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

Hour after hour the tubes moaned and droned. They were running almost white hot, but they were polished more carefully than the finest telescope mirrors, and they were in vacuum jackets equally polished, so that almost no heat escaped from them-for heat, where it isn't wanted, is not only a nuisance, but a warning of inefficiency.
Presently, the song of the fuel pumps started. They had been feeding the tubes on the original pressure hi the tanks at first, but now this was falling. Pure hydrogen and oxygen were 'being taken from the tanks at seven tons, pressure, and stepped up to the necessary eight for efficient running in the tubes. It was a gas-but under that pressure, denser than water.
That might have warned them, had they stopped to think then. But it was a hastily conceived and carried out thing, throughout. They'd raced against time all the way. When, after seven days they landed on Mars North City field with wings spread and the parachute air-brake spread to stop them, the ships needed repair and final adjustment, so much so that the three-month wait on Mars was no ordeal of monotony. There were plenty of trained mechanicians at Mars North City to help them, and still it was more of an ordeal of labor. And still there wasn't any time for recalculation that might have stopped the expedition then and there.
They loaded up with water-fuel-that is, hydrogen and oxygen gases, at Mars North City where the gases were cheap, and pulled out to Phobos running heavy. They replaced the burned fuel there, and at last the "Mercury" and her companions pulled out on the real trip.
So far they had gone. This trip out to Mars and her moons was old, charted and laid out by a pair of generations and more of space travel. Over a hundred and fifty years of exploration, over seventy years of commercial exploitation of the Minor Planets, and still no human being had passed beyond the magic ring of the Planetoids.
You have seen a scale map of our system. You know the dimensions. Forty, seventy, one hundred and one hundred-forty millions of miles are the orbits of the Minor Planets. Then-the Great Gulf. It's five hundred million to Jupiter, nine hundred million to Saturn, a billion and three quarters to Uranus. When the Lord made this system, he used two scales. Maybe he started out with one, and didn't like the looks of the dinky little system he got -planets with diameters measured in thousands of miles, orbits with diameters measured in millions. Maybe he threw that scale away, and decided to start all over with something worth while. The dust specks he /had, he just forgot, and worked with a scale reading hi billions instead of millions for the orbits, and he used tens of thousands of miles for planet diameters.
At any rate, there are two systems really, the Inner System, and the Outer System, and they're as different as two entirely strange systems might be. Four, seven, ten and fourteen tens of millions for the Inner System. Four, eight, seventeen, twenty-eight hundreds of millions for the Outer System.
The "Mercury" was trying to be the Messenger of the Gods, from the Lesser Gods to Mighty love. And she was the first ship that really stood a chance of crossing that gulf.
That's quite a hill, there between the Inner and Outer systems. Nearly four hundred million miles-and every blasted mile of it uphill-with old Sol dragging, dragging, dragging on the other end. Four hundred million miles of uphill climb had stopped exploration for a hundred and fifty years and more.
The "Mercury" lifted off Phobos, with her train of three service ships, distinctly heavy. She staggered as she pulled loose of Mar's gravity. Then she shifted into high for the climb. Hour after hour the tubes moaned. Then day after day they coasted, slowing their pace steadily as Sol pulled with his infinitely untiring grip to stop them. Then for more hours, the tubes droned and hummed, and then they began to spit and bark unevenly, and the ships lurched and staggered like mad motes in a beam of light, skittering and dancing lest some unheeding, trundling rock, weighing perhaps a thousand quadrillion tons, brush them along with it.
And all day long and all night long, though the only
night here was the nose of the ugly foot-ball thing they called a ship, there was a steady rain of terrific, sharp pings as tiny, invisibly small planetoids crashed against the synthium wall. They were going at almost the same speed-as space speeds go-so the incredible, never-tested strength of synthium turned those shocks. They were going at almost the same speed-there wasn't much more difference in their speed than the speed the mightiest shells of Man's armory attained, about a mile and a half a second. But they were made of only plain, high-grade nickel-steel armor-plating, the natural alloy of meteors, and the ships were made of synthium.
So somehow, after three horrible days in there, the men took off their space^armor suits again, and gobbled a little food (they couldn't eat with those suits on, of course) and then flopped down to rest.
And through the ships the steady, peaceful thrum and drone of the smoothly working tubes made sweet music to them. The soft regular chuck-shug-pssiii of the air circulators and the fuel pumps sounded steady and sweet.
For the "Mercury" was through the Magic Ring, and cruised at last hi that terra incognita, the no-man's-land beyond the Inner System.
When sleep had restored them, their watches were sharp, sharper than ever before. For they began to sense the difference. This space was different-it was the Great Space, the space where things the size of Mars were satellites, and gravitative control-fields of planets reached out thirty million miles. It was the Space of the Giants.
And day by day, the Sun. dwindled, grew tinier. And day by day they saw the pinpoint of Jupiter sweeping into position. Jupiter was huge-but this was the Great Space. It was still a pinpoint to their eyes.
They let a bit of hydrogen into the vacuum surrounding the rocket tubes now, so the shields weren't such good insulators, and they put a special soft black paint on the outside sheath, so radiation was better, and the ships began to warm up a bit.
And the sun dwindled four hundreds of millions of miles behind, and Jupiter became a respectable disc, an unchanging disc.
They shut off their rocket tubes then, because most of the fuel was gone. In fact, they had enough left to permit a landing on one of Jupiter's little satellites, and, by put-
ting all the fuel in one ship, the smallest, enough to fall back to Earth safely. But the ships began to get cold. Out there, a planet like Earth would have a temperature in the neighborhood of two-hundred and thirty degrees below zero. Those ships were well insulated-but they had to burn a good bit of fuel to permit life in them, even so.
Ill
"Yes, I agree that Ganymede has an atmosphere," Bar argued tensely, "and that it may be thick enough to permit us to halt almost entirely by atmospheric friction instead of by rocket power-highly important saving of fuel of course. But-Ganymede's only six hundred and sixty thousand from the surface of the blasted planet, and with the gravitative field Jup's got, that's no distance. If we go in so far before we stop, we might not be able to get back at all, if we can't find water there."
"But, Bar, we can save enough fuel by air-braking to a stop to permit us to pull out from that close approach with our little ship, if necessary."
"Uhmmmmm-maybe. I suppose we'd better. I know there's no real chance of collecting water on that chunk of rock called Number Nine, fifteen million miles out from Jupiter though it is." Then in sudden decisiveness, after a moment of thought, he said, "Shift'er over."
Brad turned to his calculated data, and presently the rocket tubes on one side moaned loudly, a driving acceleration came again as the weight-warning bell echoed dully through the ship. Bar Corliss was calling off figures into the microphone, sending instructions to the three other ships, now within ten thousand miles of the "Mercury."
The Mercury turned, and the great disc of Jupiter shifted till it was more nearly straight ahead once more; almost directly before them, the tiny disc of Ganymede, three thousand two hundred miles in diameter, loomed. It was ringed with a fat, bright ring, the halo of an atmosphere.
"That atmosphere must be pure hydrogen," said Corliss thoughtfully. "It's cold as the hinges of hades out there."
"Hydrogen, hell. That planet's too light to hold pure hydrogen with the tug and cross tug of old Jupiter down there. It's more likely something heavy and useless like nitrogen."
"We'll know quick enough. We ought to get there in eighteen hours the way Jup's pulling us now."
The rockets were silent, yet the ships were moving faster
and faster. Mighty Jupiter was dragging at them. Slowly their course bent, and Ganymede shifted across the windows till it was directly under the nose of the ship. It was enlarging swiftly now-more and more swiftly. Slowly, slowly Jupiter's pull dragged the ship over till Ganymede passed the center spot of the windows, and hung off to the other side. The ship seemed destined to pass between Ganymede and Jupiter. Then, the throw hesitated, as Ganymede began to loom; a great round moon, dimly silvered, it hung for a moment as it grew swiftly, and abruptly the ship was being pulled to the satellite. Ganymede's gravity was greater than Jupiter's at last!
The thin bright ring of atmosphere expanded, the satellite grew till it seemed evident the ship would touch the atmospheric rim, and plow on.
"Wings," called Corliss at last. Motors hummed into action, and a slow grating squeal of gears and racks sounded in the ship. The rocket trembled to the push of the motors. It was rotating slowly as the powerful collapsible wings thrust out.
"Put her on high-lift angles, and throw out the airbrakes," suggested Brad. "I think we're a bit high. We'll need a lot of resistance in the first passage to cut our speed to an orbital velocity."
For an instant the rockets flared again, pushing the ships back into a path closer to the satellite. Then, soon, there came a thin high scream, the first sound to penetrate the walls of the ship from the outside since the asteroids had been passed, a scream so thin and cold and shrill the sleeping men woke and joined the active watch. There was a new acceleration now, an acceleration due not to the rockets, but to the great metal wings, spread and screaming in the thin air outside, an acceleration actually that thrust them to the side away from the planet, for the wings, cutting the thin, thin air at more than three miles a second, were helping to hold the ship down to the planet where there was air to stop them, while behind, the great air-brake was tugging, tugging to stop them.
They couldn't hold the planet the first circle, and swung up, away again, falling out of the atmosphere as their grip on the thinning air weakened, weakened, and finally broke.
But they'd broken their hyperbolic orbit to an extended ellipse, and turned the ship so their momentum fought not only Ganymede's strain, but mighty Jupiter's as well. They were back in Ganymede's atmosphere hi two days, screaming through the thin fringes again, deeper this time, till the strain on the wings became almost unbearable, and their angle of incidence was decreased to nothing, and the air-brake cable screamed in thin-noted protest. Then, their parabola rounding again, they started up-out toward space.
"Cut the wings in again," called Bar. The screaming of the air changed once more, and "weight" returned to them as the wings began the attempt to turn the ship to the planet. Still the tremendous throw of their orbital speed was hurling them up-up-
"If we don't hold it this time," said Brad, "we'll have to stop on rockets. The orbit's so broken now we'd fall right on into Jupiter. If we stop on rockets, we'll have to find water to get back home."
"Do you hear that creaking?" asked Bar softly. "We had to use steel gears and racks, you know. We couldn't cut synthium gearing. If we add another degree to the angle of those wings they'll break those racks off."
The ships reeled slowly, they seemed to be turning, the "Mercury" echoed to a still thinner howl of air. Corliss advanced the angle of the wings a bit more, let a bit more of the air-brake come into play. There was a terrific resistance back there-and a limit to what strain the ship could endure.
Suddenly Brad was making observations again. Swiftly he ran the figures into a calculator. "Bar-Bar," he called, "she's turning in now."
They couldn't fly an hour later, at less than 2,000 miles an hour, at their high level, so they descended with the air-brake pulled in again. Gradually, the rockets glided around the little world, around again, and slowly they settled to the northern pole, landing finally at almost dead-rest on the rocket blasts.
The cold started to creep in then. The rockets were off. Ganymede they'd seen as a white planet, covered with barren, cold black rocks and shadows of deepest black, for the air was cold, colder than anything earth knew, and there was a thin atmosphere but not enough for real
diffusion. And there were fields of unbroken whiteness, with a strange blue tint in them.
It was the air, what had once been, perhaps, a dense atmosphere long since frozen. When they had settled down on that field of frozen cold, the ship had hissed, and vapor rose in spurting streams. The ship chilled swiftly. Before it had been heated by the air friction. Now they began to know cold-real cold.
In an hour they were sleeping, all save a few on watch. Two hours later they waked to the roar of the rockets as one of the companion ships landed nearby. Then, one after the other, the two others landed. The Corliss Expedition was encamped. Three of those ships were loaded almost solely with photocell equipment. Only the "Mercury" was really an expedition ship. Work was to begin now.
It was strange, the people who had applied for membership back on Earth, and the qualifications they listed. A professional "strong-man," because he could stand the heavy weight on Jupiter; another man, "because he loved adventure," and a professional guide in Africa and South America, "because he understood wild country."
Tad Martin was one chosen, a little man with a heavy body, and fingers as long and slim and sensitive as a surgeon's, a ready grin and slightly-faded thatch of thin hair. Tad Martin was chosen because he had a sound constitution, an extremely cheerful personality; he was a born optimist, and he handled a monkey wrench and a pair of pliers with the genius Fritz Kreisler once used with a bow and a wooden box known as a violin.