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

Monotony set in that day. Within three hours of their final coming to rest, they had seen all there was to see from the ports. Below, the vast sheet of floating water, extending infinitely into the distance. Above, the murky, clouded air, and finally the clouds. A very long twilight came, and the dark grey clouds turned darker, till they were only a luminous belt in the utter, unbelievable black of Jupiter's night. The light of nine moons and a billion stars was falling on them-and stopping there.
At about the same tune, the cold set in. It was just a very little above freezing outside, and slowly the cold crept through the hull of the ship, and into the insulated rooms. It was a persistent cold, a dankness rather than anything else, because there was an enormously dense atmosphere outside to drink out the heat, and the metal insisted on getting down to that temperature and staying there. Naturally, a spaceship uses vacuum heat insulation because it is obviously the lightest. The "Mercury" did. But while she could maintain that vacuum nicely between her hulls on Earth, no matter how perfectly metal is joined, even if it is synthium, it leaks a little. The vacuum, originally obtained by exhaustion into space through the usual bilge-valves of a spaceship, was break-
ing down. Air was leaking in. The vacuum gage mounted on the instrument board was slowly falling toward zero. And when the insulation went, the walls grew cold, and colder. Presently the inner hull began to show beads of moisture, and the heating of the ship had to be increased.
The chill leaked in. The ah- temperature showed 94° and the men put on heavy sweaters, because the cold metal walls soaked up the radiated heat from their bodies and didn't return it. There was no way to heat those walls satisfactorily, and the hot air cooled on them, and ran down in puddles of cold air on the floor, so their feet felt frozen.
They started electric fans to stir it up.
Corliss woke after twenty-four hours of sleep, and looked about him. There were heavy blankets over him, and the room was cold, for they had shut off the heat in his cabin bunk. He joined them presently in the motors room. They were watching an exhaust pump, designed to clear the inter-hull insulation when needed, and mainly to clear the locks. It had a seventy horsepower motor to drive it, and three cylinders, one of steel, one of parium and one of molded synthium. It was laboring terrifically, thudding horribly with every stroke, and the heavy steel of the first stage cylinder was bending visibly outward against the pressure.
It worked for some five minutes as he watched silently, unnoticed. Then there was a rending crack, and the crankshaft of the pump broke off. The synthium piston slammed down against the lower head of the cylinder, and started all the studs. Air whistled through the gasket. But the synthium valves and pipe lines held when they closed off the pump.
"Have we any spare synthium plates?" asked Corliss softly. They turned to look at him.
"Oh-hello, Bar. How's the arm?" asked Riley. "We have plenty of synthium stock, I guess, but we haven't any bigger motors so it wouldn't do much good to make it. I suppose you were thinking of a synthium pump?"
"Yes. We'll have to make it. A little one, so that motor can handle it. Because if the vacuum has been broken in the inter-hull, the pressure there will build up till it teaks into the inner hull here. And we can't live under any such pressure. We've got to make an exhaust pump
that will keep the pressure here down. It's cold as blazes here. The heaters on?'
"Uhmm-full. The steam engine won't handle any more. We could rig burners, of course-but the fuel won't last indefinitely. I wonder if it wouldn't be better to be cold, and have the fuel last as long as we do?"
"Why?" asked Martin glumly. "I'd rather be warm for a while, anyway, instead of half-frozen all the time."
Riley gestured out of the port. It was raining now. At least, what passed for raining. There was evidently a slight current in the dense air, too, for the water surface below was passing under them. They could see that in the light from the ports, for it was night, and utterly black outside. Great rounded globules of water drifted slowly, slowly downward past the windows. "We need electricity for things other than warmth. Hot coffee tastes damn good."
"We should have used asbestos insulation, or something like that," muttered Martin.
"It wouldn't have done any good. That air's too dense. If we'd used cork, the stuff would have been pounded flat under that pressure, and the air hi between the asbestos fibers would have carried heat almost as well as so much cold water."
"Could we pump that inter-hull vacuum back with a stronger pump, instead of using it inside here?" asked
Corliss.
"I doubt it," replied Riley. "The leakage is too fast. If we pump the inside, we have two slow-leaking dams between us and the outside pressure. If we pump the inter^hull, there will be faster leakage, though it would of course keep the pressure down in here just as effectively. It'll be a hell of a job making a pump work on that pressure. I'll use a cam instead of a crankshaft, and make it a radial pump. I'll have to start right away, if we don't want to get squeezed first. The pressure here's up a pound and a half."
"Yes, but some of that I'm afraid I let in," admitted Thrumann. "I got a sample of the air out there though. It has nearly one percent oxygen. And a hundredth of one percent carbon dioxide. There must be lots of plants here. The rest of the air is water, mostly."
"Huh-the rest of the air is water," quoted Martin. "Is that how you say it in German?"
"No, stupid. The rest of the air-pressure is due to
water vapor, largely, and most of the water vapor seems actually to be liquid water droplets. There's lots of nitrogen and helium and some hydrogen and lots of rare gases. But most of it is nitrogen and water."
"One percent oxygen-that'll do us a hell of a lot of good," grunted Martin. "A louse might live on it."
"A louse does. I tried it, only it was a fly rather than a louse, and so does a mouse-for a while. There is one hundred and twenty pounds pressure of oxygen hi this air-forty times Earth's oxygen pressure. I think I can get it out. By solubilities. If I can just get pumps that will handle it." He looked at Riley, and the engineer groaned.
"How?" he asked. "We have only one seventy horse motor, and the next is the thirty horse on the hydrogen fuel pump. Then there's a twenty on the oxygen fuel pump, and a pair of twenties on the fuel-tank charging motors. And the main power plant won't handle any more than 175 horsepower."
"Have you got plenty of synthium stock?" asked the chemist.
"No. I haven't got such a heck of a lot. Remember we had to shave weight."
"Could you tear out some partitions?"
"Not a chance. Those partitions are probably bearing a few thousand tons of load right now-helping to hold out the walls of the ship. I wouldn't touch them. I might consider the inner lock door, if it was absolutely necessary. The lock doors aren't leaking, by the way. There's a rubber gasket around them, you know, then a machined steel seat. Well, under the pressure, the rubber got hard, and the steel flowed, so that it is the gasket now, confined between rubber on one side, and the synthium plates on the others. That's the tightest joint in the ship."
"I thought we might make a water pump that would kick the water out into the little chemistry test-lock, throw it up hi a stream, then let it come in again, and work a water-motor on the in trip that would help push the pump that boosted it out. To overcome losses in that system we wouldn't need more than a few horsepower."
"Lord-" said Corliss, and fell silent, thinking swiftly. Finally he spoke again. "Thrumann, do you remember how heat-operated refrigerators work? The kind that freeze by heat? They circulate a liquid in a balanced-
pressure system, with vapor-pressure on one side, and absolute pressure on the other side of a pool of liquid ammonia, or rather, a U-tube of ammonia, in liquid form. I wonder if you could use a similiar system with water? Somehow have an absolute pressure of oxygen and nitrogen on the outside balanced by a pure nitrogen pressure on the inside, and circulate it, taking out the oxygen on the inside. What we need is some kind of a valve that would let oxygen through, but not nitrogen."
"Ahbh-I see what you mean-yes, and then we would need less than half a horsepower to keep the liquid moving, and agitate it thoroughly on both sides! I think it could be done-I must see-not a valve-a metal plate, permeable to oxygen, and impermeable, or almost so, to nitrogen. I must work-"
So Thrumann had his work. Riley had his, and Martin had to help him. And Corliss had only the responsibility of the expedition, and a dislocated arm.
Martin and Riley had no cinch, the task of making a pump that would handle a pressure of over six tons. It had to be synthium, and they couldn't machine the stuff, so they had to cast it. They had available a flame that would melt it, but they didn't have casting beds, nor the materials to make them. So they did the next best thing, they cut them out of blocks with their flames, and smoothed them with delicate welding, and final polish on a synthium disc, roughened and abrasive, driven by an electric motor.
It took them two weeks, and then the air pressure was up to two atmospheres, and the air was rank and musty and foul, and the men couldn't eat because they were sickened by it. Finally, though, they had a two-stage radial pump of synthium, and they welded the tubes on to the broken tubes leading from the old exhaust pump, for these were synthium, fortunately, and they started the contraption. It wasn't quite true, and the bearings squeaked, no matter how much oil they put on them, but it ran. They didn't know how much it would have pounded on a normal load, with a synthium-on-synthium bearing, but it thudded terrifically on this load-but it worked. In twelve hours the pressure inside was down again, and Thrumann, with his deodorizers and perfumes had the air smelling breathable again. They had to run the pump a good deal, and they
couldn't sleep while it ran, and it was cold all the tune, which made sleep uncomfortable anyway, till Riley rigged some electric blankets out of a cut-up space suit. Then they could sleep, but when they were awake, their fingers and their feet were frozen, and it was hard to work.
Then Thrumann announced he had found that a silver alloy would pass oxygen, and not nitrogen, but it had two difficulties. They didn't have a pound of silver on the ship, and even if they had, silver could never have withstood the pressure, save if they used a series of at least ten silver-walled chambers. That would have needed at least half a ton of the metal. Thrumann had known silver "blisters" were formed by the solvent action of melted silver on oxygen, and had worked in part from the idea of that selective action.
The air kept getting bad, and the cold drained them, for only near the heaters was it at all warm, so most of the time they had to sit near the heaters, and think. Only Thrumann had anything to do now, and his task seemed hopeless. When the pump worked, they couldn't stay in the same room, and that was the only room that was comfortable, so they froze most of the time, with the motors room door closed to stop some of the noise, the clanking and pounding and thudding.
They were beginning to get used to that horrible, monotonous life at the end of a month. Then, apparently, Jupiter entered another season. The weather changed. It had been rainy most of the time, and now it rained all the time. Day and night great round gloves of shining water drifted slowly, slowly past the window, and they sat and watched them drifting by in the light from the ports. They glowed and sparkled like gigantic jewels at night, and by day they were lusterless, dim miniatures of the leaden black sky above and the leaden black water below, and the leaden, limitless view beyond. For two weeks that continued, for fourteen endless periods of twenty-four hours. Then a change came. The air grew rough. The sea below began to heave gently first; then they realized the ship was beginning to move. It heaved gently up, then fell gently down. Like a giant breathing. The balls of rain, big as basketballs, heaved up and down too. The motion grew worse as the "season" advanced. In another month they were continuously seasick from the queer, choppy motion. The ship heaved
and pitched and rolled. Then-slowly it eased off. The motion grew less, as the men slowly regained some
strength.
They began to be active enough to be moody and quicktempered. They were optimists, chosen for even tempers, smooth dispositions and perfect agreement of temperaments. But they began to snarl at each other. Thrumann cursed Riley for not building the pumps he needed, or even trying to. Riley cursed Thrumann as a fool for thinking of an idea so insanely impossible, for his false-hope silver plate.
And Thrumann-found the answer. He finally found a way of imparting silver's selective absorption to a synthium allotrope, the clear, transparent type.
Instantly, tempers changed. A new hope had come. They could, perhaps, get air indefinitely, it was something to do at least, and the remaining pitching motion was dying. They guessed, wrongly as they learned, that the "season" had changed. There never had been a season. They'd drifted over the equator.
But they set to work with a will, while Thrumann made more of his plates, bigger ones, more of them. Finally, better ones, and then started all over again. With 120 pounds of oxygen pressure on one side, he could get seven and a quarter pounds of oxygen pressure on the inside, and a flow of half a pint per square inch at three pounds oxygen pressure. Nitrogen pressure didn't affect it
in the least.
The laboratory test-lock was opened from the inside, the inner door dismantled, and.the apparatus set up hi the lock. Then the synthium retorts in the lab were connected to the apparatus in the lock, and a new door fitted hi the inner lock-seats. And the apparatus was ready to function just three weeks after the start of the work. There were two washing retorts, where outside Jovian air entered, was washed, and the pure gases dissolved in the water; the water was agitated so that it passed under a partition that dipped into it, and into a second chamber, where the dissolved gases came out, as the apparatus was slowly brought up to working pressure. Nitrogen and oxygen and carbon dioxide. Presently the pressure on both sides was equalized, and outside pressure was the norm. The apparatus held. And-a soft, gentle breeze of pure, cold, odorless oxygen gas
swept into the room. There were twenty of the rectifier plates, evolving gas so swiftly a steady breeze of the intensely invigorating gas passed in.