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

After sundown I entered the base through the airlock, which still stands. Ten bodies are sprawled in what must have been the village square. Another was halfway into a suit in the administration building, and the twelfth was a few feet from the bubble wall, where I save him yesterday. A dozen bodies, and they all died of blowout: explosive decompression if you want to be technical.

The circular area under the bubble is only half full of buildings. The rest is a carefully fused sand floor. Other buildings lie in stacks of walls, ceilings, floors, ready to be put up. I suppose the base personnel expected others from Earth.

One of the buildings held electrical wiring. I've hooked a cable to the airmaker battery, and was able to adapt the other end to the contact on my fusion plant. There's a lot of sparking, but the airmaker works. I'm letting it fill the stack of empty O-tanks I found against a pile of walls. The nitrogen dioxide is draining into the bubble.

I know now what happened to the flatlander base.

Bubbletown died by murder. No question of it. When nitrogen dioxide started pouring into the bubble I saw dust blowing out from the edge of town. There was a rip. It was sharp-edged, as if cut by a knife. I can mend it if I can find a bubble repair kit. There must be tine somewhere.

Meanwhile I'm getting oxygen and water. The oxygen tanks I can empty into the lifesystem as they fill. The ship takes it back out of the air and stores it. If I can find a way to get the water here I can just pour it into the john. Can I carry it here in the O-tanks?

April 2 3, 2112 Dawn.

The administration building is also a tape library. They kept a record of the base doings, very complete and so far very boring. It reads like ship's log sounds, but more gossipy and more detailed. Later I'll read it all the way through.

I found some bubble plastic and contact cement and used them to patch the rip. The bubble still wouldn't inflate. So I went out and

found two more rips just like the first. I patched them and looked for more. Found three. When I got them fixed it was nearly sunup.

The O-tanks hold water, but I have to heat them to boil the water to get it out. That's hard work. Question: is it easier to do that or to repair the dome and do my electrolysis inside? How many rips are there?

I've found six. So how many killers were there? No more than three. I've accounted for twelve inside, and according to the log there were fifteen in the second expedition.

No sign of the goldskins. If they'd guessed I was here they'd have come by now. With several months' worth of air in my lifesystem, I'll be home free once I get out of this hole.

April 24, 2112

Two more rips in the bubble, a total of eight. They're about twenty feet apart, evenly spaced around the transparent plastic fabric. It looks like at least one man ran around the dome slashing at the fabric until it wasn't taut enough to cut. I mended the rips. When I left the bubble it was swelling with air.

I'm halfway through the town log, and nobody's seen a Martian vet. I was right, that's what they came for. Thus far they've found three more wells. Like the first, these are made of cut diamond building blocks, fairly large, very well worn, probably tens or hundreds of thousands of years old. Two of the four have dirty nitrogen dioxide at the bottoms. The others are dry. Each of the four has a "dedication block" covered with queer, partially eroded writing. From a partial analysis of the script, it seems that the wells were actually crematoriums: a deceased Martian would explode when he touched water in the nitrogen dioxide at the bottom. It figures. Martians wouldn't have fire.

I still wonder why they came, the men of the base. What could Martians do for them? If they wanted someone to talk to, someone not human, there were dolphins and killer whales right in their own oceans. The trouble they took! And the risks! Just to get from one hole to another,.

Aril 24, 2112

Strange. For the first time since the landing, I did not return to the ship when the sky turned light. When I did start back the sun was up. It showed as I went over the rim. I stood there between a pair of sharp obsidian teeth, staring down at my ship.

It looked like the entrance to Confinement Asteroid.

Confinement is where they take women when they get pregnant: a bubble of rock ten miles long and five miles across, spinning on its axis to produce one gee of outward pull. The children have to stay there for the first year, and the law says they have to spend a month out of each year there until they're fifteen. I've a wife named Letty waiting there now, waiting for the year to pass so she can leave with our daughter Janice. Most miners, they pay the fatherhood fee in one lump sum if they've got the money; it's about sixty thousand commercials, so some have to pay in installments. and sometimes it's the woman who pays; but when they pay they forget about it and leave the women to raise the kids. But I've been thinking about Letty. And Janice. The monopoles in my hold would buy gifts for Letty, and raise Janice with enough left over so she could do some traveling, and still I'd have enough commercials left for more children. I'd have them with Letty, if she'd agree. I think she would.

How'd I get onto that? As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, my ship looks like the entrance to Confinement-or to Farmer's Asteroid, or any underground city. With the fuel tanks gone there's nothing left but the drive and the lifesystem and a small magnetically insulated cargo hold. Only the top half of the lifesystem shows above the sea of dust, a blunt steel bubble with a thick door, not streamlined like a ship of Earth. The heavy drive tube -tangs from the bottom, far beneath the dust. I wonder how deep the dust is.

The splashdown shell will leave a rim of congealed glass around my lifesystem. I wonder if it'll affect my takeoff?

Anyway, I'm losing my fear of daylight.

Yesterday 1. thought the bubble was inflating. It wasn't. More rips were hidden under the pool of dust, and when the pressure built up the dust blew away and down went the bubble. I repaired four rips today before sunlight caught me.