"George Zebrowski - The Star Web" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zebrowski George)

Stepping across to the other side, Malachi activated another portal and stepped inside. Obrion followed,
with Lena and Rassmussen right behind him, into a room which reminded him of the one he had visited
before, except that this one was entirely bare.

A half dozen skeletons covered the floor, naked in the white light. Some were piled together, their bones
mixed; others lay lonely near the comers.

"I've looked at them carefully," Malachi said. "They're not any human I've ever seen or heard about.
There are dozens of minor differences, as well as some major ones. Two opposable thumbs on each
hand and a very large ribcage. I would like to have seen the heart that once beat in one of these
gentlemen. Their physical characteristics were natural evolutionary ones, or they were biologically
engineered. Both notions are fantastic enough."

"What killed them?" Lena asked. "They seem to have died suddenly."

Obrion thought he felt the ground tremble slightly under his feet.

"That's probably a slippage in the ice around us," Malachi said. "This entire structure might no longer be
resting on the bedrock of the continent. The glaciers might have sheared it off when they covered
everything. It might not be safe."

There was another, smaller tremor, then quiet. Obrion listened for the vibrations but they did not return.
"You know," he said looking around at the remains, "if they were like us, basically, then we can find out
all about them. There will be points of subjective as well as external analogy. Psychologically there will
already be a bridge between ourselves and them. They shared the same planet with us when we were
ape folk struggling to differentiate ourselves from the other simians…"

"Perhaps," Malachi said, "but only if we can run our minds forward to at least grasp the look, the qualities
of the kind of technics we might have a thousand years from now. Magnus, what do you think?"

Rassmussen shook his head. His tall, gray-haired frame seemed frail in the antiseptic light. "A hundred
years might well give us some of the things I've seen here. Predictions are always conservative because
the hard-to-imagine kinds of things seem remote and strange. But that can be deceptive. We're not used
to it—it's not part of daily experience. Later it may seem simple and easy to accomplish. Any sufficiently
advanced technology will look like magic, if you're backward enough…"

"But all of this is not magic," Malachi said. "You can imagine how it works, Magnus?"

"I think so, though it would be a long time before I could learn enough to do it all myself, without
coaching. Instrumental skill is a different thing from being able to furnish an explanation. A technician can
create an effect without having an adequate theory. In fact he may even be able to do things on the basis
of a wrong theory. It doesn't follow that just because something works the theory is true; it may work for
other reasons and the theory should be regarded as only possibly true. However, if something doesn't
work, and all the conditions have been checked, then very likely the theory is false. Material things often
seem to resist theory in practice, even when you feel certain that something must work. It took years to
send and receive the first radio signals across the ocean. It was difficult to send a signal from one radio
set to another sucessfully, across a room, even once."
"Everything in this place," Obrion said, "seems to have been working for a long time, possibly thousands
of years. There's air, light, heat, living spaces. I'll bet there are adequately preserved stores of food
somewhere. And maybe, Magnus, there is something in this place that might coax you into working