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

“I thought I’d give you a chance to work it out. And it isn’t as if there’s
anything we can do. Didn’t you enjoy the rest?”

“What’s this got to do with not taking up that contract?”

“There’s no point building anything anymore. You still haven’t guessed, have
you?”

I tossed the slate to him. “Maybe I should pick you up and throw you in the
lake.”

I meant it, and I’m a lot bigger than him.

“It’s a black hole,” he said.

“A black hole.”

“Sure. My guess is that the experiment caused a runaway quantum fluctuation that
created a black hole. It had to be bigger than the Planck size, and most
probably was a bit bigger than a hydrogen atom, because it obviously has been
taking up other atoms easily enough. Say around ten to the power twenty-three
kilograms. The mass of a big mountain, like Everest. The magnetic containment
fields couldn’t hold it, of course, and it dropped straight out of the reaction
cham­ber and went through the plant’s floor.”

I said, “The hole we saw was a lot bigger than the width of a hydrogen atom.”

“Sure. The black hole disrupted stuff by tidal force over a far greater distance
than its Swartzschild radius, and sucked some of it right in. That’s why there
was no trace of melting, even though it was pretty hot, and spitting out X-rays
and probably accelerated protons, too —cosmic rays.”

I didn’t believe him, of course, but it was an interesting intellectual
exercise. I said, “So where did the mass come from? Not from the combustion
chamber fuel.”

“Of course not. It was a quantum fluctuation, just like the Universe, which also
came out of nothing. And the Universe weighs a lot more than ten to the power
twenty-three kilograms. Something like, let’s see — “

“Okay,” I said quickly, before Mike lost himself in esoteric calculations. “But
where is it now?”

“Well, it went all the way through,” Mike said.

“Through the Moon? Then it came out, let’s see” —I tried to visualize the Moon’s
globe —”somewhere in Mare Fecunditas.”

“Not exactly. It accelerated in free fall toward the core, went past, and
started to fall back again. It’s sweeping back and forth, gaining mass and