"Forward,.Dr.Robert.L.-.Ocean.Under.the.Ice.Book.3.of.the.Rocheworld.Series" - читать интересную книгу автора (Forward Robert L)
#My primary called to say it is leaving Agua Dulce for a while. It is going to return to the beaches on the Isles of Thought, there to rock up and continue its thinking on ... # there was a pause as James tried to translate the thought, #... advanced mathematics.#, the translation ended lamely.
"I am sorry," James apologized to the humans through their imps. "There is no referent known in human mathematics to the phraseology which the two flouwen used in discussing the topic. I am quite appalled at my inability to translate."
"If you think _you're_ dumb, James, how do you think that makes _us_ feel?" said Richard with feeling.
Little Purple continued to talk. #When I was talking to my primary, there was a delay between my question and answer, as if my primary were far away in the water. Why is that?#
"That's because the laser light used to send messages back and forth to Rocheworld takes time to travel," replied Shirley.
#Is that true?# replied Little Purple. #If so, light must move very fast. When lightning strikes ocean, light always comes before sound.#
"The speed of sound in water is about fifteen hundred meters per second, while the speed of light is three hundred million meters per second -- two hundred thousand times faster." Shirley waited while James and Little Purple carried on a side conversation to make sure that Little Purple had understood what the metric units meant in terms of distances and time intervals which the flouwen used.
#That is very fast indeed,# Little Purple finally agreed.
"But the distance between planets is so large that even light takes a long time to travel from one planet to another, or in this case between Rocheworld and _Prometheus_. Which is why you noticed a time delay. Incidentally..." she added. "...I don't really understand it, but I am told that the speed of light is always the same to every observer, no matter how fast they are moving."
^That is not logical,^ interjected Little White. ^When I calculated mathematical logic for motion of Barnard and Gargantua and other lights in sky, that system of logic says that if one object is moving at one velocity and another object is moving toward it at another velocity, the relative velocity is sum of velocities.^
"I would agree with you," replied Shirley. "But I am told that the logic which applies to massive bodies does not apply to light or objects moving close to the speed of light. If you are traveling at the speed of light, and a light beam is sent at you traveling at the speed of light, you do not see the light beam coming at you at nearly two times the speed of light -- just one times the speed of light. For things that move very rapidly, you need to use a different system of logic. It's called relativity theory ... and don't ask me to explain it."
#A different logic for things that move very rapidly...# murmured Little Purple in thought. Soon the dark purple body was visibly growing smaller as it expelled water and became more dense in order to increase its rate of thinking. #... the speed of light is always the same to every observer...# The thinking purple blob moved slowly off to one corner, thickening and becoming more and more purple as it shrank in size. Finally it settled to the floor of the habitat tank as a deep purple rock -- a thinking rock.
Little Red spotted his good friend Richard. *Hey! Richard! This tank is too small! Get me out of here!*
"Sure, little buddy!" Richard replied. "Let me check out your drysuit and we'll go for a walk so you can stretch your legs."
There was a short pause while Little Red listened to the translation coming through James. Suddenly, the flouwen emitted a high pitched scream of laughter that continued on and on as the red cloud literally turned itself inside out. The portion of Little Red nearest them pushed deep into the center of the body and burst out the back end, dragging the rest of the body around with it. It split into an opening flower and continued back around, shaping the convoluting body into a ring of rotating red jelly twirling like a smoke ring. Little White, joining in the merriment, also gave a scream of laughter, and, forming itself into a snake-like shape, sinuously wove its way through the opening in Little Red's body. After a number of rotations, the red smoke ring collapsed and the screaming subsided as the alien took its normal blob shape.
*Stretch my legs! Little Red _have_ no legs! Richard FUNNY!*
Richard gave a broad grin in response, then looked up at the corridor ceiling to find the two-meter-diameter airlock door set in the ceiling between some air conditioning vents. Standing on tip-toe in his Velcro-bottomed slippers, he added his long reach to his 195-centimeter-long frame, grabbed the airlock latch and pulled the door open. This airlock had once been used for access upward from the hydroponics deck into the first of their landing rockets, the Surface Lander and Ascent Module, SLAM I. Now, on the other side of the outer airlock door was attached all that was left of the original lander, the Ascent Propulsion Stage for SLAM I, that had returned the exploration crew safely back from their first visit to Rocheworld, after the nearly disastrous crash of their exploration airplane, _Dragonfly I_.
Shirley, with the aid of James and the Christmas Bush, had made modifications to the airlock to accommodate the flouwen. Inside the airlock were three strange-looking garments -- "drysuits" -- custom made for the flouwen by the Christmas Bush. James had modified a standard space rescue bag made with tough glassy-foil fabric, by adding a spare spacesuit neckring that held a custom-molded plastic helmet. The drysuits were wrinkled, as if they had been sucked empty, and were connected by a pair of hoses to electronically controlled valves in the airlock wall.
"Everything looks OK," Richard said to Shirley, closing the airlock door and lifting himself up by the hatchway handholds so he could peer into the airlock window.
Shirley turned to the flouwen in the tank. "Are you ready to transfer?"
Little Red undulated over to a short hose sticking out of the back wall of the habitat tank. It too was connected to an electronically controlled valve. Little Red impaled its fluid body on the end of the hose and said, *Ready!*
"Pump away, James," Shirley muttered to her imp. Valves clicked open and the vibrations of a powerful pump started. Little Red was sucked into the tube in the habitat tank wall, with the electronic valve closing behind as the last little bit of red jelly passed through the wall.
"The drysuit is filling up nicely," Richard reported as he watched through the porthole in the airlock door. "Very little water transferred -- helmet filling up nicely with red jelly."
There was a muffled mutter coming through their imps. It was Little Red, talking through the imp assigned to his drysuit.
"Squeeze some water out of yourself!" answered Richard. "Remember, you have to make like a gummie if you are going to move like a gummie."
*Little Red not a gummie! Gummie's DUMB!* Nevertheless, Little Red knew what he had to do, and shed water from his cells until all of his body had condensed enough to fit inside the suit. James aided by pumping the ammonia water out of the suit and back into the habitat tank as Little Red squeezed the liquid out. The airlock imp disconnected the hoses, but since a little ammonia water always seemed to escape that point, it temporarily opened the airlock to outside vacuum to sweep out the ammonia fumes, then brought the lock back to ship pressure.
Shirley double-checked the airlock indicators and finally allowed Richard to open the inner door. Down from the hole in the ceiling, slowly falling in the low acceleration, came a shiny rotund ball, with a helmeted head and three octopus-like arms extending from holes in the helmet neckring. At the end of each of the glassy-foil covered arms was a three-fingered glove. The flesh inside the arms and fingers was highly condensed and had a strong rubbery consistency instead of the fluid consistency of normal flouwen body tissue.
"Phew, you stink!" yelled Richard. Despite the vacuum airing the airlock imp had given Little Red's drysuit, the pungent smell of ammonia wafted from the airlock.
Little Red reached a pseudopod down to the rescue bag zipper that allowed access to the interior of suit.
*I can stink worse!* warned Little Red, his helmet looking in the direction of Richard. Molded into the front of Little Red's helmet were two plastic lenses in about the same position as the eyes of a human. The plastic lenses focused the light coming into them into two stereo images that appeared upside down on the red flesh filling the inside of the helmet. The flouwen had practiced with the suits and helmets during their exploration of the land of the gummies on the Roche lobe of Rocheworld, and were now proficient in using sight instead of sonar to navigate their way around in their drysuits when they were out of the water.
"Let's go," answered Richard, heading off down the corridor, his long legs in their Velcro-bottomed slippers pushing off the looped carpet.
Little Red, looking like a child's punch-toy in its legless drysuit, was not as clumsy as might have been expected. The suit had been provided with a number of Velcro "sticky patches" at strategic points on the bottom, side, and arms. Crouching down on the bottom sticky patch, and tilting forward, Little Red pushed off the carpet in a jumping motion and launched himself down the corridor after Richard in a series of long hops, guided by an occasional brush at a wall. As they came to the central shaft, Little Red launched himself over the railing with obvious enjoyment, and started to fall down the shaft.
*FREE FALL!*
"Richard!" screamed Shirley after them. "Don't let him do that!"
"Stop worrying," Richard called back to her. "He won't build up too much speed in this low acceleration. Besides, he has no bones to break, and the glassy-foil can take it."
"I don't trust that zipper!" yelled Shirley. "Although our atmosphere doesn't bother him, we are sure bothered by his. It'll take James and me a week to air out the ship if that zipper springs a leak."
Richard swung himself over the railing and dove down the central shaft to catch Little Red before he crash-landed on the bottom deck.
"There we go, little buddy," said Richard, as he lowered Little Red down onto the top of the science console. The two looked down and out through the three-meter diameter dome set in the floor of the deck. Off in the distance was a double-planet. Its two lobes were so close to each other that instead of being spheres or ellipsoids, their inner points were pulled into egg shapes, as had been predicted by the French mathematician Edouard Roche in the 1800s, who never dreamed that a dual-lobed planet-world would some day be named after him. To Richard, Rocheworld looked like an infinity symbol spinning through space. The inner points of the two lobes were separated by less than one hundred kilometers and although the surfaces of the two lobes were not touching, they shared a common atmosphere, which could be seen by the clouds occasionally passing over the gap from one lobe to the other. When the humans had visited Rocheworld, they had been able to fly their exploration airplane from one lobe to another, passing through the zero-gravity point midway between the two massive planetoids.
One lobe of the double-planet, named the Roche lobe by the humans, since "roche" is French for "rock", was a dry rusty-brown and had a few sparse clouds hanging over it. The pointed end of the Roche lobe was heavily fissured and contained a number of active volcanos. Their calderas could be seen glowing up out of the darkness of the shadow cast by the other lobe lying between it and Barnard. The other lobe, named the Eau lobe by the humans, since "eau" is French for "water", was in sunlight. It was completely covered with an ocean of water that had a multitude of cyclonic cloud patterns moving over it. The ocean was unique in that a mountain of water grew up out of it at the shadowed inner point, pulled upward by the gravitational attraction of the nearby Roche lobe. The water mountain was 150 kilometers high with a rounded top, while its sides were sloped at an impossible-looking sixty degrees. Although the strength of the gravity force varied from near zero at the peak of the mountain to eleven percent Earth gravity at the base, the water did not flow to higher levels of gravity, since the gravity force also varied in direction along the sides of the mountain, and pushed the water into its mountain shape.
With the light from Barnard heating up the atmosphere of Eau, the winds were now blowing up the water mountain, driving the water ahead of it. The wind-driven swells moved upwards toward the top of the mountain, where the surface area was smaller and the gravity was weaker. As a result, the energy in the waves were concentrated into a smaller area at the same time there was less gravity to keep the wave amplitude down. The swells grew into ring waves that reached hundreds of meters in height and finally met in a ring-geyser that fountained up a spray of foamy water toward the zero-gravity point that lay half-way between the two planets. The bottom of the geyser fell back on Eau, while the top drifted across the zero gravity point to spawn tornadoes and thunderheads over Roche, that dropped salty rain onto the volcanoes below.
"There's your home -- Rocheworld," said Richard, pointing.
*Pretty!* replied Little Red. Richard could only agree. After watching the two co-orbiting gumdrops move slowly around each other for a while, Richard turned to look at Little Red.
"Those are the worlds that we are leaving from. Now let me show you the worlds that we are heading for," he said. He turned and whispered to the imp on his shoulder. "We'll need the elevator, James." He looked up the sixty meter high shaft and saw a doughnut-shaped platform start down from the top deck. As the elevator lowered, James controlled the pace of the descent so that the hole in the center of the platform passed safely over the humans moving up and down the shaft, propelled by occasional kicks or pushes against the handholds in the shaft wall.
Richard and Little Red rode the elevator to the top of the shaft. Richard lifted them both up into the starside science dome in the ceiling of the top deck and swung out the floor support that kept them from falling down the shaft. Looming large in the black star-studded sky that filled the dome, was the nearly fully illuminated orb of a large planet surrounded by its retinue of orbiting moons. The reddish gas giant was mottled with gigantic white cyclonic storms and weather fronts. Richard turned to look at Little Red. The custom-made helmet on the makeshift drysuit of the alien was filled with featureless red jelly, and on the surface of the jelly, easily seen in the darkness of the dome, were two upside-down images of Gargantua and its moons. Richard suddenly felt strange, for by being able to look into Little Red's eyes to see what his friend was looking at, he felt he was intruding into the alien's mind. Slightly shaken, he turned back to look out the dome again.
"That is Gargantua," said Richard. "You call it Warm. It is too big for us to land on, so we are going to visit some of its moons. You can easily see the four largest ones from here. The white one closest to Gargantua is the ice-covered moon Zulu. The blue-white one next closest is the water-covered moon Zuni. While the reddish one is the smog-covered moon Zouave." He looked over to one side of the dome, then lifted Little Red a little higher so he could see too. "The furthest one out is the dry world Zapotec. It is something like the Roche lobe on your Rocheworld and something like the planet Mars in our solar system. There are five other moons, but they are much smaller and hard to see."
*The Zapotec moon not round like the others, but only half-round! Why?* asked Little Red.
"Since we are coming from the direction of Barnard, Gargantua and the three inner moons are ahead of us and fully illuminated by the light from Barnard. We are about to cross the orbit of Zapotec, however, so we are seeing it from the side. The front half is illuminated by Barnard, while the back side is in shadow."
There was a brief moment while Little Red digested the idea.
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