* * * *
But that is not all that is strange in the chemistry of the giant planet. Jupiter is possessed of a climate ideal for life! The temperature is mild, about 120 degrees below zero centigrade, 185 below Fahrenheit. Yes that’s a mild temperature! It’s mild for life on an entirely different basis, an ammonia basis. Remember that in the discussion of the possible life media, I said that ammonia, though unstable, was a possible medium? That hydrogen could function as the active gas at low temperatures under great pressure? These conditions are fulfilled, for ammonia is stable, and the enormous pressure makes hydrogen active.
So a life is possible there, a life that breathes in a pure, invigorating atmosphere of hydrogen, with gentle breezes of ammonia! Its foods are, perhaps oxidizing agents instead of reducing agents. There are many organic compounds that we know which are capable of this action, compounds called peroxides which are violently explosive at the temperature of Earth, but stable at temperatures so low that Jupiter would find them normal.
Chemistry of life would be strangely different. Perhaps if there are intelligent, but not-too-intelligent inhabitants, they attempt to forget their woes on Saturday nights with the aid of a bottle of ethylamine, C2H5NH, instead of that ancient Earthly staple, ethyl alcohol, C2H5OH. To them, perhaps that compound H2O is a solid, white salt; at any rate, it is an immensely important part of their diet.
And what sort of a world do they live in? It must be a savage world of small animals. No great 100-foot monsters ever lived on the land of Jupiter, for they would have been crushed under their own weight. The animals would be small so that they could be active. Elephants never jump. Perhaps beings corresponding to men would be no more than two feet tall, but muscled so powerfully as to make any hand-to-hand encounters with such people (impossible due to the differences in atmosphere and pressure) a dangerous business indeed. Swift-moving beyond belief, in order to keep up with an environment lashed by a gravity two and a half times as swift as ours.
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 gravity—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 burn 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. [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.] 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 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-
* * * *
Campbell was, of course, no more accurate about Jupiter than astronomers generally were in 1937—who could reasonably expect him to be—but he presented the 1937 viewpoint effectively, and I never forgot it. Jupiter, after that, could not be a world of giant insects. It was a world of a giant atmosphere containing methane and ammonia.
Stories of mine such as “The Callistan Menace,” “Not Final,” and, particularly, “Victory Unintentional,” were written with Campbell’s “Other Eyes Watching” firmly in mind.
Campbell’s articles taught me more. They taught me that non-fiction could be as interesting as fiction. Well enough done, I found, it could compete with the fiction in a science fiction magazine and grab the attention. I always turned to Campbell’s article first in those issues in which the series appeared.
The time was to come, over a dozen years later, when Astounding would print non-fiction articles by me, and, still later, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction would begin a regular series of non-fiction articles by me that would run far longer than any other such series in the history of the field. (As I write this, I am working on my 181st monthly article in that series.)
And all the articles I write for science fiction magazines, indeed all the non-fiction I write, I trace back to my pleasure at reading Campbell’s articles on astronomy.
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* * * *
There was no question that I was beginning to value science for its own sake and was beginning to enjoy science fiction not only for the quality of its writing and the excitement of its action, but for the accuracy of its science. Consequently, when I came across John D. Clark’s “Minus Planet,” in the April 1937 Astounding Stories, I found an entirely new dimension of pleasure in it.
* * * *
MINUS PLANET
by John D. Clark
Now that it’s all over, and we have escaped the more serious of the possible consequences, we wonder why we were so slow to see what was happening. For it might have been foreseen. We knew that the position of man in the universe was precarious enough, and that the very existence of matter itself wasn’t much more stable. That is—we knew it, but we didn’t realize it. There is a difference, and that difference was almost enough to eliminate not only man but the Earth itself from celestial history.
The warnings were plain enough. They lasted for years. Biologists had noticed that the evolution of animal and plant life in the northern hemisphere was steadily accelerating, due, probably, to the gradual and completely inexplicable increase in the intensity of the cosmic rays from the direction of Polaris.
These rays increased the number of mutations in the germ plasm of all living matter exposed to them. New varieties of plants, freak animals, queer monsters born to normal men and women, were coming into the world at a steadily increasing rate. There were advantages, of course. Many of the new varieties of plants and animals were extremely useful, and there were genuises as well as monsters born to commonplace human beings. But, on the whole, the inhabitants of the planet didn’t like the situation. The scientists liked it even less than did anybody else. You see, they couldn’t explain it—and when a scientist can’t explain something, he is likely to be annoyed. It makes him look so foolish.
* * * *
It was on January 15, 2156, that the astrophysicist, Dr. James Carter, had the first glimmer of light—literally. He was working on the new five-hundred-inch reflector of the Mt. McKinley observatory at the time, and noticed a darkening of his photographic plate from the spectrometer focused on Polaris in the northern sky. He repeated his observation, and got the same result; a uniform darkening over the whole spectral range.
“As though,” he said to his assistant, “the whole damned spectrum were light struck! And I never knew any source of light that would give a continuous spectrum from infra-red to cosmic rays, with the cosmics the strongest. There doesn’t seem to be any line structure at all—just as though there were a hot body out there heated to a few billion degrees centigrade!”
The assistant, Dr. Michael Poggenpohl, usually known as Doc Mike, wrinkled his diminutive nose, and scratched his flaming head. “That,” he remarked, “doesn’t make sense! A body that hot on the outside wouldn’t stay that way. And where did it come from, anyway, Jimmy?”
Jimmy uncoiled his six foot three of giraffelike build from his usual thinking position (in which he rested comfortably on the back of his neck), lighted a cigarette, and grunted. The noise was not gracious, but neither was his mood nor the expression on his somewhat battered face.
“Right now, I want some information on where this alleged source of light is. Will you make arrangements for the observatories on Mars and Venus to take simultaneous observations with us on the northern sky? No, I don’t want a spectrum. I have a spectrum, and it has me baffled. I merely want a simple photographic observation. Everything this object, whatever it is, is sending out, seems to affect the plate. And I want to know where it is. The question of what it is, can wait. Move on now, little one, and pretend that you’re earning the money the commissariat of science is paying you!”
Mike held his nose insultingly, and moved to obey. “And how about the jack,” he asked sweetly, “that they’re foolish enough to waste on you?”
“It’s not waste, old fruit. Geniuses have to be supported. I’m the genius!”
“I’ve been wondering what it was. I thought you must be somebody’s uncle. O. K., I’ll get the messages off right away. The light-beam operator ought to be able to get in touch with Mars directly, but Venus is on the other side of the Sun right now, and he’ll have to relay to him.”
“Don’t bother me with trifles! Go away and let me think in peace!”
“You mean loaf,” said Mike, and departed.
* * * *
But Jimmy didn’t loaf when the other man had gone. He reached for a dozen reference books, a slide rule, and a wad of paper, and immediately became oblivious to all about him. He remained in that state for some hours, and only returned to the world when Mike reappeared with the televised plates from the other observatories. They all showed the same thing: a small, brilliant point against the background of the northern constellations.
It had evidently been overlooked previously, since it was almost invisible to the eye, even through the largest telescope, and appeared only on the photographic plate, which was sensitive to the invisible ultra-violet, gamma, and cosmic radiation which accounted for the major part of its energy. The plates were sent via pneumatic tube to the calculating room, with a request that the distance of the unknown body be determined, if possible, from the observations of the three planets. The two scientists sat down to think it over.
“Mike, what do you know about matter, anyway? What’s it composed of?”
“What’s the matter? I thought you were the genius. And why ask a kindergarten question at this time of day, anyway?”
“Go on, go on. I’m asking the questions. What’s matter
made of?”
“Well, if you must know, it seems to be made of assorted particles of electricity. An atom consists of a heavy, positive nucleus, with a lot of light, negative electrons floating around it. To be precise, the nucleus consists of, say, ‘z’ protons and ‘n’ neutrons. They weigh almost the same, and the protons have unit positive charges, while the neutrons are neutral. The whole nucleus has a positive charge, then, of plus ‘z’. (Ordinary hydrogen hasn’t any neutrons—just a single lone proton for a nucleus.) Then, of course, there are ‘z’ negative electrons floating around outside to neutralize the whole affair. You ought to know, though! You developed the method of splitting the nucleus on a commercial scale to get the energy out of it!”
“Yes, yes, I know. But what is a proton made of?”
“That? Oh, it seems to be a neutron closely tied up with a positron— a positive electron that doesn’t weigh much of anything.”
“Then, candidate, what are the fundamental units of matter?”
“What is this, anyhow? Another damned Ph.D. exam? The fundamental particles would be the neutron, with most of the mass and no charge, and the positron and electron, with positive and negative charge respectively, and no mass to speak of. And so what?”
Before The Golden Age - A SF Anthology of the 1930s Page 119