"Campbell, John W Jr - Other Eyes Watching" - читать интересную книгу автора (Campbell John W Jr)

OTHER EYES WATCHING

lay John W. Campbett, Jr.

All space flamed with an intolerable incandescence; for two thousand million miles, titanic streamers of flame shot out, wove and twined, streamers that flared dull-red and cooling where they stretched to breaking, then great clots that swirled in blue-white heat of new creation. Dimming slowly in the distance, the Wrecker was vanishing, the vagrant star that had lashed worlds out of the Sun as it swept by.

Two worlds, each blazing with the blue-white heat of the violent racking their already incandescent masses were receiving, had neared, swung, passed on. Two suns, each a million miles in diameter -- not quaking, since they were not solid, but flaming gas -- had swept by at frightful, hurtling speeds, engendering gravitational stresses, as they passed within not millions of miles, but hundreds of miles of each other, that must have made the infinite fabric of space creak to the awful strains. Each a million-mile ball of incredibly hot matter -- nearing, nearing -- flames leaping out that were to make worlds, whole solar systems -- shrieking at each other with a roaring thunder whose mere vibrations of sound would have pulverized this planet -- and passing.

But this is the thing that paralyzes my thoughts: I cannot conceive that this thing, this blasting of flames that made worlds, the explosions that scattered giant planets over three billion miles of space -- all that flaming catastrophe -- took place, was, and was done in not more than three hours! So inconsequential a thing as reading through this magazine will take longer than that. But in that almost instantaneous, Gargantuan catastrophe -- worlds were made, set spinning, established -- and the star that caused it passed on forever.

The flaming drift of flame that it left shrieking through two thousand million miles of space cooled slowly, flaming filaments of wispy heat being

Copyright 1937 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

drawn by mighty gravities of forming planets, till nearly all that scattered matter was collected in nine major clumps.

But it could not stay, for the frightful heats that had been buried under cooler layers of the stars had been torn out into open space, and it could not even radiate till it began to collect properly. (Hot atoms can radiate only when they collide with others.)* Our Earth condensed; others swiftly lost the hydrogen, the other light gases. But out farther from the Sun, the mightiest of all the groupings dragged at those atoms of flying hydrogen with a savage grip that slowed them as they struggled up one -- five -- ten

-- twenty million miles from the heart of the mass that was to be Jupiter.

The Sun was far off, and the mighty drag it exerted to aid the gases in escaping the inner planets was weakened here. The gases, their speed exhausted in a running fight that lasted twenty million miles, fell back, captured. Half a million miles, and they could get free from Mars. But Jupiter? Not a chance! Already there were flaming aggregations that had half succeeded in escaping, only to be trapped as satellites rotating tens of millions of miles out, but captured, definitely.

Jupiter dragged them back. Heavy metals were there, and condensing now, under the pressure of inconceivable tons of that captured stuff, to a liquid, terrifically compressed core. On to them piled the greater tons of these returning, captured atoms. More, more, more turned liquid, as the cold of space drank in their heat slowly. Ages passed, and the heat went rapidly. The core grew cold, as the core of all other planets had cooled.

And now Jupiter, last to cool, felt the chill of its far position. The Sun gave no great heat at this distance. That vast atmosphere which had condensed out first the metals, then the oxides, the compounds, finally water, till all the compounds had churned in the slowly cooling furnace and had reached a new stability, wound up, at last, with a condition something like this: Every last trace of oxygen had found something to grip, and hold. Down it had gone, as silicon dioxide or iron oxide or calcium oxide, some as trillions of tons of water. Fluorine, most active of non-metals, had beaten even the oxygen to a mate. Chlorine was coming out, the bromine and iodine; sulphur and phosphorus had gone down with the oxygen.

Everything was happily united -- save for the inert gases that didn't want to be: helium and xenon and radon and argon. And two others: hydrogen and nitrogen. Nitrogen, because it isn't ordinarily very anxious to do anything about it. It's not a confirmed-bachelor element; but it usually takes the stimulus of high temperatures to make nitrogen active. Then, of course, nitrogen becomes so virulently active it will drive even oxygen out of combination!

* One estimate places the temperatme of that matter freshly torn from a star at more than 600,000░ centigrade.

Hydrogen didn't unite simply because there was too much of it. Most plentiful of all elements in those vast flames the three-hour catastrophe had thrown out to make planets, it had gone down, by the trillions of tons, with oxygen to make water. By the millions, it had gone contentedly to rest with chlorine. It had combined with everything that it could combine with -- and there simply wasn't enough. So, there was hydrogen and nitrogen in the atmosphere, no half-hearted twenty per cent of hydrogen; most of that atmosphere was hydrogen.

Unfortunately, hydrogen and nitrogen, while they unite to form ammonia, do not do so very willingly, as Earth chemists know. During the War, Germany spent millions developing very complex and expensive apparatus to force the unwilling elements together. Haber, the inventor, should have been killed, by all rights, in one of the almost innumerable explosions they had trying to force these two into combination.

The principal point of the process is pressure -- pressure in large doses -- and they tried to use enormous steel retorts, made of metal of the finest quality and nine inches thick. But hydrogen has a nasty habit of forming a compound with iron -- iron hydride -- under these conditions, and that compound is twice as brittle as glass and not a tenth as strong. The retorts, fifty feet long and three feet in diameter, for all those nine-inch walls, blew up. Hydrogen and nitrogen do not unite readily, except under great pressure -- --

Pressure! Of all things Jupiter has, pressure is outstanding. Pressure that would make the bottoms of our seas seem near vacuum conditions. The hydrogen and nitrogen inevitably combined. Ammonia takes less room than the two gases; the elements were literally crushed together -- not to ammonia water, but to liquid ammonia, for Jupiter was cold, bitterly cold. Water was the stuff that made those great chalky mountains along the torrid equator, where the vast, intensely blue seas washed at them, and steamed slowly. Seas, of little, low, choppy waves, crushed under the gravity of that 86,ooo-mile world -- seas of liquid ammonia.

The cold snows of the north -- 65,000 miles away around the titanic globe -- were solid ammonia. And that atmosphere was hydrogen and ammonia vapor -- and methane, carbon tetrahydride. That is the principal constituent of natural gas here on Earth, an excellent fuel. Not on Jupiter. On Jupiter it is the waste product, the incombustible residue. Gasoline would be a safe cleaning fluid there, utterly incombustible. There, they would say that hydrogen would riot burn, but oxygen was an excellent fuel.

But that is not all that is strange in the chemistry of the giant planet. Jupiter is possessed of a climate ideal for life! The temperature is mild, about 120 degrees below zero centigrade, 185 below Fahrenheit. Yes that's a mild temperature! It's mild for Me on an entirely different basis, an

ammonia basis. Remember that in the discussion of the possible life media, I said that ammonia, though unstable, was a possible medium? That hydrogen could function as the active gas at low temperatures under great pressure? These conditions are fulfilled, for ammonia is stable, and the enormous pressure makes hydrogen active.

So a life is possible there, a life that breathes in a pure, invigorating atmosphere of hydrogen, with gentle breezes of ammonia! Its foods are, perhaps oxidizing agents instead of reducing agents. There are many organic compounds that we know which are capable of this action, compounds called peroxides which are violently explosive at the temperature of Earth, but stable at temperatures so low that Jupiter would find them normal.

Chemistry of life would be strangely different. Perhaps if there are intelligent, but not-too-intelligent inhabitants, they attempt to forget their woes on Saturday nights with the aid of a bottle of ethylamine, CgHsNH, instead of that ancient Earthly staple, ethyl alcohol, C2H5OH. To them, perhaps that compound t^O is a solid, white salt; at any rate, it is an immensely important part of their diet.

And what sort of a world do they live in? It must be a savage world of small animals. No great loo-foot monsters ever lived on the land of Jupiter, for they would have been crushed under their own weight. The animals would be small so that they could be active. Elephants never jump. Perhaps beings corresponding to men would be no more than two feet tall, but muscled so powerfully as to make any hand-to-hand encounters with such people (impossible due to the differences in atmosphere and pressure) a dangerous business indeed. Swift-moving beyond belief, in order to keep up with an environment lashed by a gravity two and a half times as swift as ours.