"Edmond Hamilton - Captain Future's Worlds of Tomorrow 02 - Pluto" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

PLUTO, THE SOLAR SYSTEM'S COLDEST PLANET
LUTO, the outermost, coldest planet of the Solar
System, was first visited in the year 2002 by Jan
Wenzi, whose name has since been given to the
planet's great north polar sea.
PWenzi was the third of that great triumvirate of
space-pioneers, the other two of whom were the immor-
tal Gorham Johnson and Mark Carew. These three first
trail-blazers of space were men of widely different
type.
The lanky, somber-eyed Gorham Johnson, who
made the initial space-flight to the moon in 1971, and
who led the 1979 expedition to Venus and Mercury and
the 1988 expedition to Mars and Jupiter, is of course
the most famous of that great trio. Johnson was a
dreamer - the greatest our race has ever known. It was
the dream of mankind expanding without limit into the
vast universe which spurred him on, even after his frail
body collapsed and he walked on artificial limbs.
Mark Carew, second in command of the Mars-
Jupiter expedition, took the leadership after Johnson's
tragic death on Callisto. He was basically a scientist.
Thirst for knowledge was the driving motive of Carew.
It led him to organize the 1991 expedition which first
visited Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. And it led him, a
few years later, on that last vain attempt to reach Pluto
from which Carew never returned.
MUTINY IN SPACE
But Jan Wenzi, to whom was reserved the glory of
reaching the farthest planet, was neither dreamer nor
scientist. He was of the age-old explorer type that is ob-
sessed by an unceasing desire to push beyond all
known frontiers, and to look upon places never before
seen by man.
Wenzi in his book (My Story, 2005), tells how as a
boy of fourteen he was in the crowd that watched
Gorham Johnson take off on his first epochal flight to
the moon.
"The crowd there on the Colorado plateau was mak-
ing skeptical jokes as Johnson entered the little rocket-
ship," writes Wenzi, "and when the craft roared up and
1
vanished there was much comment to the effect that a
crazy man had found a unique method of committing
suicide. But I knew, as I looked up into the sky after the
vanished ship, that some day I too was going to go out
there and look on worlds never seen before by Earth-
men."
When Gorham Johnson returned from the moon, and
was greeted by such a wild reception as no hero had