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

losing amplitude with each pass. That’s what the president is going to tell
everyone.”

I thought about it. Something just bigger than an atom but massing as much as a
mountain, plunging through the twenty-five-kilometer-thick outer layer of
gardened regolith, smashing a centimeter-wide tunnel through the basalt crust
and the mantle, passing through the tiny iron core, gathering mass and slowing,
so that it did not quite emerge at the far side before falling back.

“You were lucky it didn’t come right back at you,” I said.

“The amplitude diminishes with each pass. Eventually it’ll settle at the Moon’s
gravitational center. And that’s why I didn’t want to sign the contract. After
the president tells everyone what I’ve just told you, all the construction
contracts will be put on hold. What you should do is make sure we’re first on
the list for evacuation work.”

“Evacuation?”

“There’s no way to capture the black hole. The Moon, Frank, is fucked. But we’ll
get plenty of work before it’s over.”

He was half right, because the next day, after the president had admitted that
an experiment had somehow dropped a black hole inside the Moon, a serious
problem that would require an international team to monitor, we were both issued
with summonses to appear at the hastily set up congressional inquiry.

* * * *

It was a bunch of bullshit, of course. We went down to Washington, D.C, and
spent a week locked up in the Watergate hotel watching bad cable movies and
endless talk shows, with NASA lawyers showing up every now and then to rehearse
our Q&As, and in the end we had no more than half an hour of easy questions
before the committee let us go. Our lawyers shook our hands on the steps of the
Congress building, in front of a bored video crew, and we went back to Canaveral
and then to the Moon. Why not? By then Mike had convinced me about what was
going to happen. There would be plenty of work for us.

We signed up as part of a roving seismology team, placing remote stations at
various points around the Moon’s equator. The Exawatt plant had been dismantled
and a monitoring station built on its site to try and track the period of the
black hole, which someone had labeled Mendeleev X-1. Mike was as happy as I had
ever seen him; he was getting some of the raw data and doing his own
calculations on the black hole’s accretion rate and orbital path within the
Moon. He stayed up long after our workday was over, hunched over his slate in
the driving chair of our rolligon, with sunlight pouring in through the bubble
canopy while I tried to sleep in the hammock stretched across the cabin, my skin
itching with the Moon dust which got everywhere, and our Moon suits propped in
back like two silent witnesses to our squabbling. His latest best estimate was
that the Moon had between two hundred and five thousand days.