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

April 29, 2112 I've been stupid.
Those ten suicides. What did they do with their knives after they were through cutting?. Where did they get them in the first place? Kitchen knives won't cut bubble plastic. A laser might, but there can't be more than a couple of portable lasers in the base. I haven't found any.
And the airmaker's batteries were stone dead.
Maybe the Martians kill to steal power. They wouldn't have fire. Then they took my uranium for the same reason, slicing my primer line under the sand and running it into their own container.
But how would they get down there? Dive under the dust?
Oh.
I'm getting out of here.

I made it to the crater. God knows why they didn't stop me. Don't they care? They've got my primer fuel.
They're under the dust. They live there, safe from meteors and violent temperature changes, and they build their cities there too. Maybe they're heavier than the dust, so they can walk around on the bottom.
Why, there must be a whole ecology down there! Maybe one-celled plants on top, to get energy from the sun, to be driven down by currents in the dust and by dust storms, to feed intermediate stages of life. Why didn't anybody look? Oh, I wish I could tell someone!
I haven't time for this. The town 0-tanks won't fit my suit valves, and I can't go back to the ship. Within the next twenty-four hours I've got to repair and inflate the bubble, or die of runout. Later:
Done. I've got my suit off, and I'm scratching like a madman. There were just three slits left to patch, none at all along the edge of the bubble where I found the lone mummy. I patched those three and the bubble swelled up like instant city.
When enough water flows in I'll take a bath. But I'll take it in the square, where I can see the whole rim.
I wonder how long it would take a Martian to get over the rim and down here to the bubble?
Wondering won't help. I could still be seeing goblins.

April 30, 2112 The water feels wonderful. At least these early tourists took some luxuries with them.
I can see perfectly in all directions. Time has filmed the bubble a little, merely enough to be annoying. The sky is jet black, cut raggedly in half by the crater rim. I've turned on all the base lights. They light the interior of the crater, dimly, but well enough so I'd see anything creeping down on me. Unfortunately they also dim out the stars.
The goblins can't get me while I'm awake.
But I'm getting sleepy.
Is that a ship? No, just a meteor. The sky's lousy with meteors. I've got nothing to do but talk to myself until something happens. Later:
I strolled up to the rim to see if my ship was still there. The Martians might have dragged it into the dust. They hadn't, and there's no sign of tampering.
Am I seeing goblins? I could find out. All I'd have to do is peep into the base fusion plant. Either there's a pile there, mostly lead by now... or the pile was stolen seventy years ago. Either way the residual radiation would punish my curiosity.
I'm watching the sun rise through the bubble wall. It has a strange beauty, unlike anything I've, seen in space. I've seen Saturn from an plenty of angles when I pulled monopoles in the rings, but it can't compare to this.
Now I know I'm crazy. It's a hole! I'm at the bottom of the lousy hole!
The sun writes a jagged white line along the crater rim. I can see the whole rim from here, no fear of that. No matter how fast they move, I can get into my suit before they get down to me.
It would be good to see my enemy.
Why did they come here, the fifteen men who lived and died here? I know why I'm here: for love of money. Them too? A hundred years ago the biggest diamonds men could make looked like coarse sand. They may have come after the diamond wells. But travel was fiendishly expensive then. Could they have made a profit?
Or did they think they could develop Mars the way they developed the asteroids? Ridiculous! But they didn't have my hindsight. And holes can be useful... like the raw lead deposits along Mercury's dawnside crescent. Pure lead, condensed from dayside vapor, free for the hauling. We'd be doing the same with Martian diamonds if it weren't so cheap to make them.

Here's the Sun. An anticlimax: I can't look into it, though it's dimmer than the rock miner's Sun. No more postcard scenery till--
Wups.
I'd never reach my suit. One move and the bubble will be a sieve. Just now they're as motionless as I am, staring at me without eyes. I wonder how they sense me? Their spears are poised and ready. Can they really puncture bubble fabric? But the Martians must know their own strength, and they've done this before.
All this time I've been waiting for them to swarm over the rim. They came out of the dust pool in the bottom of the crater. I should have realized the obsidian would be as badly cracked down there as elsewhere.
They do look like goblins.

For moments the silence was broken only by the twin humming of a nearby bumblebee and a distant tractor. Then Lit reached to turn off the log. He said, "We'd have saved him if he could have held out."
"You knew he was there?"
"Yah. The Deimos scope watched him land. We sent in a routine request for permission to land on UN property. Unfortunately flatlanders can't move as fast as a drugged snail, and we knew of no reason to hurry them up. A telescope would have tracked Muller if he'd tried to leave."
"Was he nuts?"
"Oh, the Martians were real enough. But we didn't know that until way too late. We saw the bubble inflate and stay that way for a while, and we saw it deflate all of a sudden. It looked like Muller'd had an accident. We broke the law and sent a ship down to get him if he was still alive. And that's why I'm telling you all this, Garner. As First Speaker for the Belt Political Section, I hereby confess that two Belt ships have trespassed on United Nations property."
"You had good reasons. Go on."
"You'd have been proud of him, Garner. He didn't run for his suit; he knew perfectly well it was too far away. Instead, he ran toward an 0-tank full of water. The Martians must have slashed the moment he turned, but he reached the tank, stepped through one of the holes and turned the 0-tank on the Martians. In the low pressure it was like using a fire hose. He got six before he fell."
"They burned?"
"They did. But not completely. There are some remains. We took three bodies, along with their spears, and left the others in situ. You want the corpses?"
"Damn right."
"Why?"
"What do you mean, Lit?"