[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Martians couldn't be found, a room full of dead ones was the next best thing.
Maybe an even better thing;
it had been only sixty-odd years since the Orson Welles invasion-scare. Tony
Lattimer, the discoverer, was beginning to cash in on his attentions to Gloria
and his ingratiation with Sid; he was always either making voice-and-image
talks for telecast or listening to the news from the home planet. Without
question, he had become, overnight, the most widely known archaeologist in
history.
"Not that I'm interested in all this, for myself," he disclaimed, after
listening to the telecast from Terra two days after his discovery. "But this
is going to be a big thing for Martian archaeology. Bring it to the public
attention; dramatize it. Selim, can you remember when Lord Carnarvon and
Howard Carter found the tomb of Tutankhamen?"
"In 1923? I was two years old, then," von Ohlmhorst chuckled. "I really don't
know how much that publicity ever did for Egyptiology. Oh, the museums did
devote more space to Egyptian exhibits, and after a museum department head
gets a few extra showcases, you know how hard it is to make him give them up.
And, for a while, it was easier to get financial support for new excavations.
But I don't know how much good all this public excitement really does, in the
long run."
Page 21
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
"Well, I think one of us should go back on the Cyrano, when the
Schiaparelli orbits in," Lattimer said.
"I'd hoped it would be you; your voice would carry the most weight. But I
think it's important that one of us go back, to present the story of our work,
and what we have accomplished and what we hope to accomplish, to the public
and to the universities and the learned societies, and to the Federation
Government. There will be a great deal of work that will have to be done. We
must not allow the other scientific fields and the so-called practical
interests to monopolize public and academic support. So, I
believe I shall go back at least for a while, and see what I can do "
Lectures. The organization of a Society of Martian Archaeology, with Anthony
Lattimer, Ph.D., the logical candidate for the chair. Degrees, honors; the
deference of the learned, and the adulation of the lay
public. Positions, with impressive titles and salaries. Sweet are the uses of
publicity.
She crushed out her cigarette and got to her feet. "Well, I still have the
final lists of what we found in
Halvhulva
 Biology department to check over. I'm starting on Sorn-hulva tomorrow, and I
want that stuff in shape for expert evaluation."
That was the sort of thing Tony Lattimer wanted to get away from, the
detail-work and the drudgery. Let the infantry do the slogging through the
mud; the brass-hats got the medals.
She was halfway through the fifth floor, a week later, and was having midday
lunch in the reading room on the first floor when Hubert Penrose came over and
sat down beside her, asking her what she was doing. She told him.
"I wonder if you could find me a couple of men, for an hour or so," she added.
"I'm stopped by a couple of jammed doors at the central hall. Lecture room and
library, if the layout of that floor's anything like the ones below it."
"Yes. I'm a pretty fair door-buster, myself." He looked around the room.
"There's Jeff Miles; he isn't doing much of anything. And we'll put Sid
Chamberlain to work, for a change, too. The four of us ought to get your doors
open. He called to Chamberlain, who was carrying his tray over to the dish
washer.
"Oh, Sid; you doing anything for the next hour or so?"
"I was going up to the fourth floor, to see what Tony's doing."
"Forget it. Tony's bagged his season limit of Martians. I'm going to help
Martha bust in a couple of doors;
we'll probably find a whole cemetery full of Martians."
Chamberlain shrugged. "Why not. A jammed door can have anything back of it,
and I know what Tony's doing just routine stuff."
Jeff Miles, the Space Force captain, came over, accompanied by one of the
lab-crew from the ship who had come down on the rocket the day before.
"This ought to be up your alley, Mort," he was saying to his companion.
"Chemistry and physics department. Want to come along?"
The lab man, Mort Tranter, was willing. See the sights was what he'd come down
from the ship for. She finished her coffee and cigarette, and they went out
into the hall together, gathered equipment and rode the elevator to the fifth
floor.
The lecture hall door was the nearest; they attacked it first With proper
equipment and help, it was no problem and in ten minutes they had it open wide
enough to squeeze through with the floodlights. The room inside was quite
empty, and like most of the rooms behind closed doors, comparatively free from
dust. The students, it appeared, had sat with their backs to the door, facing
a low platform, but their seats and the lecturer's table and equipment had
been removed. The two side walls bore inscriptions: on the right, a pattern of
concentric circles which she recognized as a diagram of atomic structure, and
on the left a complicated table of numbers and words, in two columns. Tranter
Page 22
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
was pointing at the diagram on the right.
"They got as far as the Bohr atom, anyhow," he said. "Well, not quite. They
knew about electron shells, but they have the nucleus pictured as solid
mass. No indication of proton-and-neutron structure. I'll bet, a when you come
to translate their scientific books, you'll find that they taught that the
atom was the ultimate and indivisible particle. That explains why you people
never found any evidence that the Martians
used nuclear energy."
"That's a uranium atom," Captain Miles mentioned.
"It is?" Sid Chamberlain asked, excitedly. "Then they did know about atomic
energy. Just because we haven't found any pictures of A-bomb mushrooms doesn't
mean "
She turned to look at the other wall. Sid's signal reactions were getting away
from him again; uranium meant nuclear power to him, and the two words were
inter-changeable. As she studied the arrangement of the numbers and words, she
could hear Tranter saying:
"Nuts, Sid. We knew about uranium a long time before anybody found out what
could be done with it.
Uranium was discovered on Terra in 1789, by Klaproth."
There was something familiar about the table on the left wall. She tried to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

  • zanotowane.pl
  • doc.pisz.pl
  • pdf.pisz.pl
  • alwayshope.keep.pl

    •