"Larry Niven - The Hole Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

THE HOLE MAN

One day Mars will be gone.
Andrew Lear says that it will start with violent quakes, and end hours or days later, very suddenly. He ought to know. ItТs all his fault.
Lear also says that it wonТt happen for from years to centuries. So we stay, Lear and the rest of us. We study the alien base for what it can tell us, while the center of the world we stand on is slowly eaten away. ItТs enough to give a man nightmares.
It was Lear who found the alien base.
We had reached Mars: fourteen of us, in the cramped bulbous life-support system of the Percival Lowell. We were circling in orbit, taking our time, correcting our maps and looking for anything that thirty years of Mariner probes might have missed.
We were mapping mascons, among other things. Those mass concentrations under the lunar maria were almost certainly left by good-sized asteroids, mountains of rock falling silently out of the sky until they struck with the energies of thousands of fusion bombs. Mars has been cruising through the asteroid belt for four billion years. Mars would show bigger and better mascons. They would affect our orbits.
So Andrew Lear was hard at work, watching pens twitch on graph paper as we circled Mars. A bit of machinery fell alongside the Percival Lowell, rotating. Within its thin shell was a weighted double lever system, deceptively simple: a Forward Mass Detector. The pens mapped its twitchings.
Over Sirbonis Palus, they began mapping strange curves.
Another man might have cursed and tried to fix it. Andrew Lear thought it out, then sent the signal that would stop the free-falling widget from rotating.
It had to be rotating to map a stationary mass.
But now it was mapping simple sine waves.
Lear went running to Captain Childrey.
Running? It was more like trapeze artistry. Lear pulled himself along by handholds, kicked off from walls, braked with a hard push of hands or feet. Moving in free fall is hard work when youТre in a hurry, and Lear was a forty-year-old astrophysicist, not an athlete. He was blowing hard when he reached the control bubble.
ChildreyЧwho was an athleteЧwaited with a patient, slightly contemptuous smile while Lear caught his breath.
He already thought Lear was crazy. LearТs words only confirmed it. УGravity for sending signals? Dr. Lear, will you please quit bothering me with your weird ideas. IТm busy. We all are.Ф
This was not entirely unfair. Some of LearТs enthusiasms were peculiar. Gravity generators. Black holes. He thought we should be searching for Dyson spheres:
stars completely enclosed by an artificial shell. He believed that mass and inertia were two separate things: that it should be possible to suck the inertia Out of a spacecraft, say, so that it could accelerate to near lightspeed in a few minutes. He was a wide-eyed dreamer, and when he was flustered he tended to wander from the point.
УYou donТt understand,Ф he told Childrey. УGravity radiation is harder to block than electromagnetic waves. Patterned gravity waves would be easy to detect. The advanced civilizations in the galaxy may all be communicating by gravity. Some of them may even be modulating pulsarsЧrotating neutron stars. ThatТs where Project
Ozma went wrong: they were only looking for signals in the electromagnetic spectrum.Ф
Childrey laughed. УSure. Your little friends are using neutron stars to send you messages. WhatТs that got to do with us?Ф
УWell, look!Ф Lear held up the strip of flimsy, nearly weightless paper heТd torn from the machine. УI got this over Sirbonis Palus. I think we ought to land there.Ф
УWeТre landing in Mare Cimmerium, as you perfectly well know. The lander is already deployed and ready to board. Dr. Lear, weТve spent four days mapping this area. ItТs flat. ItТs in a green-brown area. When spring comes next month, weТll find out whether thereТs life there! And everybody wants it that way except you!Ф
Lear was still holding the graph paper before him like a shield. УPlease. Take one more circuit over Sirbonis Palus.Ф
Childrey opted for the extra orbit. Maybe the sine waves convinced him. Maybe not. He would have liked inconveniencing the rest of us in LearТs name, to show him for a fool.
But the next pass showed a tiny circular feature in Sirbonis Palus. And LearТs mass indicator was making sine waves again.

The aliens had gone. During our first few months we always expected them back any minute. The machinery in the base was running smoothly and perfectly, as if the owners had only just stepped out.
The base was an inverted pie plate two stories high, and windowless, The air inside was breathable, like EarthТs air three miles up, but with a bit more oxygen. MarsТs air is far thinner, and poisonous. Clearly they were not of Mars.
The walls were thick and deeply eroded. They leaned inward against the internal pressure. The roof was somewhat thinner, just heavy enough for the pressure to support it. Both walls and roof were of fused Martian dust.
The heating system still workedЧand it was also the lighting system: grids in the ceiling glowing brick red. The base was always ten degrees too warm. We didnТt find the off switches for almost a week: they were behind locked panels. The air system blew gusty winds through the base until we fiddled with the fans.
We could guess a lot about them from what theyТd left behind. They must have come from a world smaller than Earth, circling a red dwarf star in close orbit. To be close enough to be warm enough, the planet would have to be locked in by tides, turning one face always to its star. The aliens must have evolved on the lighted side, in a permanent red day, with winds constantly howling over the border from the night side.
And they had no sense of privacy. The only doorways that had doors in them were airlocks. The second floor was a hexagonal metal gridwork. It would not block you off from your friends on the floor below. The bunk room was an impressive expanse of mercury-filled waterbed, wall to wall. The rooms were too small and cluttered, the furniture and machinery too close to the doorways, so that at first we were constantly bumping elbows and knees. The ceilings were an inch short of six feet high on both floors, so that we tended to walk stooped even if we were short enough to stand upright. Habit. But Lear was just tall enough to knock his head if he stood up fast, anywhere in the base.
We thought they must have been smaller than human. But their padded benches seemed human-designed in size and shape. Maybe it was their minds that were different: they didnТt need psychic elbow room.
The ship had been bad enough. Now this. Within the base was instant claustrophobia. It put all of our tempers on hair triggers.
Two of us couldnТt take it.
Lear and Childrey did not belong on the same planet.
With Childrey, neatness was a compulsion. He had enough for all of us. During those long months aboard Percival Lowell, it was Childrey who led us in calisthenics. He flatly would not let anyone skip an exercise period. We eventually gave up trying.
Well and good. The exercise kept us alive. We werenТt getting the healthy daily exercise anyone gets walking around the living room in a one-gravity field.
But after a month on Mars, Childrey was the only man who still appeared fully dressed in the heat of the alien base. Some of us took it as a reproof, and maybe it was, because Lear had been the first to doff his shirt for keeps. In the mess Childrey would inspect his silverware for water spots, then line it up perfectly parallel.
On Earth, Andrew LearТs habits would have been no more than a character trait. In a hurry, he might choose mismatched socks. He might put off using the dishwasher for a day or two if he were involved in something interesting. He would prefer a house that looked Уlived in.Ф God help the maid who tried to clean up his study. HeТd never be able to find anything afterward.
He was a brilliant but one-sided man. Backpacking or skin diving might have changed his habitsЧin such pursuits you learn not to forget any least trivial thingЧ but they would never have tempted him. An expedition to Mars was something he simply could not turn down. A pity, because neatness is worth your life in space.
You donТt leave your fly open in a pressure suit.
A month after the landing, Childrey caught Lear doing just that.
The УflyФ on a pressure suit is a soft rubber tube over your male member. It leads to a bladder, and thereТs a spring clamp on it. You open the clamp to use it. Then you close the clamp and open an outside spigot to evacuate the bladder into vacuum.
Similar designs for women involve a catheter, which is hideously uncomfortable. I presume the designers will keep trying. It seems wrong to bar half the human race from our ultimate destiny.
Lear was addicted to long walks. He loved the Martian desert scene: the hard violet sky and the soft blur of whirling orange dust, the sharp close horizon, the endless emptiness. More: he needed the room. He was spending all his working time on the alien communicator, with the ceiling too close over his head and everything else too close to his bony elbows.