"Blish, James - Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

than the surface of Jupiter V, except in degree. If you
stepped out of this building naked, you'd die just as fast as
you would on Jupiter. Try to look at it that way."
Helmuth, looking forward into another night of dreams,
said: "That's the way I look at it now."
m
There were three yellow "Critical" signals lit on the long
gang board when Helmuth passed through the gang deck on
the way back to duty. All of them, as usual, were concentrat-
ed on Panel 9, where Eva Chavez worked.
Eva, despite her Latin namesuch once-valid tickets no
longer meant anything among Earth's uniformly mixed-race
populationwas a big girl, vaguely blonde, who cherished
a passion for the Bridge. Unfortunately, she was apt to be-
come enthralled by the sheer Cosmicness of it all, precisely at
the moments when cold analysis and split-second decisions
were most crucial.
Helmuth reached over her shoulder, cut her out of the circuit
except as an observer, and donned the co-operator's helmet.
The incomplete new shoals caisson sprang into being around
him. Breakers of boiling hydrogen seethed seven hundred feet
up along its slanted sidesbreakers that never subsided, but
simply were torn away into flying spray.
There was a spot of dull orange near the top of the north
face of the caisson, crawling slowly towards the pediment of
the nearest truss. Catalysis
Or cancer, as Helmuth could not help but think of it. On
this bitter, violent monster of a planet, even the tiny specks of
calcium carbide were deadly. At these wind velocities, such
specks imbedded themselves in everything; and at fifteen
million pounds per square inch, pressure ice catalyzed by so-
dium took up ammonia and carbon dioxide, building pro-
tein-like compounds in a rapid, deadly chain of decay:
H~NCHCO-HNCHCO-HNCHCO-HN....
Ca0 Ca Ca
I I
HNCHCO-HNCHCO-HNCHCO-HN... .
I I I
Ca0 Ca Ca
I I
HNCHCO-HNCHCO-HN... .
For a second, Helmuth watched it grow. It was, after all,
one of the incredible possibilities the Bridge had been built to
study. On Earth, such a compound, had it occurred at all,
might have grown porous, bony, and quite strong. Here, un-
der nearly eight times the gravity, the molecules were forced
to assemble in strict aliphatic order, but in cross section their
arrangement was hexagonal, as if the stuff would become an
aromatic compound if it only could. Even here it was mod-
erately strong in cross sectionbut along the long axis it