"Campbell, John W Jr - The Space Beyond" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)

Undoubtedly, there is water in the Jovian atmosphere; it has been detected. So has helium been detected, but not nitrogen, and certainly not oxygen. Ammonia and methane, which Campfoell doesn't mention, are present, but the major component is hydrogen. In fact, all of Jupiter is at least 90 percent hydrogen, mostly in the liquid form.
Campbell correctly assumes there is a greenhouse effect in Jupiter's atmosphere; that solar radiation is trapped and that the temperature is higher than it might otherwise be. But he has his heroes in the arctic zone where he describes it as fiercely cold.
Thanks to Jupiter-probe data, gathered in 1974, however, we believe that the temperature of Jupiter rises steadily as one penetrates the atmosphere. Six hundred miles below the cloud layer, the temperature is already 3600 C. It seems quite likely that by the time the ship had penetrated to a depth at which the atmosphere had become dense enough to resist further penetration, the problem would be heat and not cold.
But what's the difference? Whenever a story is placed at the edge of science as it is known at the time, and whenever the author allows his imagination to steer him forward as. best it can, making intelligent or dramatic extrapolations-the advance of real science is bound to outmode him in spots. This must be accepted, and to be wise after the event, as I have been here, or to shine in 'hindsight, as I do, is of no significance.
The question is this: Were Campbell's extrapolations, whether right or wrong, nevertheless intelligent and dramatic? And the answer is: A thousand times, yes!
Campbell might be outwritten by many others, in and out of science fiction, in terms of characterization, plot, and dialog, but no one ever outdid him in visualizing the grandeur of the Universe.


MAROONED

I

In August 2133, Robert Randall discovered synthium. He announced simply that he had created element 101, which had, according to his modest report, "unusually interesting properties." Since civilization has been based on metals for the past seven thousand years, and syn-thium's "unusually interesting properties" included such things as its unheard of (and, because they had no machines at the time capable of determining it) undeter-minedly great tensile strength, and its crystalline, transparent allotropic form with a strength only slightly less, RandaU was most unnecessarily modest in his claims.
That was several years after the last expedition to Jupiter had been destroyed by the customary meteor, and the last of Stephenson's three ships was tastefully draped over an asteroid. Naturally there were half a dozen expeditions trying to get the Interplanetary Committee's consent to a new expedition. Bar Corliss had been trying patiently for four and a half years. Jinimie Mattorn had been trying to get permission for-four of their "Explorer" type ships. They'd been turned down regularly and with punctuality by the Committee, because parium was the latest word in strong materials at the time-something like two and a quarter million pounds to the square inch. Good, but not good enough to stop a really determined meteor, of course-and most of those found out Jupiter's way were very determined.
Then too, parium fuel tanks had a nasty habit of "failing" when one of the overanxious explorers loaded a twenty-ton tank with thirty^seven tons.
All in all, Jupiter kept pretty much to himself. Only one ship got past the asteroid belt-they couldn't dodge out of the plane of the ecliptic in those days, because that meant taking more fuel for the dodging. Erickson did it He fell back into the Minor Orbits some six years later, and the bodies of the crew were retrieved by the tow-cruiser "Maximum," which pleased the widows to some extent.
But Randall's mild "unusual properties" hid a world
of high-explosive punch. Since all of the explorer's gang was looking for the slightest thing in that line, undoubtedly they all read the line. Somewhere or other, though, Bar Corliss had met Randall. He read the thing, and he suddenly got a mental picture of Randall: a little sandy-haired man with pale-blue eyes and a pale-sandy mustache, rather moth-eaten in appearance, slightly stained by weather and his favorite pipe, wearing clothes apparently made by the American Packaging Bag company, fitted by the oldest of tailors, Guess and Gosh, and dyed by Laboratory Fumes. And he remembered him as the discoverer of triconite-familiarly known as "tricky-nite" and described by him as a "rather powerful explosive."
So Corliss wandered down to Pittsburgh and American Metals. Randall had a piece of the stuff, paper thin and impossibly strong. Corliss looked at it, and grunted. It was the early product, not the refined stuff they turn out today, and it looked like a poorly tanned pig's hide with the measles. Randall went into one of his quiet raptures about it, and tried to demonstrate its strength. He was rather handicapped, because he'd already broken most of the testing machines trying it out, and they hadn't built a new one yet. But Corliss wasn't slow in getting the possibilities. Corliss had more money than he could spend then anyway, so he found out what American Metal's total possible production of synthium would be, and ordered it for the next six months.
Jimmie Mattorn got there two days later, and Nord-deutscher Rakete, two and a half later-they couldn't get in touch with their American representative. So Corliss wasn't without competition on the thing. Norddeutscher, finding they couldn't get more than a scrap of synthium from American Metals, bought German rights to the stuff, and wanted to start making it, and get a rocket under way.
Corliss was already moving.
That was probably why the things happened as they did. When Corliss built that ship, he hadn't the faintest idea of the strength he put in it, because he didn't have the ghost of an idea of the strength of synthium. Besides, he had carefully drawn plans for a parium ship-four of them actually-and so he just made them out of synthium instead. He did make a test tank, and broke down his pumps trying to break the tank. That was all he cared
about though, so he let it go. He was in too much of a faurry.
He'd probably have forgotten something in the rush if be hadn't planned on his parium ships for so long. If he'd known how long he'd have for planning afterwards, he'd probably have spent less before. He certainly wouldn't •have backed out.
You can weld synthium-they could then. But you can't cut it with any saw, or tool. So the "Mercury" was slapped together in a remarkable hurry. The synthium plates had to be cast and heat-treated because Corliss wouldn't wait while rolls and machines were built of it to bend and work it. So he allowed a little extra size over his original parium blueprints-he found out two years later that cast and heat-treated synthium was stronger than rolled-and plowed ahead.
The Germans were at his heels all the way. But his crew-with plenty of money and no budget-got four ships together in slightly less time than the German crew did. They loaded them up so fast that they had to get some of their supplies at the terrific rates prevailing on old Luna.
But the Committee didn't know that; they saw four new ships, of a very strong metal, with very strong fuel tanks of unusual capacity, and a remarkably different course laid out that would take men around the asteroid belt- and the plans were stamped.
Automatically, they turned down the Norddeutscher people when they applied "until the success or failure of the present expedition has been determined." The Norddeutscher people had a long wait. And then, of course, when Corliss' fate was settled they couldn't get approval of their ships, or, for that matter, any lupiter-bound ships. Corliss settled that for once and for all with the result of his expedition. They couldn't have gotten men anyway, probably, for none had the desire to have their ship christened "Mahomet's Coffin" for so excellent a reason.
Corliss got off Earth in May 2134. The Corliss Jupiter Expedition was underway. A fleet of four tiny ships, each of five-thousand-ton mass, each looking, with their raw, unpainted synthium, like a farmer-boy's unsuccessful effort toward a home-grown and tanned football, mottled with green and yellow and pink.
They were remarkable looking things, stubby, thick-bellied, and quite hideous, with their weirdly-shaped wing-attachments sticking out forlornly at a broken angle.
But they lifted off at ten A.M., May 17, 2134.
Bar Corliss looked at Brad Warren, second in command, with a sour, exaggerated grimace. "Great gang of planners we are," he commented.
Brad Warren grinned back at him. "Forget something, Bar?"
"Only a few minor things-like soap, and coffee extract and antiseptics. Nothing really important of course-" Bar chuckled. "Wouldn't the Norddeutscher crowd like to know that!"
Brad gestured out the port toward the blinding light and the- sharp shadows of Luna. Half a mile distant loomed the dome of Lunar Metals and Mines No. 3. "When do we break loose?"
"Don't say the words," moaned Corliss. "Break loose, I mean. That's what the clerk in the L.M. and M. keeps saying. And, dear God, has he been breaking me loose. I've got to have the stuff. It's my own fault we haven't got it-and is he 'breaking me loose' from plenty of cash. Only 22.50 a pound for coffee extract. Only a dollar a cake for five-cent laundry soap. And as for the water we've got to have for fuel-!" Bar shook his head and looked piously upward. "May God bless him-nobody else ever will."
Brad grinned without sympathy. "You knew it was coming on that score; how else could you get away from old Earth? Even when the famous 'Irrelevant' disproved the law of conservation of energy in interplanetary work, she didn't disprove the fact that you needed a lot of kick to dimb away from Earth. We've still got to climb out most of the way from Earth, so far as gravity goes."
"Uhmmm-but considering they generate power here directly from sunlight in the Davison photocells, get their water by cooking out the water of crystallization of the deeper rocks, and have plenty, you'd think they could sell it for less than thirty-two cents a gallon.
"What's the latest figures on water at Phobos? Interplanetary Minerals sent anything yet?"
"Uhm," said Brad. "It's down. It seems they found it
wasn't selling well. Three and a half a gallon on Mars, and seventeen and a quarter on Phobos."
"That's not so stiff. It'll change, though, by the time we get there. And we need tens of thousands of gallons of it!"
"Well, you still won't be broke," grinned Brad, "and you know damn well the kick you get out of this is worth it. Anyway-we lift off here any time you say now. We're loaded with everything, I guess."
"Make it two hours then. That is-two hours and whatever more is needed for aligning of orbits and so forth. How long did you say we'd have to wait on Phobos?"
"RandaU was very timely in his invention. Jupiter and Mars will be right, in about three months. If we take off as you say, we ought to wait about three months, three days and four hours."
"It could be worse," sighed Bar.
Two hours, forty-seven minutes and thirty-three seconds later, the "Mercury" and her escorting squadron of three ships got underway. Pale-blue flames flared for a few seconds as they trembled, soundless in the vacuum of Moon's surface; then they rose in slow sweeps, rocketing upward, and away. They were visible to the men watching in the protecting glass and steel of the L.M. and M. company. But finally, they were lost in the haze of stars that obscured almost all the heavens, flaring brightly despite the glaring yellow sun.
The steady drone of the great rocket tubes of infusible tungovan grumbled and echoed and murmured to itself in the metal shells of the ships. The rockets were mar-velously well-designed. There was little wasted energy here, and therefore, little noise. Noise is the audible warning of waste energy. They could not afford wastage of the precious burden of fuel, so there was almost no noise, only the smooth, carefully engineered flow of gases rushing through ground, honed and polished rocket tubes, designed as nearly as possible for absolute stream flow.
To all new spacers, rocket tubes are flimsy-looking things. The metal is less than an eighth of an inch thick, flimsy, tinny in appearance. It would seem that those incredibly powerful and light engines, rocket engines, would certainly burst anything so slight. That again illustrates the refinements of rocket engineering. It is a well-known
fact that the greater the velocity of a fluid stream, the less the side-pressure. Those tubes were designed for the greatest possible velocity, naturally, and since that meant almost no side-pressure, tons of metal could be shaved from the rocket tubes. Only the great pressure blocks seemed, and were, capable of resisting strain bracing the egg-shaped combustion chambers.