"David Gerrold - Starsiders 1 - Jumping of the Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gerrold David)

Weird said, "Oh, wow!"
Stinky said, "Daddy, is that a real hole?"
And I said a word that got me a dirty look from all three of them.
It was the biggest empty space I'd ever seen in my life. It was eerie. At the bottom, there were some
buildings and even a couple of scooters and jeeps. That's how you could tell how big it was. Weird started
reading aloud from the souvenir pamphlet, "The Barringer crater is named for the American engineer,
Daniel M. Barringer, who theorized in 1905 that it was caused by the impact of a meteor. The meteor
struck the Earth almost head on, 25,000 years before the birth of Christ; it was mostly nickel and iron, 30
meters (100 feet) in diameterтАФactually, that makes it an asteroidтАФand weighed 63,000 metric tons. It
was traveling 8-16 kilometers, or 5-10 miles, per second. The blast was the equivalent of a 35-megaton
nuclear warhead. Most of the asteroid was vaporized, but approximately 30 tons of fragments have been
collected. The minerals coesite and stishovite, which can only be formed under very high pressure, have
been discovered here.
"The crater is 1.2 kilometers in diameterтАФthat's about three-quarters of a mile. It's 180 meters deep,
surrounded by a rim rising 50 meters above the surrounding plain. This wall we're on is 160 feet high. So
that makes it 760 feet to the bottom."
I said, "I bet you could put the Empire State Building inside it and it wouldn't show."
"No," said Weird, still reading. "The Empire State Building is 450 meters highтАФ1475 feet. The top
half would still be visible."
"You know what I like about you, Douglas?" I said.
"No, what?"
"Nothing."
"Hey, it says so right here, ChiggerтАФ" He waved the pamphlet at me. I slapped it away.
"All right. Knock it off, you two," Dad said. We both turned away from each other, annoyed.
The four of us were all alone on that crater wall. If there was anyone else around, we didn't see them.
Not even at the bottom of the crater. All around us everything was very hot and very silent and very dark
all the way down. There was no wind. It was like being frozen in time. The whole bottom of the crater
was one big shadow. And it looked haunted. It made me queasy.
"Look," said Weird, pointing. "There's a path. I'll bet it goes all the way down."
"Where?"
"There." He pointed. It spiraled around and down. The crater walls were too steep to get to the
bottom any other way. Stinky started being Stinky almost immediately. "Can we go down there, huh?
Huh?" He didn't wait for an answer. He just started running along the path.
Dad hollered, "No, waitтАФ" but Stinky didn't stop. So Dad poked me and said, "Go, get him."
"UhтАФ" I didn't want to say that the height of the crater and the steepness of the wall scared me. "If I
chase him, he'll just keep running. If we just stand here, he'll give up and come backтАФ"
"And what if he slips and falls?" said Dad. "Go get him."
I looked to Weird for support, but he just pushed me forward. "Go on, Chigger."
"You too!" I demanded.
 "Both of you, go after him! Now!" said Dad. Weird pushed me again, and I was off. Behind me, I
heard Dad say, "You too, Douglas!" I could hear him following behind me, but it didn't sound like he was
making much of an effort. Apparently he thought this was just a kid thing, not worthy of serious geek
attention.
The path was narrow and steep and scary. It was like running down the side of a wall. I tried not to
look off to my left, where there was nothing at all except a lot of nothing at all. Maybe it was all that time
living in a tube-town, I just didn't like big open spacesтАФand this was the biggest and openest I'd ever
seen. So I didn't look. And if I didn't see it, then it wasn't there. I hoped.
"Stinky, you stop right there!" I called after him, but he giggled and shouted back, "You can't catch
me. You can't catch me." He kept running and laughing, like it was all a game. And to tell the truth, it was
almost kinda fun running down and around the crater wall. It was all downhill, so it was easy running.