"Paul J. McAuley - How we Lost the Moon - A True Story by Frank W. Allen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

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 back up with dust on the end.”

“This is Ridpath,” someone else said. Ridpath, you may remember,
was the chief of the science team. Although he wasn’t exactly responsible
for what hap-pened, he made millions from selling the rights to his story,
and then hanged himself six months after it was all over. He said, “You boys
get on out of there. We’ll take it from here.”
 Five rolligons passed us on our way back, big fat pressurized
vehicles making speed. “You put a hair up someone’s ass,” I told Mike,
who’d been real quiet after he crawled out from beneath the chamber.

“I think something escaped,” he said.

“Maybe some of the laser energy was deflected.”

“There weren’t any traces of melting,” Mike said, with a preoccupied
air. “And just a bit of all that energy would make a hell of a mess, not leave
a neat little hole. Hmm. Kind of an interesting problem.”

But he didn’t say any more about it until a week later, about an hour
before the president went on the air to explain what had happened.

****

The Moon was a good place to be working then. It was more-or-less run by
scientists, the way Antarctica had been before the drillers and miners got to
it. There were about two thousand people living there at any one time, either
working on projects like the Exawatt or the Big Array or the ongoing
resource mapping surveys, or doing their own little thing. Mike and I were
both part of the General Labor Pool, ready to help anyone. We’d earned
our chops doing Ph.D.s, but we didn’t have the drive or desire to work our
way up the ladder of promotion. We didn’t want responsibility, didn’t want to
be burdened with administration and hustling for funds, which was the lot of
career researchers. We liked to get our hands dirty. Mike has a double
Ph.D. in pure physics and cybernetics and is a whiz at elec-tronics; I’m a
run-of-the-mill geologist who is also a fair pilot. We made a pretty good
team back then and generally worked together whenever we could, and
we’d worked just about every place on the Moon.

When the president made the announcement, we’d moved on from