"Geoffrey A. Landis - Turnover" - читать интересную книгу автора (Landis Geoffrey A)

TURNOVER
by Geoffrey A. Landis
_____________________________________________
Copyright ┬й 1998 by Geoffrey A. Landis
Printed in Year's Best SF 3
HarperPrism
ISBN 0-06-105901-3

eBook scanned & proofed by binwiped 11-10-02 [v1.0]




The scientist's guild had a requirement that each accredited scientist must have a beautiful assistant
to ask questions. Doctor Piffelheimer's beautiful assistant was a young man named Percival Kensington.
She looked him over. The cool-suit he was wearing, a necessary accoutrement against the Venusian
temperature, had the advantage of being a skin-tight, form-fitting garment, padding and revealing every
curve of his perfectly shaped body, down to and including the almost indecent bulge between his thighs.
The surface of Venus was almost hot enough for the rocks to glow. It was a good thing that the
perfect thermal insulator had been invented, or it would have been completely impossible to send a team
to Venus to answer important sci-entific questions.
Except for her assistant Percy, the surface of Venus held very little to see. One spot on the barren
rock looked very much like another. Dr. Piffelheimer picked one at random and pointed. "This looks like
a good spot."
Percy obediently lugged the equipment over to the spot. Fortunately the ultradrill floated on a carpet
of electrostatic repulsion, and lugging the five-ton mass of the drill to the indi-cated spot required little
more than guiding it with a finger in the right direction. "Explain to me what we're trying to find out from
this core," he said, and cocked his head in a charm-ing tilt to listen. They must have trained him perfectly
in sci-entists' assistant school; this was exactly the type of obvious question that a beautiful assistant was
supposed to ask.
Piffelheimer motioned him to start the ultradrill while she expounded. The ultradrill would bore
downward at a rate of 200 meters a minute. It made a racket like a herd of mating elephants while doing
so, but fortunately the helmets of the coolsuits were perfect acoustic insulators as well as perfect thermal
insulation, so she knew that her voice over the inter-com was flawlessly clear.
"The surface of Venus is very anomalous," Piffelheimer expounded carefully. "This was first really
understood back in the last years of the twentieth century, when the primitive space probes discovered
that the crater distribution was uni-form across the surface."
"What's anomalous about that?" Percy asked, completely on cue.
"Crater count indicates the age of the surface," Piffel-heimer said. "Since meteor bombardment
occurs randomly at every point on the surface, a uniform crater distribution means that the surface of
Venus is all precisely the same age. But, as every geologist knows, a geological surface is periodically
resurfaced, by tectonic forces, by vulcanism, and the like. Vulcanism is necessary to get the heat out of
the interior of the planet. So a planet cannot possibly have a surface of uniform age."
"But you just said it does."
"That's right. This is the scientific mystery, and we're about to find the answer to it."
"Oh. How are we going to do that?"
"By drilling and inserting heat-flow probes," she said. "The mystery is, how does the planet Venus
release heat from the interior, if it doesn't resurface the planet through vulcan-ism?"
"Aren't there any theories?"
 "Well, there is one." Piffelheimer made a face. "One wacko from the twentieth century, a scientist