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

Tad Martin was a super-mechanic. His type is known as a mechanician, not a mechanic, and calls itself "tinkerer."
Karl Thrumann went because he was a born optimist, and a chemist. He could play half a dozen different instruments, was a fairly good actor, and an excellent raconteur.
That's the type it takes in an expedition bound to be away from all humanity for at least two years. Every one was an optimist. They had to be. But-expeditions aren't adventure. They represent an unexampled amount of extraordinarily hard, dreary work with the wrong tools in the wrong places under unfavorable conditions. Expedi-
tions are largely made up of fine chemists peeling potatoes and expert physicists washing clothes, of trained mechanicians fixing the plumbing, which never could be made right anyway, and, most of all, sitting and waiting. Sitting and waiting to do something, anything at all.
It wasn't hard to find something to do at first. There were the great cells packed hi the "Corliss I," "II," "III" and the "Mercury" to be set up. The sun was weak here, and it was inconceivably cold, far far colder than night on the Moon, or even on Phobos or Deimos-. Not because the sun was so much weaker, though that of course counted, but because there was not merely a lack of heat coming in, but an actual withdrawal of heat by the cold substances, the frozen gases, the almost-frozen atmosphere. Cold? No human had ever before known the like. Why, on Luna, elsewhere hi empty, shadowed space they used rubber suits. Here, a bit of rubber exposed to that air was as hard and brittle as so much glass in twenty seconds. They used storage batteries to heat the suits on old Luna. Storage batteries!
Men had to go out the first day of landing. They divided the time into "days" and "weeks." Weeks was a sensible division, a natural one, because Ganymede re* volveJh^around Jupiter in almost exactly a week-seven days, three hours and forty-two point two minutes to be exact. They set one of the chronometers to mark that week into sevenths, and worked on that basis. They had three and a half "days" of sunlight, and three and a half of darkness, except that, having landed on the Jupiter face of the satellite, their days were broken by the great shadow of the Titan of the System.
But explorers had to go out, and they went out hi the special suits provided for them. They were made of woven asbestos, because that was both an insulator against heat loss, and flexible. They were padded with powdered asbestos fibers, and covered finally by an inner lining of airtight, finest rubber, impregnated in tough canvas. But between the layers of asbestos padding were heated coils, not powered by any mere storage battery, but by the main power lines of the ship, run by the powerful, light steam engines on board her.
Those engines were designed. The flames of hydrogen and oxygen gases, taken from the fuel tanks, ran the steam engines, by boiling water. They were one hundred
percent efficient, because the energy that wasn't used in generating electric power couldn't escape save as heat that warmed the vessels. The condensers were nothing but radiators.
So there was plenty of electric power generated while the ships rested on that cold, cold world.
They went out first to set up the sun-power cells. They were wonderfully light things-they weighed scarcely an ounce apiece because they were made of that transparent form of synthium, the transparent allotropic form. Like all transparent solids, synthium-beta, as it was known, was an insulator to electric current. And they were wonderfully rugged and strong, despite the ten-thousandth of an inch thickness of their walls.
Rack after rack of them appeared, set in chronometer-driven frames mat kept them always pointed toward the sun. The sun was weak here, horribly weak, yet still it had power, and they had a great, great deal of area exposed. "Corliss I," "II" and "III" had been loaded almost exclusively with them. Those three ships were never intended to go back to Earth, nor to leave this system of Jupiter's.
It took a week to set them up. In the meantime, the chemist and geologic parties had been at work. They found some gypsum here, but didn't need its water of crystallization. They found water, ice. Ganymede was very light to have much water, yet it had nearly as much as Mars had, for it was so very, very cold here the water never got a chance to escape. And it was overlaid almost everywhere by great masses of carbon dioxide.
Corliss stared when he saw their find. A great, rugged mountain of glistening, beautiful blue and faintly green, transparent, beautifully clear solid. "Is that-solid carbon dioxide?" he gasped into the transmitter.
"It sure is," laughed Karl Thrumann. "It's clear, because it's lain there for half a billion years, just slowly packing, and, under the direct sun, melting ever so little till it packed solid. There's a white snow on top, where the pressure couldn't solidify it, crystallize it thoroughly into a whole block. We're looking at a side where something broke it off.
"The lower vein there is hydrogen oxide. I think that's a better name for it than water, considering."
"It is," agreed Oorliss. "I've seen glaciers-but they didn't look like that."
"No-that's because they weren't really cold. They melted at the base, where all the millions of tons of weight rested on them. Ice will melt at a fairly low temperature if you press it hard, remember. That's how a glacier flows. The bottom melts under the pressure- heat runs out as liquid water, escapes the pressure, and instantly re-freezes, because without the pressure it's solid at that temperature. Here, the temperature is so low even the pressure won't do it."
"Uhmm-suppose we have glaciers of CO2 here?"
"No, not carbon dioxide. Water, remember, is a wonderful substance. Unique in a thousand ways. Dissolves more different things than almost any other single solvent, absorbs more heat in melting and boiling than almost anything else, holds more heat per pound-degree of mass and temperature than any other thing save hydrogen. And-it contracts on changing from ice to liquid water, and then further contracts as the temperature rises to four degrees centigrade. Unique, really. And because it expands on solidifying, pressure liquifies it because it occupies less room then. That's not true of CO2. Therefore you can't get moving glaciers."
"Ufammm-but it's cold enough for them. How much more cable have we, Ben?"
Back in the ship, Ben Riley, the electrical engineer-elec-trician-mechanician-radio-expert-physicist-electronics engineer, answered over the telephone sets, "About five hundred feet, Bar. Then unless you want to run without beaters, you'd better stop."
"May the good Lord preserve us from any such situation. We'll stop. I'm half-frozen with the heaters. Cant you send any more juice?"
"No-not without danger of burning them out altogether. It's your own cock-eyed calculations that said you'd lose only five horsepower of heat out there."
"All rightl" laughed Corliss. "I admit it. How many are we drawing?"
"Ten right now, if you want to know. What are you doing? Rolling in the snow? I can't figure where it's all going myself."
"I can't either," said Thrumann sourly. "You'd never guess it from here.
"But that*s all right. There's plenty of water here, so we can set up a quarry and get our fuel. How much power coming in from the cells?"
"Five thousand horse-and we need one and a half to warm these blamed ships. We can break down some water for you though. They've got the cells set up in Two."
"Check. We'll bring in a load now. I brought some cotton along."
"Cotton?" asked Corliss, mildly surprised. "What for?"
Thrumann chuckled. "I didn't trust your explosives in this temperature any too much. Wait and see."
Thrumann had an electric drill with him, and Tad Martin had some other apparatus, as well as the sledge they'd hauled over. In five minutes, the electric drill was humming almost inaudibly in the thin air, and cutting swiftly into the brittle ice. In five more, a series of ten holes had been drilled, slanting into the clear "rock" of this world. Carefully Thrumann packed plain cotton batting into them with a little rod. Then Martin produced his flask. "Oh," said Corliss grinning. "We're well below the critical temperature here, aren't we?"
"Brrr-" said Thrumann. "I'm not, but I'm damn near it It certainly is outside." From the flask he poured a stream of clear blue liquid into the holes, generously. Then he inserted caps in each, and the party backed off. The clear liquid oxygen they had poured hi was thoroughly soaked up in the cotton in ten seconds. In thirty the thing was quite ready. In forty-five, Thrumann sent the current through the caps and wires-and a thousand tons of the rock-hard ice shattered off. There was an explosive born of cold and as safe in this temperature as in the coal mines of Earth where it had originated two centuries before.
The sledge was loaded with a will-and consequent warming work-and hauled to "Corliss II." The lumps of ice were hurled into the lock, and the door closed once more. The men went back for another load of ice. They passed the laboratory ship-"Corliss I." The research laboratories had been set up in this ship, now that the cells had been placed outside. Corliss hesitated as he passed, and asked Ben to connect him with Porter, hi the
lab.
"Hello, Bar," came Porter's voice finally. "What is it?"
"Cot the air analyzed yet?"
"On, yes. Some time ago, we finally got the last con-
stituents. Nothing new. No helium to speak of, but it was all rare gas. Mostly argon, neon and Xenon. There's one tenth of one percent oxygen, and a detectable trace of water vapor even at this temperature. The rest, as Thrumann told you, is nitrogen, carbon dioxide, a fraction of one percent chlorine, and lots of rare gases. Everything else seems combined with something to make a solid.
"That chlorine had us going for a while; still I guess it's as logical as the trace of oxygen. There's no life here of course-probably never was, and when you consider how active oxygen is, it's no wonder so little of it is free, and probably the combination of the oxygen meant some chlorine couldn't find a partner."
"You're wrong in saying it combined to a solid," said Corliss. "I saw a nice little river back a way. Know what it was? Just a nice, cool swimming pool of Xenon, so Thrumann says."
Porter whistled softly. "Nice planet. No wonder we found so much Xenon in the air."
The work was started then. They quarried for their water, and, of course, for their air. But they were mighty glad to have that work. To Bar Corliss it meant that the millions he had sunk in this expedition were not lost. For the whole success of the thing depended on finding a source of water-hydrogen and oxygen for fuel-on this satellite, or on Callisto. Hurling the rockets across space had required all but the last dregs of fuel. No ship could be designed which would have been otherwise. The sheer work of lifting the fuel across the four hundred million miles of space against the sun's pull prevented that. They had to find water-or return at once, immediately, before those last dregs of fuel were used in heating. Not even two months could have been spent investigating after all those millions of miles of travel and those millions of dollars spent.
That was most of the expedition, that. That was the adventure of exploring the planets, digging and working and sweating even in that cold, to dig out the water they must have, and the slow, slow waiting while the electrolysers took the electric power obtained from the sun and converted the water to hydrogen and oxygen fuel. That and cleaning, polishing, selecting, weighing, repairing, cooking. Cooking, and living hi the air that was
already heavy with the odors of meals a month past, for the rectifiers would not remove those last faint traces which the unhappy sensitivity of the human nose detected.
IV
"It would be an immense advantage-" sighed Bar. He looked across at "Two." There were two feet of "snow" on it now, and the light thai shone on it was weak and dun and red, the light of enormous, magnificent Jupiter, mighty in the sky, almost full. For six months they had waited here while the fuel tanks of the ships filled slowly -so slowly. They were nearly full now. The men for the last dash had been selected, the trip planned to almost the last detail-as though the years on Earth had not been calculation time enough for this particular feature-but now Brad proposed to change it.
"It can be done. Refueling in space has never been done-but I think it can be done if we do as I suggest. To do it would mean the 'Mercury' could land on Jupiter with tanks completely full, not nearly full. The original plan to establish a fuel depot on satellite Five, tiny though it is, and close to Jupiter, still means some fuel would be needed in escaping its pull. We have fuel enough on hand now, and it would save twelve hours wear on your tubes, and on the tubes of Two' and Three' to do it. Also, it would save the work of gathering that much fuel again."
Bar stood looking out of the port. They had had a "cold snap" two weeks before. It had snowed Xenon, a wind had sprung up in the thin air to howl with horrific threats about the ships and their apparatus. The cell frames had been well anchored, and resisted till the blizzard had covered them over, and banked snow two feet deep over them, and made drifts ten feet deep on the windward side of the ships. It was a strange scene now; it had an air of permanence, of stability.