"Michael Swanwick - Slow Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

*Slow Life*
by Michael Swanwick
Different evolutionary backgrounds lead to _very_
different perspectives.
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"It was the Second Age of Space. Gagarin, Shepard,
Glenn, and Armstrong were all dead. It was _our_ turn to
make history now."
-- _The Memoirs of Lizzie O'Brien_
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The raindrop began forming ninety kilometers above
the surface of Titan. It started with an infinitesimal speck
of tholin, adrift in the cold nitrogen atmosphere.
Dianoacetylene condensed on the seed nucleus, molecule by
molecule, until it was one shard of ice in a cloud of
billions.
Now the journey could begin.
It took almost a year for the shard of ice in
question to precipitate downward twenty-five kilometers,
where the temperature dropped low enough that ethane began
to condense on it. But when it did, growth was rapid.
Down it drifted.
At forty kilometers, it was for a time caught up in
an ethane cloud. There it continued to grow. Occasionally it
collided with another droplet and doubled in size. Finally
it was too large to be held effortlessly aloft by the gentle
stratospheric winds.
It fell.
Falling, it swept up methane and quickly grew large
enough to achieve a terminal velocity of almost two meters
per second.
At twenty-seven kilometers, it passed through a dense
layer of methane clouds. It acquired more methane, and
continued its downward flight.
As the air thickened, its velocity slowed and it
began to lose some of its substance to evaporation. At two
and a half kilometers, when it emerged from the last patchy
clouds, it was losing mass so rapidly it could not normally
be expected to reach the ground.
It was, however, falling toward the equatorial
highlands, where mountains of ice rose a towering five
hundred meters into the atmosphere. At two meters and a lazy
new terminal velocity of one meter per second, it was only a
breath away from hitting the surface.
Two hands swooped an open plastic collecting bag
upward, and snared the raindrop.
"Gotcha!" Lizzie O'Brien cried gleefully.
She zip-locked the bag shut, held it up so her helmet
cam could read the bar-code in the corner, and said, "One
raindrop." Then she popped it into her collecting box.