"Jay Lake & Ruth Nestvold - The Canadian Who Came Almost All the Way Back from the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

"How deep can you dive?"

I looked up from the gear I was stowing in the Ranger Cherokee. I hadn't done any diving in years.
"Now wait a minute тАФ "

"If you're going into the water anyway, you could also see if you could get down to the mascon."

I straightened, shaking my head. "The anomaly is in thirty meters of water. I don't think I can hold my
breath more than ninety seconds. That's not enough."

"So we tie a fifteen meter rope to your ankle, drop you over with something heavy to take you down fast,
and you push a pole down the rest of the way."

I laughed. "And do what? Tap?"

She smiled her real smile. "You come back up, tell me what you saw, what it felt like. What's down
there."

"You were planning on asking me this all along, weren't you?"

Her smile took on a guilty cast. "Well, yes."

I sighed. How much did it matter now? There wasn't much I could do to compete with her rich, dead
genius husband. At least I could do this for her.

I wired the butt of an ancient oak post to the end of a twenty-foot aspen pole, then made a wrist loop at
the other end of the pole out of an old bootlace. I would jump headfirst out of the bass boat clutching an
old wheel rim to weigh me down and follow the pole toward the bottom. First I smeared my body with a
mixture of Vaseline and mudтАФwe didn't have enough of the petroleum jelly around the lodge to use it
straight up, but I was worried about the cold.

"We're nuts," I said. Kelly drove the boat straight for the dimple. Our long line trailed behind us toward
the nearest shore, some two hundred feet distant, ready for my belaying act.

Kelly looked happier than she had since I first met her. "Nick's down there."

"I'm not knocking on any doors." I already had mud in some very uncomfortable places.

Her smile was like the sunrise. "Just see what you see."

What I saw was what Nick Maclnnes had seen in her. What I wondered was what she had seen in him:
the record suggested he had been a monomaniacal nutcase who happened to have gotten it right.

The Ranger Cherokee slid down into the dimple, and my stomach did a sharp flop тАФthe world's shortest
log-flume ride. Kelly cut the trolling motor, and the boat circled loosely in the base of the dimple, a
forty-foot wide bowl. The ten-foot walls of water around us were incredibly disconcerting, a violation of
every sense and sensibility. It didn't help that our trailing line strained upward, vanishing into those angled
waterfalls.

We tipped the stripped aspen pole overboard. The oak block pulled it straight down until it was stopped