"Murray Leinster - Four from Planet 05" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

He shrugged, and she said somehow disconsolately, "What will knowing the orbits of meteors lead
to?"
He shrugged again. Having Gail around him so frequently was becoming rather uncomfortable, feeling
as he did about her. And he'd been thrown together with her more than average.
Everybody at the base had to carry at least two jobs. He'd piloted Gail in a helicopter ride along
the edge of the Barrier two days before. The Barrier was the line of monstrous three-to-six-
hundred-foot-high ice cliffs which formed most of the shoreline of this part of the Antarctic
continent. They'd flown low and close to the cliffs' base, with angry seas ffinging themselves
against the ice. It was a frightening experience, but Gail hadn't flinched.
"Finding out some special meteor-orbits," he said drily, "might lead to finding out when the Fifth
Planet blew itself up. According to Bode's Law there ought to be a planet like ours between Mars
and Jupiter. If there
was, it blew itself to pieces, or maybe the people on it had an atomic war."
Gail cocked her head to one side.
"Now that promises!" she said. "Keep on!"
"There ought to be a planet between Mars and Jupiter, in a certain orbit," he told her. "There
isn't. Instead, there's a lot of debris floating around. Some is as far out as Jupiter. Some is as
far in as Earth. It's mostly between Mars and Jupiter, though, and it's made up of hunks of rock
and metal of all shapes and sizes. We Call the big ones asteroids. There's no proof so far, but
it's respectable to believe that there used to be a Fifth Planet, and that it blew itself up or
was blown up by its inhabitants. I'm checking meteor-orbits to see if some meteors are really tiny
asteroids."
"Hmrninm," said Gail. Then. she asked about one of those surprising, unconnected bits of
information a person in the newspaper business picks up. "Don't they say that the mountains on the
moon were made by asteroids falling on it?" -
Soames nodded and glanced at her quickly. She'd surprised him before. Not every attractive girl
knows about the moon-mountains, craters, ring-mountains. They are the impact-splashes of monstrous
missiles which, a long time ago, hurtled out of space to blast the surface of Earth's small
companion.
Some of the craters could have been made by nothing more than giant meteorites, but there is a


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valley in the Lunar Alps which is seventy-five miles long and five miles wide. It was literally
gouged out of the moon's curved surface. It must have been made by something too big to be
anything but an asteroid, plunging wildly through emptiness and just barely touching the edge of
the moon in a grazing miss before it went on to nobody knows where. Then there are the nwres-the
so-called seas-which are certainly plains of lava formed when even larger masses plunged deep and
let the inner fires of the moon flow out.
"It's at least possible that the moon was smashed up by fragments of the Fifth Planet," agreed
Soames. "In fact, that's a more or less accepted explanation."
She looked at him expectantly. The inter-base radio speaker muttered. Somebody in the Danish base
read off readings of cosmic-particle frequency. In theory the in-formation would be avidly noted
down by the French, English, American, Belgian, and Russian bases. It wasn't.
"I have to think of my readers," insisted Gail. "It's interesting enough, but how can I make it
something they'll be concerned about? When the moon was smashed, why wasn't Earth?"
"It's assumed that Earth was," Soames told her. It, was odd to talk to Gail about abstract things,
for her never to mention anything but impersonal matters when he felt so much more than an