kite: переводы

→In a few minutes the sun went below the western horizon. That was not what Fox had wanted to show me. Clouds were rising in that direction, thin wispy ones, cirrus I think, or at least intended to look like cirrus. The invisible sun painted them various shades of red and blue, hovering somewhere just out of sight.

→The sun scuttled across the sky like some great silver bird. The shadow of each tree and bush and blade of grass marked its passage like a thousand hourglasses. If you want to experience disorientation, give that a try. I found myself getting dizzy, swayed and set my feet apart, discovered the whole thing was a lot more interesting when viewed from a sitting position.

→There was a distant boom, and a huge smoke ring rose slowly into the sky, tinged with golden light. Fox was working intently. I heard a faraway whistling sound, and the smoke ring began to alter in shape. The top was pressed down, the bottom drawn out. I couldn't figure out what the point of all this was, and then I saw it. The ring had formed a passable heart-shape. A valentine. I laughed, and hugged him.

→"That's not it."

→"Very pretty," I said.

→The traditional countdown began at ten. I put on the safety glasses and closed my eyes at two. So naturally I opened them when the light shone through my eyelids. There was a dazzle, as he'd said, but my eyes quickly recovered. How to describe something that bright? Put all the bright lights you ever saw into one place, and it wouldn't begin to touch the intensity of that light. Then there was the ground shock, and the air shock, and finally, much later, the sound. I mean, I thought I'd been hearing the sound of it, but that was the shock waves emanating from the ground. The sound in the air was much more impressive. Then the wind. And the fiery cloud. The whole thing took several minutes to unfold. When the flames had died away there was a scattering of applause and a few shouts. I turned to Fox and grinned at him, and he was grinning, too.

→Twenty kilometers away, a thousand people were already dead in what came to be called the Kansas Collapse.

→I was perfectly happy with the eyes I had. I began to wonder if it had been such a good idea, coming here. I resolved to look away for the first several seconds. Common human lore was heavy with stories of what could happen to you in a nuclear explosion, dating all the way back to Old Earth, when they'd used a few of them to fry their fellow beings by the millions.

→"Clear leaded glass will do it. It's the UV that burns. Expect a certain dazzle effect at first. Hell, Hildy, if it blinds you the company's insurance will get you some new eyes."

→"Do I need to protect my eyes?"

→"If I say run," he said, seriously, "hop in the trailer, pronto."

→"That's sort of a relative question. It's not as safe as sleeping in your bed. But these things are calculated to a fare-thee-well. We haven't had a blasting accident in thirty years." He went on to tell me more than I'd wanted to know about the elaborate precautions, things like radar to detect big chunks of rock that might be heading our way, and lasers to vaporize them. He had me completely reassured, and then he had to go and spoil it.

→"Is it dangerous?"

→I noticed the "we." He really did want to build these places instead of just install and run the weather machines.

→"It's not really much of a blast as these things go," he said. "The really big ones would jolt the structure too much. But when we're starting out, we use charges about ten times larger than this one."

→This show was strictly "to the trade." Everyone but me was a construction engineer; this sort of thing was not open to the public. Not that it was really rare. Kansas had required thousands of blasts like this, and would need about a hundred more before it was complete. Fox described it as the best-kept secret in Luna.

→He was embarrassed. He hadn't meant it to be taken that way-which I had known, but he's easy to tease and I could never resist it. So he coughed, and took refuge in technical explanation.

→"Fox, you're a romantic fool after all."

→They were still in the process of excavation. The half-dome was nearly complete, with just some relatively small areas near the north edge to blast away. Fox said the best vantage point would be near the west edge; if we'd gone all the way to the south the dust would have obscured the blast too much to make the trip worthwhile. He landed the trailer near an untidy cluster of similar modular mobile homes and we joined a group of a few dozen other firework fans.

→***