"Larry Niven - At the Bottom of a Hole" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

At the Bottom of a Hole

TWELVE STORIES BELOW the roof gardens were citrus groves, grazing pastures, and truck farms. They curved out from the base of the hotel in neat little squares, curved out and up, and up, and up and over. Five miles overhead was the fusion sunlight tube, running down the radius of the slightly bulging cylinder that was Farmer's Asteroid. Five miles above the sunlight tube, the sky was a patchwork of small squares, split by a central wedding ring of lake and by tributary rivers, a sky alive with the tiny red glints of self-guided tractors.
Lucas Garner was half-daydreaming, letting his eyes rove the solid sky. At the Belt government's invitation he had entered a bubbleworld for the first time, combining a vacation from United Nations business with a chance at a brand new experience--rare thing for a man seventeen decades old. He found it pleasantly kooky to look up into a curved sky of fused rock and imported topsoil.
"There's nothing immoral about smuggling," said Lit Shaeffer.
The surface overhead was dotted with hotels, as if the bubbleworld were turning to city. Garner knew it wasn't. Those hotels, and the scattered hotels in the other bubbleworld, served every Belter's occasional need for an Earthlike environment. Belters don't need houses. A Belter's home is the inside of his pressure suit.
Garner returned his attention to his host.
"You mean smuggling's like picking pockets on Earth?"
"That's just what I don't mean," Shaeffer said. The Belter reached into his coverall pocket, pulled out something flat and black, and laid it on the table.
"I'll want to play that in a minute. Garner, picking pockets is legal on Earth. Has to be, the way you crowd together. You couldn't enforce a law against picking pockets. In the Belt smuggling is against the law, but it isn't immoral. It's like a flatlander forgetting to feed the parking meter. There's no loss of self-respect. If you get caught you pay the fine and forget it."
"0h."
"If a man wants to send his earnings through Ceres, that's up to him. It costs him a straight fifty percent. If he thinks he can get past the goldskins, that too is his choice. But if we catch him we'll confiscate his cargo, and everybody will be laughing at him. Nobody pities an inept smuggler."
"Is that what Muller tried to do?"
"Yah. He had a valuable cargo, twenty kilos of pure north magnetic poles. The temptation was too much for him. He tried to get past us, and we picked him up on radar. Then he did something stupid. He tried to whip around a hole.
"He must have been on course for Luna when we found him. Ceres was behind him with the radar. Our ships were ahead of him, matching course at two gee. His mining ship wouldn't throw more than point five gee, so eventually they'd pull alongside him no matter what he did. Then he noticed Mars was just ahead of him."
"The hole." Garner knew enough Belters to have learned a little of their slang.
"The very one. His first instinct must have been to change course. Belters learn to avoid gravity wells. A man can get killed half a dozen ways coming too close to a hole. A good autopilot will get him safely around it, or program an in-and-out spin, or even land him at the bottom, God forbid. But miners don't carry good autopilots. They carry cheap autopilots, and they stay clear of holes."
"You're leading up to something," Garner said regretfully.
"Business?"
"You're too old to fool."
Sometimes Garner believed that himself. Sometime between the First World War and the blowing of the second bubbleworld, Garner had learned to read faces as accurately as men read print. Often it saved time-and in Garner's view his time was worth saving.
"Go on," he said.
"Muller's second thought was to use the hole. An inand-out spin would change his course more then he could hope to do with the motor. He could time it so, Mars would hide him from Ceres when he curved out. He could damn near touch the surface, too. Mars' atmosphere is as thin as a flatlander's dreams."
"Thanks a lot. Lit, isn't Mars UN property?"
"Only because we never wanted it."
Then Muller had been trespassing.
"Go on. What happened to Muller?"
"I'll let him tell it. This is his log." Lit Shaeffer did something to the flat box, and a man's voice spoke.

April 20, 2112 The sky is flat, the land is flat, and they meet in a circle at infinity. No star shows but the big one, a little bigger than it shows, through most of the Belt, but dimmed to red, like the sky.
It's the bottom of a hole, and I must have been crazy to risk it. But I'm here. I got down alive. I didn't expect to, not there at the end.
It was one crazy landing.
Imagine a universe half of which has been replaced by an ocher abstraction, too distant and far too big to show meaningful detail, moving past you at a hell of a clip. A strange, singing sound comes through the walls, like nothing you've ever heard before, like the sound of the wings of the angel of death. The walls are getting warm. You can hear the thermosystem whining even above the shriek of air whipping around the hull. Then, because you don't have enough problems the ship shakes itself like a mortally wounded dinosaur.
That was my fuel tanks tearing loose. All at once and nothing first, the four of them sheered their mooring bars and went spinning down ahead of me, cherry red.
That faced me with two bad choices. I had to decide fast. If I finished the hyperbola I'd be heading into space on an unknown course with what fuel was left in my inboard cooling tank. My lifesystem wouldn't keep me alive more than two weeks. There wasn't much chance I could get anywhere in that time, with so little fuel, and I'd seen to it the goldskins couldn't come to me.
But the fuel in the cooling tank would get me down. Even the ships of Earth use only a little of their fuel getting in and out of their pet gravity well. Most of it gets burned getting them from place to place fast. And Mars is lighter than Earth.
But what then? I'd still have two weeks to live.
I remembered the old Lacis Solis base, deserted seventy years ago. Surely I could get the old lifesystems working well enough to support one man. I might even find enough water to turn some into hydrogen by electrolysis. It was a better risk than heading out into nowhere.
Right or wrong, I went down.
The stars are gone, and the land around me makes no sense. Now I know why they call planet dwellers "flatlanders." I feel like a gnat on a table.
I'm sitting here shaking, afraid to step outside.
Beneath a red-black sky is a sea of dust punctuated by scattered, badly cast glass ashtrays. The smallest, just outside the port, are a few inches in diameter. The largest are miles across. As I came down the deep-radar showed me fragments of much larger craters deep under the dust. The dust is soft and fine, almost like quicksand. I came down like a feather, but the ship is buried to halfway up the lifesystem.
I set down just beyond the lip of one of the largest craters, the one which houses the ancient flatlander base. From above the base looked like a huge transparent raincoat discarded on the cracked bottom.
It's a weird place. But I'll have to go out sometime; how else can I use the base lifesystem?
My Uncle Bat used to tell me stupidity carries the death penalty.
I'll go outside tomorrow.

April 21, 2112 My clock says it's morning. The Sun's around on the other side of the planet, leaving the sky no longer bloody. It looks almost like space if you remember to look away from gravity, though the stars are dim, as if seen through fogged plastic. A big star has come over the horizon, brightening and dimming like a spinning rock. Must be Phobos, since it came from the sunset region.
I'm going out. Later:
A sort of concave glass shell surrounds the ship where the fusion flame splashed down. The ship's lifesystem, the half that shows above the dust, rests in the center like a frog on a lillypad in Confinement Asteroid. The splashdown shell is all a spiderweb of cracks, but it's firm enough to walk on.