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发信人: by (春天的小懒虫), 信区: SFworld
标  题: 2010 (38)
发信站: 哈工大紫丁香 (Wed Oct  6 15:12:47 1999), 转信

                               38
                         Foamscape

The last beast he saw, before he left the oceans of Europa,
was much the largest. It closely resembled one of the banyan
trees from Earth's tropics, whose scores of trunks allow a
single plant to create a small forest sometimes covering
hundreds of square metres. The specimen, however, was
walking, apparently on a trek between oases. If it was not
one of the creatures that had destroyed Tsien, it certainly
belonged to a very similar species.
  Now he had learned all that he needed to know - or,
rather, all that they needed to know. There was one more
moon to visit; seconds later, the burning landscape of Io lay
below him.
  It was as he had expected. Energy and food were there in
abundance, but the time was not yet ripe for their union.
Around some of the cooler sulphur lakes, the first steps had
been taken on the road to life, but before any degree of
organization had occurred, all such bravely premature
attempts were thrown back into the melting pot. Not until
the tidal forces that drove Io's furnaces had lost their power,
millions of years later, would there be anything to interest
biologists on that seared and sterilized world.
  He wasted little time on Io, and none at all on the tiny
inner moons that skirted Jupiter's ghostly rings - them-
selves only pale shadows of the glory that was Saturn's. The
greatest of worlds lay before him; he would know it as no
man had ever done, or ever would.
  The million-kilometre-long tendrils of magnetic force,
the sudden explosions of radio waves, the geysers of elec-
trified plasma wider than the planet Earth - they were as real
and clearly visible to him as the clouds banding the planet in
multihued glory. He could understand the complex pattern
of their interactions, and realized that Jupiter was much
more wonderful than anyone had ever guessed.
  Even as he fell through the roaring heart of the Great Red
Spot, with the lightning of its continent-wide thunder-
storms detonating around him, he knew why it had persisted
for centuries though it was made of gases far less substantial
than those that formed the hurricanes of Earth. The thin
scream of hydrogen wind faded as he sank into the calmer
depths, and a sleet of waxen snowflakes - some already
coalescing into barely palpable mountains of hydrocarbon
foam  -  descended  from  the  heights  above.  It was already
warm  enough  for  liquid  water  to  exist, but there were no
oceans   there;   that  purely  gaseous  environment  was  too
tenuous to support them.
  He  descended  through  layer after layer of cloud, until he
entered  a  region  of  such  clarity  that  even human vision
could  have  scanned  an  area more than a thousand kilometres
across.  It  was  only  a minor eddy in the vaster gyre of the
Great  Red  Spot;  and  it  held  a  secret  that men had long
guessed, but never proved.
  Skirting  the  foothills of the drifting foam mountains were
myriads  of  small, sharply-defined clouds, all about the same
size  and  patterned  with  similar  red  and brown mottlings.
They  were  small  only  as  compared  with  the inhuman scale
of  their  surroundings;  the  very least would have covered a
fair-sized city.
  They  were  clearly  alive,  for  they were moving with slow
deliberation  along the flanks of the aerial mountains, brows-
ing  off  their  slopes  like  colossal  sheep.  And they were
calling  to  each  other in the metre band, their radio voices
faint  but  clear  against  the  cracklings and concussions of
Jupiter itself.
  Nothing  less  than  living  gasbags,  they  floated  in  the
narrow   zone   between   freezing   heights   and   scorching
depths.  Narrow,  yes  -  but a domain far larger than all the
biosphere of Earth.
  They   were  not  alone.  Moving  swiftly  among  them  were
other  creatures  so  small  that  they could easily have been
overloaded.  Some  of  them  bore  an  almost  uncanny resemb-
lance to terrestrial aircraft and were of about the same size.
But  they  too  were  alive - perhaps predators, perhaps para-
sites, perhaps even herdsmen.
  A  whole  new  chapter of evolution, as alien as that which
he  had  glimpsed  on  Europa,  was  opening before him. There
were jet-propelled torpedoes like the squids of the terrestrial
oceans, hunting and devouring the huge gasbags. But the
balloons were not defenceless; some of them fought back
with electric thunderbolts and with clawed tentacles like
kilometre-long chainsaws.
  There were even stranger shapes, exploiting almost every
possibility of geometry - bizarre, translucent kites, tetra-
hedra, spheres, polyhedra, tangles of twisted ribbons.
The gigantic plankton of the Jovian atmosphere, they were
designed to float like gossamer in the uprising currents,
until they had lived long enough to reproduce; then they
would be swept down into the depths to be carbonized and
recycled in a new generation.
  He was searching a world more than a hundred times the
area of Earth, and though he saw many wonders, nothing
there hinted of intelligence. The radio voices of the great
balloons carried only simple messages of warning or of fear.
Even the hunters, who might have been expected to de-
velop higher degrees of organization, were like the sharks
in Earth's oceans - mindless automata.
  And for all its breathtaking size and novelty, the bio-
sphere of Jupiter was a fragile world, a place of mists and
foam, of delicate silken threads and paper-thin tissues spun
from the continual snowfall of petrochemicals formed by
lightning in the upper atmosphere. Few of its constructs
were more substantial than soap bubbles; its most terrifying
predators could be torn to shreds by even the feeblest of
terrestrial carnivores.
  Like Europa on a vastly grander scale, Jupiter was an
evolutionary cul-de-sac. Consciousness would never emerge
here; even if it did, it would be doomed to a stunted ex-
istence. A purely aerial culture might develop, but in an
environment where fire was impossible, and solids scarcely
existed, it could never even reach the Stone Age.
  And now, as he hovered above the centre of a Jovian
cyclone merely as large as Africa, he became aware once
again of the presence controlling him. Moods and emotions
were leaking into his own consciousness, though he could
not identify any specific concepts or ideas. It was as if he
were listening, outside a closed door, to a debate in pro-
gress, and in a language he could not understand. But the
muffled sounds clearly conveyed disappointment, then un-
certainty, then a sudden determination - though for what
purpose he could not tell. Once again, he felt like a pet dog,
able to share his master's changing moods but not to com-
prehend them.
  And then the invisible leash was taking him down toward
the heart of Jupiter. He was sinking through the clouds,
below the level where any form of life was possible.
  Soon he was beyond the reach of the last rays from the
faint and distant Sun. The pressure and temperature were
swiftly mounting; already it was above the boiling point of
water, and he passed briefly through a layer of superheated
steam. Jupiter was like an onion; he was peeling it away skin
by skin, though as yet he had travelled only a fraction of the
distance to its core.
  Beneath the steam was a witches' brew of petrochemicals
- enough to power for a million years all the internal-
combustion engines that mankind had ever built. It became
thicker and denser; then, quite abruptly, it ended at a dis-
continuity only a few kilometres thick.
  Heavier than any rocks on Earth, yet still a liquid, the
next shell consisted of silicon and carbon compounds of a
complexity that could have provided lifetimes of work for
terrestrial chemists. Layer followed layer for thousands of
kilometres, but as the temperature rose into the hundreds
and then the thousands of degrees, the composition of the
various strata became simpler and simpler. Halfway down
to the core, it was too hot for chemistry; all compounds
were torn apart, and only the basic elements could exist.
  Next there came a deep sea of hydrogen - but not hy-
drogen as it had ever existed for more than a fraction of a
second in any laboratory on Earth. This hydrogen was
under such enormous pressure that it had become a metal.
  He had almost reached the centre of the planet, but Jupiter
had one more surprise in store. The thick shell of metallic
yet still fluid hydrogen ended abruptly. At last, there was a
solid surface, sixty thousand kilometres down.
  For ages, the carbon baked out of the chemical reactions
far above had been drifting down toward the centre of the
planet. There it had gathered, crystallizing at a pressure of
millions of atmospheres. And there, by one of Nature's
supreme jests, was something very precious to mankind.
  The core of Jupiter, forever beyond human reach, was a
diamond as big as the Earth.

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:-) Helix@163.NET                                                    85958F57
:-( Helix@KALI.COM.CN                                                208CE12C
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