"G. David Nordley - Into the Miranda Rift" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nordley G. David)

INTO THE MIRANDA
RIFT
G. David Nordley

New writer G. David Nordley is a retired Air Force officer and physicist
who has become a frequent contributor to Analog in the last couple of
years, winning that magazine's Analytical Laboratory readers poll last year
for his story "Poles Apart." He has also sold stories to Asimov's Science
Fiction, Tomorrow, Mindsparks, F&SF, and elsewhere. He lives in
Sunnyvale, California.



I

This starts after we had already walked, crawled, and clawed our way
fifty-three zig-zagging kilometers into the Great Miranda Rift, and had
already penetrated seventeen kilometers below the mean surface. It starts
because the mother of all Mirandaquakes just shut the door behind us and
the chances of this being rescued are somewhat better than mine; I need
to do more than just take notes for a future article. It starts because I have
faith in human stubbornness, even in a hopeless endeavor; and I think the
rescuers will come, eventually. I am Wojciech Bubka and this is my
journal.
Miranda, satellite of Uranus, is a cosmic metaphor about those things
in creation that come together without really fitting, like the second try at
marriage, ethnic integration laws, or a poet trying to be a science
reporter. It was blasted apart by something a billion years ago and the
parts drifted back together, more or less. There are gaps. Rifts. Empty
places for things to work their way in that are not supposed to be there;
things that don't belong to something of whole cloth.
 Like so many great discoveries, the existence of the rifts was obvious
after the fact, but our geologist, Nikhil Ray, had to endure a decade of
derision, several rejected papers, a divorce from a wife unwilling to share
academic ridicule, and public humiliation in the pop science
media—before the geology establishment finally conceded that what the
seismological network on Miranda's surface had found had, indeed,
confirmed his work.
Nikhil had simply observed that although Miranda appears to be made
of the same stuff as everything else in the Uranian system, the other
moons are just under twice as dense as water while Miranda is only one
and a third times as dense. More ice and less rock below was one
possibility. The other possibility, which Nikhil had patiently pointed out,
was that there could be less of everything; a scattering of voids or bubbles
beneath.
So, with the goat-to-hero logic we all love, when seismological results
clearly showed that Miranda was laced with substantial amounts of
nothing, Nikhil became a minor Solar System celebrity, with a permanent
chair at Coriolis, and a beautiful, high-strung, young renaissance woman
as a trophy wife.