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

right. But tossing aside such impossibly grandiose claims, it was and still is
a hell of a story. ItтАЩs generated millions of bytes of Web journalism (two
years after, there are still more than two hundred official Web sites, not to
mention the tens of thousands of unofficial newsgroups devoted to proving
that it was really caused by God, or aliens, or St. Elvis), tens of thousands
of hours of TV and a hundred schlocky movies (and I do include James
CameronтАЩs seven-hour blockbuster), thousands of scientific papers and
dozens of thick technical reports, including the ten-million-page
congressional report, and the ghostwritten biographies of scientists Who
Should Have Known Better.

Now you might think that IтАЩm sending out my version because I was
either misrepresented or completely ignored in all the above. Not at all. IтАЩll
be the first to admit that my part in the whole thing was pretty insignificant,
but nevertheless I was there, right at the beginning. So consider this
shareware text a footnote or even a tall tale, and if you like it, do feel free to
pass it on, but donтАЩt change the text or drop the byline, if you please.

****

It began in the middle of a routine calibration run in the Exawatt Fusion
facility. All the alarms went off and the AI in charge shut everything down,
but there was no obvious problem. The robots could find no evidence of
physical damage, yet the integrity and radiation alarms kept ringing, and
analysis of experimental data showed that there had been a tremendous
fluctuation in energy levels just after the fusion pulse. So the scientists sent
the two of us, Mike Doherty and me, over the horizon to eyeball the place.

YouтАЩve probably seen a zillion pictures. It was a low, square concrete
block half-buried in the smooth floor of Mendeleev Crater on the MoonтАЩs far
side, sur-rounded by bulldozed roadways and cable trenches, the two
nuclear reactors which powered it just at the level horizon to the south. At
peak, the Exawatt used a thousand million times more power than the entire
U.S. electrical grid to fire up, for less than a millisecond, six pulsed lasers
focused on a target barely ten mi-crometers across, producing conditions
which simulated those in the first picosec-onds of the Big Bang, before
symmetry was broken. Like the atom bomb a century before, it pushed the
envelopes of engineering and physics. The scientists respon-sible for firing
off that first thermonuclear device believed that there was a slight but
definite chance that it would set fire to the EarthтАЩs atmosphere; the
scientists running the Exawatt thought that there was a possibility that it
might burst its containment and vaporize several hundred square kilometers
around it. That was why they had built it on the MoonтАЩs far side, inside a
deep crater. ThatтАЩs why it was run by robots, with the actual labs in a bunker
buried over the horizon.

ThatтАЩs why, when it went wrong, they sent in a couple of GLPs to take
a look.

We went in an open rover, straight down the service road. We were