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

open.

We arrived a few hours after dawn. It was a lonely place, not much
visited despite its historic importance. A big squat carrier rocket had gone
ahead, landing two kilometers to the north, and the robots were already
waiting. There were four of us: a historian from the Museum of Air and
Space in Washington, a photog-rapher, and Mike and me. The site was
ringed around with laser sensors. As we loped through the perimeter, an
automatic beacon on the common band warned us that we were
trespassing on a U.N. heritage site and started to recite the relevant
penalties until the historian found it and turned it off. The angular platform of
the lunar moduleтАЩs descent stage had been scorched by the rocket of the
ascent stage; the gold foil which had wrapped it was torn and tattered, white
paint beneath turned tan by exposure to the sunтАЩs raw ultraviolet. One of its
spidery legs had collapsed after a recent quake focused near new volcanic
cones to the southeast. We lifted everything, working inward toward the
ascent stage: the Passive Seis-mometer and the Laser Ranging
Retroreflector; the flag, its ordinary fabric, stiff-ened by wires, faded and
fragile; an assortment of discarded geology tools; human waste and food
containers and wipes and other litter in crumbling jettison bags; the plaque
with a message from a long-dead president. Before the descent stage was
lifted away, a robot sawed away a chunk of dirt beside its ladder, the spot
where the first human footprint had been made on the Moon. There was
some dispute about which print was actually the first, so two square meters
were carefully lifted. And at last the descent stage was carried off to the
cargo rocket, and there was only a litter of cleated footprints left, our own
overlaying ArmstrongтАЩs and AldrinтАЩs.

It was time to go.

****

As the eruptions grew more frequent, even the skeleton crews of the
various sta-tions were evacuated, leaving a host of robot surveyors in close
orbit or crawling about the troubled surface to monitor the unfolding
disaster. Mike and I went on one of the last shuttles, everyone crowding to
the ports as it made a single low orbital pass before lighting out for Earth.

It was six months after the Mendeleev X-1 incident. The heat
generated by the black holeтАЩs accretion process and tidal forces had
remelted the iron core; pockets of molten basalt in the mantle had swollen
and conjoined. A vast rift opened in the Oceanus Procellarum, splitting the
nearside down its northwestern quadrant and raising new scarps as high
and jagged as those in an old Chesley Bonestell painting. The Orientale
Basin flooded with lava and the fractured blocks of the Maunder formation
sank like foundering ships as new lava flows began to well up. Volcanic
activity was less on the far side, where the crust was thicker, but the Mare
Ingenii collapsed and reflooded, forming a vast new basin which swallowed
the Jules Verne and Gagarin Craters.