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

device and a neutrino detector. We helped bore a shaft five hundred meters deep
parallel to the hole punched through the floor, and probes and motion sensors
and cameras were lowered into it.

Mike claimed to have worked out what had happened as soon as he stuck the wire
in the hole through the foundation, but he wouldn’t tell me. “You should be able
to guess from what they were trying to measure,” he said, the one time I asked,
and smiled when I called him a son of a bitch. He’s very smart, but sort of
fucked up in the head, antisocial, careless of his appearance and untidy as
hell, and proud that he has four of the five symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome.
But he was my partner, and I trusted him; when he said it wasn’t a good idea to
take up a new contract, I nagged him for a straight hour to explain why, and
went along with him even though he wouldn’t. He was spending all his spare time
making calculations on his slate, and was still working on them at the South
Pole facility.

I raised the subject again when news of the special presidential announcement
broke. “You’d better tell me what you think happened,” I told Mike, “because
I’ll hear the truth in less than an hour, and after that I won’t believe you.”

We were in an arbor in the dome of the South Pole facility. Real plants, cycads
and banana plants and ferns, growing in real dirt around us, sunlight pouring in
at a low angle through the diamond panes high above. The dome capped a small
crater some three hundred meters across, on a high ridge near the edge of the
South Pole-Aitken Basin and in permanent sunlight, the sun circling around the
horizon once every twenty-eight days. It was hot and humid, and the people
splash­ing in the lake below our arbor were making a lot of noise. The lake and
its scattering of atolls took up most of the crater’s floor, with arbors and
cafes and cabins on the bench terrace around it. The water was billion-year-old
comet water, mined from the regolith in permanently shadowed craters. A rail gun
used to lob shaped loads of ice to supply the Clavius base in the early days,
but Clavius had grown, and its administration was uncomfortable with the idea of
being bombarded with ice meteors, which was why they wanted to build a railway.
In the low gravity, the waves out on the lake were five or six meters high, and
big droplets flew a long way, changing shape like amoebas, before falling back.
People were body surfing the waves; a game of water polo had been going on for
several days in one of the bays.

I’d just been playing for a few hours, and I was in a good mood, which was why I
didn’t strangle Mike when, after I asked him to tell me what he knew, he flashed
his goofy smile at me and went back to scratching figures on his slate. Instead,
I snatched the slate from his hands and held it over the edge of the arbor and
said, “You tell me right now, or the slate gets it.”

Mike scratched the swirl of black hair on his bare chest and said, “You know you
won’t do it.”

I made to skim it through the air and said, “How many times do you think it
would bounce before it sank?”