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

Things fall more swiftly. The spring of an attacking animal there would be a blur of motion to our eyes, for if it were not, he would not be able to spring any distance before that snapping gravity jerked him back to the ground.

They would have hard ground of low, almost flat country, where even the strength of mountains cannot lift themselves high against an overwhelming, eternal gravity. Though Jupiter is 300 times as massive as Earth, its gravity is not, fortunately, 300 times as great at the surface, because the surface is so far from the center of the planet. At one hundred thousand miles from the center of Earth, the gravity is one three hundredth that an equal distance from the center of Jupiter, but the latter planet is larger -- and the surface is farther from the center.

But the hills are low, for the gravity is still intense. The trees are low, scrubby things, perhaps with many stalks supporting a widespreading network of branches. There's reason for that, too -- two good ones. The grav-

ity -- always that -- and the winds. Not the gentle zephyrs of a minor planet like Earth, but howling, roaring, shrieking tornadoes that seem leftover memories of that wild day when planets were created in three brief hours. Winds that shriek past at two hundred miles an hour. Those are the steady, day-in-and-day-out trade winds of Jupiter -- gentle things that they expect every day of the long, long year. At least, we know they exist in the upper atmosphere, and surely something more than a hint of them goes raving around the surface.

Speaking of surface -- Jupiter has lots of that! How much of it is flooded, we have no way of guessing, but the planet is about 265,000 miles in circumference, and it spins around that circumference at a mad pace: once each ten hours, 26,500 miles an hour. But if ever a Jovian Magellan set out to circle his world, he would be tackling a task that even light would require a very distinctly measurable time to accomplish. Jupiter is a full-size planet, no accidental scrapings dropped behind that world!

And that fearfully heavy atmosphere is going to introduce difficulties when they start to make airplanes. The planes are easy enough -- almost anything with a flat surface will fly in an atmosphere as thick as that frightfully compressed stuff is. But speed is something quite different. It takes more than streamlining to wriggle a path through that ultracondensed soup.

Under the circumstances, probably an automobile would have the better of it, for, could we see a Jovian driver, we would undoubtedly praise the gods of the universe that we couldn't ride with him. They would have a habit of taking right-angle turns at forty to fifty miles an hour, braking the car to a dead stop from seventy miles an hour in about fifteen feet, and jittering through traffic with the general effect of one of those trick movies of a wild ride through New York.

Why? Because brakes there would have a far greater effect; the mass of the car, its inertia, would be unchanged, while its weight, and consequent pressure against the surface would be two and a half times as great The jarring decelerations, approaching the severity of a full-fledged collision, would not bother the concentrated balls of muscular strength a Jovian would have to be, anyway. Swinging a corner at forty would be ,no trick at all, when the car was held to the road by Jupiter's savage clutch.

But top speeds? That forty or fifty would be like doing approximately the same speed through water. If the brakes stop a car quickly, so does the air. What they'd bum for gasoline, I don't know -- perhaps pure hydrogen peroxide -- but they would burn it at a frightening rate, to make any speed.

And what would they build these automobiles of? Not iron -- remember what happened to Haber's steel retorts. Iron is a hopelessly brittle metal

under those conditions.* Not aluminum -- for in the strongly alkaline rains of that world, aluminum would melt away in no time. Silver would run away in liquid streams of ammonia-silver complex salts. So would copper. None of the noble metals -- they're all too heavy, by far, even if they are not as rare as on Earth, though they probably are. They would develop an utterly alien metallurgy, and a completely alien chemistry.

What do they burn in their gas stoves? Oxygen? Would they be able to develop radio where radio vacuum tubes would be crushed instantly by the brutal hand of that atmospheric pressure? Even if the tube is built sufficiently strong to stand the pressure, hydrogen atoms would seep through, as they diffuse through almost any material we know of. Perhaps, though, they would develop Alexanderson alternators for sending, which are nothing but specially designed dynamos; and receive by crystal detectors. Still -- even our best sets would never receive messages around that world -- a quarter of a million miles.

But are there any people there to worry about such things? We can't know, of course, but we can say this: There is an active liquid, not water, but one we have reason to believe is an excellent substitute. They have an atmosphere containing an active gas. They certainly have reason to develop life -- a nice mild climate, lots of land and "water" area in all probability. The Sunlight may be a bit diluent, but it's there.

Yes, those people may be based on a weird chemistry that makes liquid ammonia their "Adam's ale," and hydrogen their air; but the chemistry is possible. They might fry an egg -- of a Jovian chicken -- on the freezer tray of a Terrestrial refrigerator, but based on an ammonia scale, they have the proper temperature. They have day and night -- shorter than those of any other planet of the system -- to distribute the Sun's heat evenly.

If some strange and utterly alien creature from other solar systems were to come to make a guess as to which of Sol's children bore life, which do you suppose he would choose? Tiny planets -- the Terrestrial type -- with an almost perfect vacuum for atmosphere -- or mighty worlds like Jupiter? I think I would choose Jupiter, were it not that I just happen to have special, one might say "inside," dope. My personal economy is based on water.

I'm glad of that. That and the atmosphere I breathe. For I wonder if there are on Jupiter, peoples more intelligent than we, gazing out through

* You may be interested in one solution of the problem of getting hydrogen under great pressure safely. They use two retorts, one inside the other, like an arm in a sleeve. The "arm" is the hydrogen retort, with hydrogen at a pressure, let us say, of 2000 pounds to the square inch. The sleeve is a heavy steel retort about it. Between the two, in the hollow, is nitrogen at 2010 pounds. The hydrogen leaks and weakens the inner retort, but that's under no real strain. The nitrogen keeps it from reaching the outer sleeve, taking all the strain safely because it is not "weakened" by seeping hydrogen.

mighty telescopes, wondering and longing, imagining life on tiny, more Sunward worlds -- and vainly wishing. Wishing, and knowing that they cannot leave. For just as surely as no near-evacuated vessel made of matter could resist for a day, that awful, crushing atmosphere of Jupiter, so surely could no vessel made of matter resist the frightful, bursting pressure should it venture into space charged with that ultra-compressed air. Burdened by an enormously heavy air, seeking to escape an enormously massive planet -- and the filtering, seeping hydrogen escaping steadily through the very atoms of the metal. I wonder if they look -- and wish -- --