"Paul Preuss - Venus Prime 4 - The Medusa Encounter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preuss Paul)

Three. . . .)

Earth-based observers had long suspected this, as they made careful drawings of the ever-changing
Jovian cloudscape. There was only one semipermanent feature on the face of the planet, the famous
Great Red Spot, and even this sometimes vanished completely. Jupiter was a world without geographyтАФ
a planet for meteorologists, but not for cartographers.

As I have recounted in Astounding Days: A Science-fictional Autobiography, my own fascination with
Jupiter began with the very first science-fiction magazine I ever sawтАФthe November 1928 edition of
Hugo GernsbackтАЩs Amazing Stories, which had been launched two years earlier. It featured a superb
cover by Frank R. Paul, which one could plausibly cite as proof of the existence of precognition.

Half a dozen earthmen are stepping forth onto one of the Jovian satellites emerging from a silo-shaped
spaceship that looks uncomfortably small for such a long voyage. The orange-tinted globe of the giant
planet dominates the sky, with two of its inner moons in transit. I am afraid that Paul has cheated
shamelessly, because Jupiter is fully illuminatedтАФthough the sun is almost behind it!

IтАЩm not in a position to criticize, as itтАЩs taken me more than fifty years to spot thisтАФprobably deliberate
тАФerror. If my memory is correct, the cover illustrates a story by Gawain Edwards, real name G. Edward
Pendray. Ed Pendray was one of the pioneers of American rocketry and published The Coming Age of
Rocket Power in 1947. Perhaps PendrayтАЩs most valuable work was in helping Mrs. Goddard edit the
massive three volumes of her husbandтАЩs notebooks: he lived to see the Voyager closeups of the Jovian
system, and I wonder if he recalled PaulтАЩs illustration.

What is so astonishingтАФIтАЩm sorry, amazingтАФabout this 1928 painting is that it shows, with great
accuracy, details which at the time were unknown to earth-based observers. Not until 1979, when the
Voyager spaceprobes flew past Jupiter and its moons, was it possible to observe the intricate loops and
curlicues created by the Jovian tradewinds. Yet half a century earlier, Paul had depicted them with
uncanny precision.

Many years later, I was privileged to work with the doyen of space artists, Chesley Bonestell, on the
book Beyond Jupiter (Little Brown, 1972). This was a preview of the proposed Grand Tour of the outer
solar system, which it was hoped might take advantage of a once-in-179-year configuration of all the
planets between Jupiter and Pluto. As it turned out, the considerably more modest Voyager missions
achieved virtually all the Grand TourтАЩs objectives, at least out to Neptune. Looking at ChesleyтАЩs
illustrations with 20:20 clarity of hindsight, I am surprised to see that Frank Paul, though technically the
poorer artist, did a far better job of visualizing Jupiter as it really is.

Since Jupiter is so far from the sunтАФfive times the distance of the EarthтАФthe temperature might be


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 ARTHUR C. CLARKEтАЩS VENUS PRIME, VOLUME 4

expected to be a hundred or so degrees below the worst that the Antarctic winter can provide. That is
true of the upper cloud layers, but for a long time astronomers have known that the planet radiates
several times as much heat as it receives from the Sun. Though it is not big enough to sustain
thermonuclear fusion (Jupiter has been called тАЬa star that failedтАЭ), it undoubtedly possesses some
internal sources of heat. As a consequence, at some depth beneath the clouds, the temperature is that of a
comfortable day on Earth. The pressure is another matter; but as the depths of our own oceans have