Alice: The Girl From Earth - Булычев Кир - Страница 61
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“Thank you, my child.” The archaeologist said as he curled himself into a ball in Alice’s arms. “Perhaps I shall be able to return the favor some day. My friends have gotten quite carried away.”
The little archaeologist was light green in color, and fury; his round face was dominated by a single purple grey eye.
“I am the Galaxy’s leading specialist in the decipherment of ancient and dead languages.” He said. “Not one Cyberbrain or computer can compare with me. If my companions had managed to crush me, it would have been an enormous loss for science in general and for our expedition in particular.”
Even at such an extreme moment the little archaeologist was thinking about his work, and not about himself.
Alice brought the battered little archaeologist, who was called Purr, to the largest of the plastic domes where the others had already gathered, and with Petrov’s help sought out the expedition’s doctor, a gruff inhabitant of the planet Cromanyon, who bore a strong resemblance to a garden watering can on legs. When the doctor said the little archaeologist was not in any danger, Alice turned her attention to the discussions going on among the researchers.
It turned out that the members of the expedition had not sat on their hands (and tentacles and feelers and manipulators) while their team leader had flown off to Earth for the time machine. They had finished excavating a medium sized city, en toto, with all its houses, streets, markets, factories, movie theaters, and the railroad station.
And after lunch at the long dining table, during which Gromozeka regaled his friends with his adventures on Earth, the archaeologists took their guests on a tour of the dig.
A hundred years had passed since the city had died; the winds, rain, and snows had tried to wipe the city from the face of the planet, and to a great extent they had succeeded. But the buildings made of stone still stood all the same, if without their roofs, and with windows like the gaping eye sockets of fleshless skulls; weathered, the pavements lined with rows of thick tree stumps, still remained in place. Best preserved was the old castle on the hill above the town; its thick stone walls had stood a thousand years or more and would endure the assaults of the wind and rain for far longer.
The excavators were smearing dried wood with preservative, setting fallen bricks and mortar back into place in half fallen walls, carefully gathering up the century’s accumulation of filth and dust from the street and on a bright, clear day the city may have appeared rundown, old, but clean and almost alive. As though its people had departed not all that long ago.
The city’s inhabitants had been very similar to Earth people, but of short stature, so that when Alice found herself in one of the re-built houses she felt as though the table and bed and chairs had been made specially for her.
A small train stood beside the train station. The steam engine had a long tube, but the wagons with large round windows and overhanging roofs were similar to old Earth train cars.
One of the archaeologists, a specialist in restoration who had resurrected the steam engine and train from pieces of rusty scrap, kept the guests at the station for what seemed to be forever. He wanted them to be able to appreciate how masterfully all the handles, buttons, and switches in the ancient machine were made.
Then the guests got a chance to tour the museum, into which the excavators had gathered all the small objects found in the city: pictures, statues, pots and pans, clothing, household utensils, knickknacks and decorations, and everything else. It was obvious just how much work would have to go into returning all these artifacts to life.
“Tell me,” Petrov asked, when the guests had finished looking over the museum. “have you been able to determine precisely when the planet Coleida died, and what it died from?”
“Yes.” The little archaeologist Purr said. “I’ve read the remains of their newspapers and magazines and found numerous documents. Very clearly an epidemic was responsible. The epidemic began on Coleida one hundred years, three months, and twenty days ago. From the description, and taking into consideration the terror of the inhabitants who described it, it is very similar to Space Plague.”
“But how could the disease have gotten down to the planet. They’ve shown the virus can’t make it to the surface through the atmosphere. That means, something or someone brought it. Could it have been a meteorite?”
“That we have not been able to determine. It could be.” Purr said. “All that is known, is that the first news of the strange disease appeared in the newspapers on Seventh Day, Thirdmonth, year 3070 by the local calender.
“For the explanation we have turned to our temporalist friends.” Gromozeka finished after him. “That is why they flew here, after all. Consider, my friends, victory is almost in sight!”
Gromozeka shook his tentacles, flashing the sharks’ teeth of his enormous maw; all the archaeologists shouted, and the temporalist Petrov whispered to himself:
“You’re right about then ‘almost.’“
6
For five days all the archaeologists, temporalists, and space ship crews erected the time machine and the atomic batteries that would power it. Finally, in the middle of the empty field rose a structure as high as a three story house.
The Time Cabinet occupied only the very center of this enormous construction; the rest of it was given over to control instruments, computers, back-up computers and back-ups for the back- ups, and vast amounts of recording instruments: tapes, paper read-outs, holographic crystals.
All the work on the excavation came to a halt. Who in their right mind would root about in the dirt if there was the possibility to see these artifacts and their creators in reality?
“Well, that,” Petrov said on the morning of the sixth day, “is that. Everything is in place. There is room for just one individual in the temporal transposition chamber, and, since this model of the machine has never been fully tested before, I’ll be the first to use it.”
“Certainly not!” Richard said, waving long, skinny arms. “We’ve been arguing this for the last four days; I’m the one who has to go first.”
“Why?” Alice asked.
She was smeared with graphine and covered all over in dust. She hadn’t had a chance to wash or do her hair all day she had been so busy. The technicians needed help, and she had been running all over the excavation with Purr, who had discovered he was utterly unable to refuse Alice anything now that she had saved him from certain death.
“Because if anything happens to me, there are a hundred graduate students at the Institute who can take my place, Alice.” Richard said. “But if anything happens to Doctor Petrov, there is no one in the Galaxy who can take his place. It’s simply approaching the matter reasonably; how can we guarantee that absolutely nothing will happen with our machine?”
“There are other things more important.” Petrov said. “Discipline, and I am the one who bears the responsibility for both the machine and for you, Richard.”
“I for one would like to go back into the past myself,” Gromozeka said, “but there is no way I could fit into the time machine.”
“Perfectly understandable.” Alice said. “I’d go too.”
Everyone laughed, and no one seemed able to take her seriously. Alice felt her ears burning and almost spoke back up to them when Petrov and Richard went on trying to convince each other who should be first, but before she could Gromozeka carefully pulled Alice to one side with a tentacle and whispered:
“Listen, my child; I did not invite you hear for purely innocent reasons. I think that you still may very well find yourself on a trip to the past. Not now, not the first, but later. And then, what will fall to you will be the most important and complicated part of our work. It is far too early to speak of that. But I swear to you by all the wonders of space itself that at the decisive moment the two of us are going to have something very interesting to do.”
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