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

"Let's hope not, and thank God for transparent synthium ports!"
As suddenly as it had started, the hail stopped. And the clouds vanished. They were out of the clouds. And outside was only a tremendous, driving sheet of rain. It washed back across the ship with a driving, thudding, thundering wash of water. For an instant, they thought they had struck, by chance, in a great ocean.
"We're slowing still. I wonder-will we strike so terribly hard?" Corliss labored nearer the instrument panel under more than three Earth-gravities, crawling on hands and knees.
Martin looked at the airspeedometer. It showed now, only two hundred and fifty miles per hour-for what that might mean.
"I wonder how far we've fallen now, and how deep the air is?" he asked.
"Only God knows how far we've fallen now, or how deep the atmosphere actually is." Corliss sighed. "We must be near bottom, though. Well, boys, it was a grand fall, while it lasted."
"It lasts too long," moaned Thrumann. "I-I can't bear the suspense-the waiting for the inevitable."
"It won't last much longer," said Martin bleakly. "We've slowed to one-seventy-nine now."
A strange look came over Corliss's face. He looked out. The rain seemed to have stopped, momentarily; they were no longer rushing through it. There was something
else out there, though. Suddenly the ship jarred slightly, and a great, sprawled thing hung limp and brown across the ports-obscuring the view. Corliss looked at it thoughtfully for the instant before it was ripped away by the air streaming past.
There was a new sound, growing slowly. The howl of torn air was growing deeper in tone now, heavy and thick, almost a groan. And-intermingled with it a slow, heavy creak and groan, a straining settling, a slow, jarring vibration through all the ship. The fabric of the ship was creaking with the colossal strain upon it. Corliss was first to recognize it.
"Martin-Martin-" he said softly. "Open the barometer valve-just a trifle-let a little air in." Silently, Martin did it. The needle crept over on the gage-over and over and over. It struck the stop pin at five times atmospheric pressure. Some fifteen seconds later there was a dull explosion; the barometer shattered, and a roaring, terrific thunder of incoming gas sounded from the syn-thium valve. Martin closed it as the ship's atmosphere became permeated with a thick, heavy smell of musty plants, and cold dankness.
"What's the air-speed, Martin? Have you noticed? I did, just now. It's almost zero-thirty-five according to that instrument. We've almost-God!" They saw it too then. They had been watching and listening to Corliss, but now they saw the horizon-reaching water-surface!
It seemed ages the ship fell-fell-fell toward it. Then -a bone-cracking jar as they struck if. It seemed to splash about the ship in thin, airy froth; then they were plowing slowly through it. "We'll float," groaned Corliss. "My arm-but our density's only .94, thanks to synthium."
Martin suddenly yelled; he yelled in horror, amazement, sudden fear of the impossible and unknown. They had penetrated the water and were on the under side. Below them was air, just clean air, except-perhaps fifteen miles down-they saw rocks, great boulders, stones, and pebbles, a little higher there was dust. And the boulders, the rocks, and the pebbles were floating in the air.
Corliss spoke. His voice was very calm and disassociated. "We've stopped falling, haven't we, Martin? Yes? I thought so. We'll rise now, presently. You see-this is Mahomet's Coffin. The ground won't take us, and we can't reach the
sky, so we will float, float just as those boulders and the water do-in the air.
"You see-we were too hurried. We didn't make our investigations properly, because we knew that Norddeu-tscher would be on our heels in six months; the Interplanetary Commission knew synthium ships could cross the Asteroid Belt.
"So we didn't make the observations we should have. If we had, we'd have learned quickly enough from the elasticity and the gravitational vectors what the atmosphere was like. How deep it was,
"We've come down nearly eight hundred and fifty miles. I wonder how far the atmosphere does extend? It can't go very much further, or it would become terribly dense. See
-in some ten miles more it is dense enough to float rocks.
"The upper part must be less dense than Earth's. You know even under Earth's light gravity, the air pressure doubles in three and a half miles. And at the surface of Earth, the atmosphere is I/800th as dense as water. You have to double it only a few times-let's see-it mounts so rapidly-2;4;8;16;32;64;128;256;512; and then 1024. That's ten doublings. If Earth's atmosphere were just thirty-five miles deeper-it would be denser than water. If it were fifty-five miles deep, it would float anything known-platinum, iridium, mercury.
"You see we didn't consider that. The atmosphere here
-ah, that's the hydrosphere again. We'll rise through it slowly this time. We'll float above it somewhere-a few hundred feet. The atmosphere right here is as dense as water. Water-good lord-it must be warm here!"
Martin stared blankly at the instruments for several seconds, then shook himself like a dog emerging from a swim. "It's-it's three degrees above zero, centigrade."
"Yes-it would be. The air blanket. What is the composition of this air, I wonder. We can't really test it, you see, because the test bottles wouldn't stand it. And- try the rockets, Martin, ever so gently."
"My arm hurts. Look at it, will you, Lombard?"
Martin touched the rocket feed control. There was a soft thud, then a very muffled, heavy, laborious whoosh. The ship stumbled slightly, and moved under a very, very faint acceleration. They were out of the hydrosphere now, and again in the air above. Martin looked at his gauges.
"Impossible," he sighed. "They won't work at all."
"Oooh-I was afraid they wouldn't. You have only eight tons pressure in the fuel tanks, the atmospheric pressure must be close to that. You can't get any rocket kick that way-and we aren't equipped with propellers. Propellers would work fine in this stuff." He jerked slightly as Lombard felt his shoulder gently.
"It's dislocated," said the doctor. "I'll have to splint it and wrap it a bit. I wonder what effect this gravity will have on it."
"I don't know. We're oscillating now, aren't we, Martin?"
"Yes-going down again, slowly now."
"We'll reach rest rather quickly-and rise and fall with the barometric pressure. But I think we're-parked."
"Can't we get out?" asked Thrumann softly.
"Well-the rockets don't work, and the wings are gone, and we haven't a propeller."
"Can't we-can't we make one?"
"Difficult, Karl. I really don't know what kind of a diving suit we'd use. They never made a suit-or a submarine for that matter-that could get down to the bottom of the Six Mile Deep of Japan-and that's no worse than this is. We have some idea of the strength of synthium, anyhow. Remarkable stuff. I'll have to calculate the stress on those beams-" Corliss looked up at the great cross-girders in the ceiling of the room. They'd been made heavy-intended to resist the shock of meteor and asteroid impacts. They'd groaned under the awful load when the air pressure hit them, but-somehow they'd held.
Probably, had those early explorers had any real idea of the immense strength of the stuff they worked with, the "Mercury" would never have gotten so far as the hydrosphere layer. They wouldn't have used such heavy stuff. But there were two-inch plates of welded synthium as a hull, and immense girders in that ship. The old "Mercury" would look enormously clumsy and heavy to us today, like the old twenty-by-twenty solid oak beams they used to use in the old settler's homes for reef-trees when America was settled. Vast, unnecessary strength.
Well, it served them well. The "Mercury" hung, still a mottled, bloated football of metal, stuck on dead center in Jupiter's impossibly dense atmosphere. Even the rockets
couldn't build up much more pressure than that atmosphere had. There simply wasn't any discharge velocity -the gases drifted out slowly from the center of burning- and the ship stuck where she was.
An hour later, Corliss was in bed, sleeping under a mild opiate, his arm bandaged and- reset. Martin was looking at his controls, only half intelligently. He was trying to accept that they couldn't move.
He knew they couldn't. He'd always known that someday he'd die, too. But dying is an act always performed by someone else; no conscious person ever performed the act-so it remains the unexpected, a rather mythical thing you believe in; you agree it will happen-but not now. And since all time is only a succession, of nows, Man never really believes in Death.
Martin had always come back, he'd never been stuck, hopelessly, utterly, eternally stuck. So he was trying to realize simultaneously the two unrealizables-personal catastrophe and personal death. Because Death was at hand now, actually this particular now. There was a limit to the food. There was a limit to the air. But there wasn't any .limit to time. Time would just go on, in its usual way. Only he wouldn't be part of it He'd be gone. He'd be gone because he couldn't go.
Martin was too much of a mechanist to hope to move. He knew there wasn't a hope of working on the outside of the ship, of getting out for even an instant. And of course they couldn't do a thing from inside.
Ben Riley had given up that angle. He was fussing with the radio apparatus. He was timing echoes now. The echoes were sharp, and definite. The reflecting layer was turning back everything he sent. He couldn't get a note through that layer. And there was a terrific, washing static, like ocean breakers snarling on a rocky coast. He tried timing the cycles of the interference, began to plow it carefully, found its wavelength of maximum intensity. Riley had settled to more or less routine work.
Thrumann was in the laboratory. The reagents were limited, and he didn't have enough of any of them. Reagents were heavy. But the gyroscopes were working now, holding the ship in position. They were too light and small to resist the turning, bouncing winds up above, but they held the "Mercury" nicely now, and Thrumann began setting up his laboratory. Presently he began look-
ing at the sample bottles. Quietly he put one with a trip-seal in the special test-lock. He opened the outer valve and watched through the clear synthium port as the outside air came in. There was a barometer connected with the lock, and suddenly it exploded. Thick, dank, foul-smelling air rushed into the room as Thrumann shut off the intake valve.- The trip valve was closed on his test bottle however. Then-suddenly it exploded too.
Thrumann went to work. Under the heavy gravity he laboriously removed the wrecked barometer and put a heavy brass cap over the tube. He fished out the wrecked test bottle, and put in another, empty one. Carefully he ran the pressure up inside the little lock, till he felt he had enough. Then he started the pump that would force the excess air back into the outside atmosphere, and permit him to let in the ship's air, without contaminating it further. For a few moments the pump chugged heavily- then it stopped at the lower end of a stroke. It couldn't handle the difference in pressure now.
Thrumann valved the air into the ship. But he got his test sample, and began checks on it.