Robert J. Sawyer - Peking Man

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 22.07KB 7 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Robert%20J%20Sawyer%20-%20Peking%20Man.txt

Peking Man

by Robert J. Sawyer

First published as the lead story in the anthology Dark Destiny III, edited

by Edward E. Kramer (White Wolf, October 1996).

Winner of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award ("the Aurora") for

Best English-Language Short Story of the Year.

PEKING MAN

by Robert J. Sawyer

The lid was attached to the wooden crate with eighteen nails. The

return address, in blue ink on the blond wood, said, "Sender: Dept. of Anatomy,

P.U.M.C., Peking, China." The destination address, in larger letters, was:

Dr. Roy Chapman Andrews

The American Museum of Natural History

Central Park West at 79th Street

New York, N.Y. U.S.A.

The case was marked "Fragile!" and "REGISTERED" and "Par Avion." A

brand had burned the words "Via Hongkong and by U.S. Air Service" into the wood.

Andrews had waited anxiously for this arrival. Between 1922 and

1930, he himself had led the now-famous Gobi Desert expeditions, searching for

the Asian cradle of humanity. Although he'd brought back untold scientific

riches -- including the first-ever dinosaur eggs -- Andrews had failed to

discover a single ancient human remain.

But now a German scientist, Franz Weidenreich, had shipped to him a

treasure trove from the Orient: the complete fossil remains of Sinanthropus

pekinensis. In this very crate were the bones of Peking Man.

Andrews was actually salivating as he used a crowbar to pry off the

lid. He'd waited so long for these, terrified that they wouldn't survive the

journey, desperate to see what humanity's forefathers had looked like, anxious

The lid came off. The contents were carefully packed in smaller

cardboard boxes. He picked one up and moved over to his cluttered desk. He swept

the books and papers to the floor, laid down the box, and opened it. Inside was

a ball of rice paper, wrapped around a large object. Andrews carefully unwrapped

the sheets, and --

White.

White?

No -- no, it couldn't be.

But it was. It was a skull, certainly -- but not a fossil skull. The

material was bright white.

And it didn't weigh nearly enough.

A plaster cast. Not the original at all.

Andrews opened every box inside the wooden crate, his heart sinking

as each new one yielded its contents. In total, there were fourteen skulls and

eleven jawbones. The skulls were subhuman, with low foreheads, prominent brow

ridges, flat faces, and the most unlikely looking perfect square teeth.

Amazingly, each of the skull casts also showed clear artificial damage to the

foramen magnum.

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Robert%20J%20Sawyer%20-%20Peking%20Man.txt (1 of 7) [12/30/2004 8:23:40 PM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Robert J. Sawyer - Peking Man.pdf

共7页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Robert J. Sawyer - Peking Man

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: