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

The plant was essentially one big hall filled with the laser-pumping assemblies,
huge frames of parallel color-coded pipes each as big as one of those old Saturn
rockets and threaded through with bundles of heavy cables and trackways for the
robots which serviced them. We crept along the tiled floor in their shadows like
a pair of orange mice, directing our camera rigs here and there at the request
of the scientists. The emergency lights were, still strobing, and I asked
someone to switch them off, which they did after only five minutes’ discussion
about whether it was a good idea to disturb anything.

The six laser-focusing pipes, two meters in diameter, converged on the bus-sized
experimental chamber. Containment was a big problem; that chamber was crammed
with powerful magnetic tori which generated the fields in which the target, a
pellet of ultra-compressed metallic hydrogen, was heated by chirped pulse
amplification to ten billion degrees Centigrade. It was surrounded by catwalks
and hidden by the flared ends of the focusing pipes, the capillary grid of the
liquid sodium cooling system, and a hundred different kinds of monitor. We
checked the system diagnostics of the monitors, which told us only that several
detectors on the underside had ceased to function, and then, harangued by
scientists, crawled all around the chamber as best we could, sweating heavily in
our suits and chafing our elbows and knees.

Mike found a clue to what had happened when he managed to wriggle into the crawl
space beneath the chamber, quite a feat in a pressurized suit. He had taken off
his camera rig to do it, and it took quite a bit of prompting before he started
to describe what he saw.

“There’s a severed cable here, and something has punched a hole in the box above
it. Let me shift around…Okay, I can see a hole in the floor, too. About two
centimeters across. I’m poking my screwdriver into it. Well, it must go all the
way through the tiles, I can’t see how deep. Hey, Frank, get me some of that
wire, will you?”

There was a spool of copper cable nearby. I cut off a length and passed it in.

“You two get on out of there now,” one of the scientists advised.

“This won’t take but a minute,” Mike said, and started humming tunelessly, which
meant that he was thinking hard about something.

I asked, because I knew he wouldn’t say anything otherwise, “What is it?”

“Looks like someone took a shot at this old thing,” Mike said. “Shit. How deep
does the foundation go?”

“The concrete was poured to three meters,” someone said over the radio link, and
the scientist who’d spoken before said, “It really isn’t a good idea to mess
around there, fellows.”

“It goes all the way through,” Mike said. “I wiggled the wire around and it came