"How We Lost The Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

tens of thousands of unofficial newsgroups devoted to proving that it was really
caused by God, or aliens, or St. Elvis), tens of thousands of hours of TV and a
hundred schlocky movies (and I do include James Cameron’s seven-hour
blockbuster), thousands of scientific papers and dozens of thick technical
reports, including the ten-million-page congressional report, and the
ghostwritten biographies of scientists Who Should Have Known Better.

Now you might think that I’m sending out my version because I was either
misrepresented or completely ignored in all the above. Not at all. I’ll be the
first to admit that my part in the whole thing was pretty insignificant, but
nevertheless I was there, right at the beginning. So consider this shareware
text a footnote or even a tall tale, and if you like it, do feel free to pass it
on, but don’t change the text or drop the byline, if you please.

* * * *

It began in the middle of a routine calibration run in the Exawatt Fusion
facility. All the alarms went off and the AI in charge shut everything down, but
there was no obvious problem. The robots could find no evidence of physical
damage, yet the integrity and radiation alarms kept ringing, and analysis of
experimental data showed that there had been a tremendous fluctuation in energy
levels just after the fusion pulse. So the scientists sent the two of us, Mike
Doherty and me, over the horizon to eyeball the place.

You’ve probably seen a zillion pictures. It was a low, square concrete block

half-buried in the smooth floor of Mendeleev Crater on the Moon’s far side,
surrounded by bulldozed roadways and cable trenches, the two nuclear reactors
which powered it just at the level horizon to the south. At peak, the Exawatt
used a thousand million times more power than the entire U.S. electrical grid to
fire up, for less than a millisecond, six pulsed lasers focused on a target
barely ten micrometers across, producing conditions which simulated those in
the first picoseconds of the Big Bang, before symmetry was broken. Like the
atom bomb a century before, it pushed the envelopes of engineering and physics.
The scientists responsible for firing off that first thermonuclear device
believed that there was a slight but definite chance that it would set fire to
the Earth’s atmosphere; the scientists running the Exawatt thought that there
was a possibility that it might burst its containment and vaporize several
hundred square kilometers around it. That was why they had built it on the
Moon’s far side, inside a deep crater. That’s why it was run by robots, with the
actual labs in a bunker buried over the horizon.

That’s why, when it went wrong, they sent in a couple of GLPs to take a look.

We went in an open rover, straight down the service road. We were wearing bright
orange radiation-proof shrouds over our Moon suits, and camera rigs on our
shoulders so that the scientists could see what we saw. The plant looked intact,
burning salt-white in the glare of a lunar afternoon, throwing a long black
shadow toward us. The red-and-green perimeter lights were on; the cooling sink,
a borehole three kilometers deep, wasn’t venting. I drove the rover all the way
around it, and then we went in.