hands, the finger bone was tiny, and for the first time, she wondered if it could have belonged to a
child. Roger turned the bone gently but Althea tensed. Kidnapped Neolithic children on Mars, probably
chopped into little pieces and eaten by Martians in lost cities. She could hear it now.

Roger put the bone back on the desk and turned to her with warm, undemanding brown eyes. There was
nothing in his face that resembled the predatory questions of her doctoral inquisitors. He was anything but
threatening. His expression simply said Explain this to me.

She turned to her laptop and brought up the site map. "Let's start here."

He let her talk, never interrupting except to clarify some point. He never led her with the kind of moronic
questions she considered typical of the press and never once speculated about abducted Neolithic
children. She showed him the minimum—where the bone had been found, when, how, and by whom.
She talked about its veracity but the impossibility of using one fragment to date an entire site. "It could be
that these foundations are three to four thousand years old," she said, "but without native organic material
to use for carbon dating, there's no way to place these ruins in a time line with our own history."
"So they could be much older than the bone itself," said Roger.

"Much older," said Althea. "We just have no way to know."

"And no other ruins have been found on Mars?"

"Not yet. But it's a big planet, and we're constantly expanding our survey."

"So there's reason to believe that civilization existed elsewhere on the planet, not just in this small
enclave."

"It's unlikely that this is the only place where there are signs of an organized community. Mars has water,
and on Earth at least, where there's water there's life."

He nodded with enthusiasm, and she instantly regretted what she'd just said, even if it was true. Next he'd
be asking her about the Martians. Instead he smiled and leaned back in his chair. "That's a good place to
end it, Professor Mendez, unless there's something you want to add."

She shook her head. "It's more than enough."

He retrieved the camera, and she held out her hand for the disk. "I want to see that before it goes
anywhere."