"Campbell, John W Jr - Atomic Power UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)

"What's up, Ban?" asked Ribly.
Swiftly Ban explained the proposition. Ribly's face worked with surprise and belief from the first second.
"Have you fellows spotted it?" Torrence asked at last.
"Yes, 'fraid of it. Didn't announce it."
"So's everybody else. Both spotted it and been afraid. What did you notice it in?"
"Our Moon first, of course. Then Mercury and Phobos and Deimos. And- Heaven help us-I didn't understand at the time, but the companion of Sirius is bluer to-night than it was a year ago!"
"I thought you said it had no intra-atomic effects; spectra are intra-atomic effects," said Albrite.
"Not in this case. Sirius' companion is so dense, the spectrum is pulled back toward the red by the intense gravitational field. The gravitational fields are weakening-even so far away as Sirius."
"Why? Why?" demanded Albrite.
The world asked, too, when it learned; when markets found pound packages of "sugar and butter weighing fifteen ounces. But that was several months later. Before then, the Moon was changed. Earth began to see a smaller Moon, and a different Moon, for as the Moon circled out, the effects were cumulative, and she turned at such a rate that the face which had eternally faced Earth began to turn away, and the unseen face became visible.
And a gold merchant made a small fortune by buying gold in Brazil, using a very accurate type of pneumatic balance, and selling it in the same way in Alaska, where the centrifugal force of the Earth's spin did not cut its weight.
The three men worked together on the problem, and all over Earth other men were seeking some answer, some explanation, and some help. The diminution of weight, starting so slowly, mounted rapidly, cumulative in rate itself.
Ban Torrence did most of the work, using the figures that Ribly brought him, and the apparatus that Albrite designed. 1947 drew to a close, and 1948 began. It was a bitterly cold winter, colder than had been known before for many, many years, despite predictions that it would be a warm one.
It was February when the astronomers definitely announced that, at present rates, the winter would be everlasting, growing neither colder nor warmer, for as the Earth turned its northern hemisphere more toward the Sun, it moved away. But in the southern hemisphere, there would be rapidly increasing cold, as the two effects added, instead of subtracting.
By the last of May and early June, however, the temperature would start falling again. The report ended with that statement. "By late May or early June the temperature will again begin to fall." That was the end, because there was no other prediction. After June the temperature would fall. In February, the warmest day in New York City registered a temperature of only 42░. The coldest was -19.2░.
And still the world asked why.
The sun rose at seven thirty on March 21st. It rose much later on April 21st, for it was falling behind. Earth was no longer circling it. Earth was spiraling about it.
In late March, the three scientists had moved to Northern Mexico and established a laboratory there. It was easier to work, and much work must be done out of doors.
"Have we got anywhere at all?" Albrite demanded when they had settled again and begun a conference on advances.
"Hum-yes," decided Torrence. He glanced quizzically at Ribly. "You wouldn't believe my statement, so I won't make it. But I'll tell you something. This is about the only warm place on Earth-down in the tropics. We're in the northern hemisphere. Tropic of Cancer to the south of us."
"I still," said Albrite softly, "don't see why you didn't make a job of it and move down to the equator while you were at it."
"It's March right now, and the Sun is actually about over the equator, but it's moving north as usual, so that it'll be over the Tropic of Cancer in June-and that'll be the warmest spot on a very, very, chilly Earth. But what's the difference between the polar and equatorial diameter of the Earth?"
"I don't know-there is a difference, at that. Couple of miles, why?"
"Because the diameter of the Earth through the forty-five-degrees point is the same as the mean diameter. The poles are flattened. The equator is bulged. When gravity weakens some more, centrifugal force won't-and the thing is going to be even worse. Also-earthquakes. They'll be starting soon."
"Hmmm-that's true."
"Well, we're here. What'll we do?"
"Work-and work fast," replied Torrence. "Ever stop to think, Tad, that we'll have to use some kind of electrical generating equipment in all probability, and that we haven't time to build new, because this weakening is going on so fast that before we could spend the year so necessary normally, even if we didn't freeze first, to design and build it, it couldn't be built, because all metal would be powder? We have to use standard stuff-and the standard won't be able to stand its own centrifugal force beyond July 30th. So, friend, if we don't find the answer and start in by July to stop it-there-just isn't any use."
"Is there any?" asked Albrite hopelessly. "Trying to do something with the whole solar system!"
"Not," replied Torrence, "with the whole solar system, if my idea is right. And to do anything at all, anyway, we'll have a further little problem to meet, you see. I don't know just yet."
"Then-to work," Ribly sighed. "What must I do? Go on collecting the same old data?"
"With particular emphasis on the new nebular velocities. What's Andromeda now?"
"Minus 12," replied Ribly. "My record so far is minus 22,500. Minus means retreat. The distant constellations are showing some change, too."
.
It was June 10th. New York City was semideserted. Snow ten feet deep, where it wasn't drifted, blocked all the streets. Where it was drifted, which was almost everywhere, it ran forty and fifty feet deep. The few people who still lived in New York, less than five hundred thousand, moved about little; only when a boat was due to sail.
Day and night the crunch-crack-shuff of the icebreakers in the harbor was audible. Because the temperature had begun to drop in late May. It was -32.4 at noon, June 10th. Where the icebreakers opened the water, it steamed.
The oceans were giving up their age-old hoard of heat. Had ice only been heavier, instead of lighter, than water, the temperature would not have fallen so low, for even in the cold of space where Earth was headed now, the stored heat of the oceans would have warmed her for decades.
But ice was forming. The Atlantic was in port now, taking aboard passengers at
five hundred dollars a head for third class, five thousand for a private room. She was a vast liner, another attempt at the "world's greatest."
And New York heard a rumor. The Atlantic was making her last trip-the last trip any ship would make. They were afraid of the waves. They were afraid of the winds. They were most afraid of the ice.
On June 9th there was a blizzard-an antarctic blizzard. The wind howled, and the howl mounted to a shriek. No snow fell, but the powdery stuff rose, thousands of tons of it, swept up by a wind of one-hundred-mile-an'hour velocity, with undiminished force and mass, since its inertia remained. The snow had lost weight. New York was blinded.
At seven A.M. the George Washington Bridge shrieked a new song. The fragments landed nearly a quarter of a mile down the river. At seven thirty, the older bridges failed, the Brooklyn going first. By eight fifteen there were no man-made bridges. But the wind, the snow, had sucked the heat out of the rivers, and the ice had solidified all across them, so there was a single, great ice bridge.
At ten twenty, the old Woolworth Building crashed, and on its heels came the Empire State tower. The fragments of the Empire State's tower fell over most of southeastern Manhattan.
The blizzard had died by the morning of the tenth, but there were no great towers remaining on the sky line of New York. The weakening of materials, and the titanic force of the wind, had seen to that.
And the rumor that the Atlantic would be the last ship to leave New York spread.
The Atlantic was booked by dawn of the 10th, and there were no more ships in New York harbor leaving that day, sailings scheduled the next day would not go. A crowd gathered about the sheltered dock of the Atlantic on the southern side of Manhattan. A wind still raged at forty-five miles an hour from the north.
Slowly the crowd grew, and the low muttering increased. Police and guards kept the lines in check till ten. The Atlantic was to sail at noon. At ten ten, the crowd swarmed up her gangways. Guards were killed, crushed. Men, women, and children started up the gangplanks.
Men, and some women, reached the decks and burst into the cabins. Men found and fought their way to the neighborhood of the boiler and engine rooms. At ten twenty, it was estimated there were two thousand people aboard, at ten forty, seven thousand. At eleven o'clock, at least fifteen thousand people, over a thousand tons of humanity, had got aboard.
It was like no other panic crowding. Many of those fifteen thousand were dead already, many more dying. A woman's body trampled underfoot. A girl held erect by the crowd's pressing, blood slowly oozing from her shoulder, her arm torn completely off, held perhaps in the clenched fingers of her other hand like some monstrous club, dead. A man's dismembered corpse.
For the power of human bodies is supplied by chemical combinations. These were the visible damages, there were shrieks, groans of horrible agony, for the chemical power of muscles remained undiminished, while their tensile strength declined. Literally, people tore themselves apart by the violence of their struggles.
The Atlantic gained no more passengers after eleven.