Islands of Space - John W. Campbell (pdf to ebook reader TXT) 📗

the sun, it must have received almost the same amount of heat that Earth does, for this sun was considerably brighter than Sol.

Terra was eight thousand two hundred miles in diameter, with a fairly clear atmosphere and a varying albedo which indicated clouds in the atmosphere. Morey had every reason to believe that it might be inhabited, but he had no proof because his photographs were consistently poor due to the glare of the sun.

The rest of the planets proved to be of little interest. In the place where, according to Bode’s Law, another planet, corresponding to Mars, should have been, there was only a belt of asteroids. Beyond this was still another belt. And on the other side of the double asteroid belt was the fourth planet, a fifty-thousand-mile-in-diameter methane-ammonia giant which Morey named Zeus in honor of Jupiter.

He had picked up a couple of others on his plates, but he had not been able to tell anything about them as yet. In any case, the planets Aphrodite and Terra were by far the most interesting.

“I think we picked the right angle to come into this system,” said Arcot, looking at Morey’s photographs of the wide bands of asteroids. They had come into the planetary group at right angles to the plane of the ecliptic, which had allowed them to miss both asteroid belts.

They started moving toward the planet Terra, reaching their objective in less than three hours.

The globe beneath them was lit brightly, for they had approached it from the daylight side. Below them, they could see wide, green plains and gently rolling mountains, and in a great cleft in one of the mountain ranges was a shimmering lake of clearest blue.

The air of the planet screamed about them as they dropped down, and the roar in the loudspeaker grew to a mighty cataract of sound. Morey turned down the volume.

The sparkling little lake passed beneath them as they shot on, seventy-five miles above the surface of the planet. When they had first entered the atmosphere, they had the impression of looking down on a vast, inverted bowl whose edge rested on a vast, smooth table of deep violet velvet. But as they dropped and the violet became bluer and bluer, they experienced the strange optical illusion of “flopping” of the scene. The bowl seemed to turn itself inside out, and they were looking down at its inner surface.

They shot over a mountain range, and a vast plain spread out before them. Here and there, in the far distance, they could see darker spots caused by buckled geological strata.

Arcot swung the ship around, and they saw the vast horizon swing about them as their sensation of “down” changed with the acceleration of the turn. They felt nearly weightless, for they were lifting again in a high arc.

Arcot was heading back toward the mountains they had passed over. He dropped the ship again, and the foothills seemed to rise to meet them.

“I’m heading for that lake,” Arcot explained. “It seems absolutely deserted, and there are some things we want to do. I haven’t had any decent exercise for the past two weeks, except for straining under high gravity. I want to do some swimming, and we need to distill some water for drink; we need to refill the tanks in case of emergencies. If the atmosphere contains oxygen, fine; if it doesn’t, we can get it out of the water by electrolysis.

“But I hope that air is good to breathe, because I’ve been wanting a swim and a sun bath for a long time!”

XIII

The Ancient Mariner hung high in the air, poised twenty-five miles above the surface of the little lake. Wade, as chemist, tested the air while the others readied the distillation and air condensation apparatus. By the time they had finished, Wade was ready with his report.

“Air pressure about 20 psi at the surface; temperature around ninety-five Fahrenheit. Composition: eighteen percent oxygen, seventy-five percent nitrogen, four-tenths of one percent carbon dioxide, residue⁠—inert gasses. That’s not including water vapor, of which there is a fair amount.

“I put a canary into the air, and the bird liked it, so I imagine it’s quite safe except for bacteria, perhaps. Naturally, at this altitude the air is germ-free.”

“Good,” said Morey, “then we can take our swim and work without worrying about spacesuits.”

“Just a minute!” Fuller objected. “What about those germs Wade mentioned? If you think I’m going out in my shorts where some flock of bacteria can get at my tender anatomy, you’ve got another think coming!”

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Wade said. “The chances of organisms developing along the same evolutionary line is quite slim. We may find the inhabitants of the same shape as those of another world, because the human body is fairly well constructed anatomically. The head is in a place where it will be able to see over a wide area and it’s in a safe place. The hand is very useful and can be improved upon but little. True, the Venerians have a second thumb, but the principle is the same.

“But chemically, the bodies are probably very different. The people of Venus are widely different chemically; the bacteria that can make a Venerian deathly ill is killed the instant it enters our body, or else it starves to death because it can’t find the kind of chemical food it needs to live. And the same thing happens when a Venerian is attacked by an Earthly microorganism.

“Even on Earth, evolution has produced such widely varying types of life that an organism that can feed on one is totally incapable of feeding on another. You, for instance, couldn’t catch tobacco mosaic virus, and the tobacco plant can’t catch the measles virus.

“You couldn’t expect a microorganism to evolve here that was capable of feeding on Earth-type tissues; they would have starved to death long ago.”

“What about bigger animals?” Fuller asked cautiously.

“That’s different. You would probably be indigestible to an alien carnivore,