（外文电子版资料）Niven, Larry - Hole Man, The.doc

THE HOLE MAN By Larry Niven 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. It’s all his fault. Lear also says that it won’t 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. It’s 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 you’re in a hurry, and Lear was