"Paul J. McAuley - How we Lost the Moon - A True Story by Frank W. Allen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

тАЬThen itтАЩs remelting the interior. Those anomalies in the seismology
signals are melt caverns full of lava.тАЭ

Mike said thoughtfully, тАЬIтАЩm sure weтАЩll start picking up a weak magnetic
field soon, when the iron core liquifies and starts circulating. Of course, the
end will be pretty close by then. Wow. That thing out there is really big.тАЭ

The rolligon was climbing a long gentle slope toward the top of a
curved ridge more than a kilometer high, the remnants of the rim of a crater
which had been mostly buried by the fluid lava flow which had formed the
Oceanus Procellarum. I told the AI to stop when I spotted the source of the
plume. It was a huge fresh-looking crevice that ran out from a volcanic
dome; gas was jetting out of the slumped side of the dome like steam from
a boiling kettle. Dust fell straight down in sheets kilometers long. Already,
an appreciable ray of brighter material was forming on the regolith beneath
the plume.

тАЬWe should get closer,тАЭ Mike said. He was rocking back and forth in
his chair like a delighted child.

тАЬI donтАЩt think so. There will be plenty of rocks lofted along with the gas
and dust.тАЭ
 We transmitted some pictures, then suited up and went outside to set
up a seismology package. The sun was in the east, painting long shadows
on the ground, which shook, ever so gently, under my boots. With no
atmosphere to scatter the light, shadows were razor sharp, and color
changed as I moved about. The dusty regolith was deep brown in my
shadow, but a bright blinding white when I looked toward the sun, turning
ashy gray to either side. The gas plume glittered and flashed against the
black sky. I told Mike that it was probably from a source deep in the
megaregolith; pressure increased in gas pockets with depth. A quake,
prob-ably at the interface between the megaregolith and the rigid crust,
must have opened a path to the surface.

тАЬThereтАЩll be a lot more of these,тАЭ Mike said.

тАЬItтАЩll blow itself out soon enough.тАЭ

But it was still venting strongly when we had finished our work, and we
drove a long way north to skirt around it, with Mike scratching away on his
slate, fac-toring this new evidence into his calculations.

****

We were out for another two weeks, ending our run in lunar night at the Big
Array Station at Korolev. It was one of the biggest craters on the far side,
with slumped terraced walls and hummocky rim deposits like ranges of low
hills. Its floor was spattered with newer craters, including a dark-floored
lava-flooded crater on its southern edge which was now the focus of a
series of quakes of steadily increasing amplitude. Korolev Station, up on