"Niven, Larry - Bottom Hole" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

"Muller's second thought was to use the hole. An in-and-out spin would change his course more than he could hope to do with the motor. He could time it so Mars would hide him from Ceres whey, he curved out. He could damn near touch the surface, too. Mars's atmosphere is as thin as a flatlander's dreams."

"Thanks a lot. Lit, isn't Mars UN property?"

"Only because we never wanted it."

Then Muller had been trespassing. "Go on. What happened to Muller?"

"I'll let him tell it. This is his log." Lit Shaeffer did something to the flat box, and a man's voice spoke.

Aril 20, 2112

The sky is flat, the land is flat, and they meet in a circle at infinity. No star shows but the big one, a little bigger than it shows through most of the Belt, but dimmed to red, like the sky.

It's the bottom of a hole, and I must have been crazy to risk it. But I 'm here. I got down alive. I didn't expect to, not there at the end.

It was one crazy landing.

Imagine a universe half of which has been replaced by an ocher Abstraction, too distant and far too big to show meaningful detail, Moving past you at a hell of a clip. A strange, singing sound comes through the walls, like nothing you've ever heard before, like the pound of the wings of the angel of death. The walls are getting \,,-arm. You can hear the thermosystem whining even above the shriek of air whipping around the hull. Then, because you don't have enough problems, the ship shakes itself like a mortally wounded dinosaur.

That was my fuel tanks tearing loose. All at once and nothing first, tile four of them sheered their mooring bars and went spinning down ahead of me, cherry red.

That faced me with two bad choices. I had to decide fast. If I finished the hyperbola I'd be heading into space on an unknown course with what fuel was left in my inboard cooling tank. My lifesystem wouldn't keep me alive more than two weeks. There wasn't much chance I could get anywhere in that time, with so little fuel, and I'd seen to, it the goldskins couldn't come to me.

But the fuel in the cooling tank would get me down. Even the "flips of Earth use only a little of their fuel getting in and out of their pet gravity well. Most of it gets burned getting them from place to place fast. And Mars is lighter than Earth.

But what then? I'd still have two weeks to live.

I remembered the old Lacis Solis base, deserted seventy years ago. Surely I could get the old lifesystems working well enough to support one man. I might even find enough water to turn some into hydrogen by electrolysis. It was a better risk than heading out into nowhere.

Right or wrong, I went down.

The stars are gone, and the land around me makes no sense. Now

I know why they call planet dwellers "flatlanders." I feel like a gnat can a table.

I'm sitting here shaking, afraid to step outside.

Beneath a red-black sky is a sea of dust punctuated by scattered, badly cast glass ashtrays. The smallest, just outside the port, are a few inches in diameter. The largest are miles across. As I came clown the deep-radar showed me fragments of much larger craters sleep under the dust. The dust is soft and fine, almost like quicksand. I came down like a feather, but the ship is buried to halfway tip the lifesystem.

I set down just beyond the lip of one of the largest craters, the one which houses the ancient flatlander base. From above the base looked I Ike a huge transparent raincoat discarded on the cracked bottom.

It's a weird place. But I'll have to go out sometime; how else can I use the base lifesystem?

My Uncle Bat used to tell me stupidity carries the death penalty.

I'll go outside tomorrow.

April 21, 2112