Cities in Flight 01, They Shall Have Stars by James Blish

Author:James Blish
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-08-12T14:31:38+00:00

CHAPTER SIX: Jupiter V

Yet the barbarians, who are not divided by rival traditions, fight all the more incessantly for food and space. Peoples cannot love one another unless they love the same ideas.

GEORGE. SANTAYANA

THERE WERE three yellow "Critical" signals lit on the long gangboard when Helmuth passed through the gang deck on the, way back to duty. All of them, as usual, were concentrated on Panel 9, where Eva Chavez worked.

Eva, despite her Latin name such once valid tickets no longer meant anything among the West's uniformly mixed race population was a big girl, vaguely blonde, who cherished a passion for the Bridge. Unfortunately, she was apt to become enthralled by the sheer Cosmicness of it all, precisely at the moment when cold analysis and split-second decisions were most crucial.

Helmuth reached over her shoulder, cut her out of the circuit except as an observer, and donned the co operator's helmet. The incomplete new shoals caisson sprang into being around him. Breakers of boiling hydrogen seethed seven hundred feet up along its slanted sides breakers that never subsided, .but simply were torn away into flying spray.

There was a spot of dull orange near the top of the north face of the caisson, crawling slowly 'toward the pediment of the nearest truss. Catalysis '

Or cancer, as Helmuth could not help but think of it. Or this bitter, violent monster of a planet, even tiny specks of calcium carbide were deadly, that same calcium carbide which had produced acetylene gas for buggy lamps two centuries ago on Earth. At these 'wind velocities, such specks imbedded themselves deeply 'in anything they struck; and at fifteen million p.s.i. of pressure, under the catalysis of sodium, pressure ice took up ammonia and carbon dioxide, building proteinlike compounds in a rapid, voracious chain of decay':

For a moment, Helmuth watched it grow. It was, after all, one of the incredible possibilities the Bridge had been built to study. On Earth, such a compound, had it occurred at all, might have grown porous, hard, and as strong as rhinoceros horn. Here, under nearly three times Earth's gravity, the molecules were forced to assemble in strict aliphatic order, but in cross section their arrangement was hexagonal, as though the stuff would become an aromatic compound if only it could. Even here it was moderately strong in cross section but along the long axis it smeared like graphite, the calcium and sulphur atoms readily changing their minds as to which was to act as the metal of the pair, surrendering their pressure driven holds on one carbon atom to grab hopefully for the next one in line, or giving up altogether to become incorporated instead in a radical with a self-contained double sulphur bond, rather like cystine....

It was not too far from the truth to call it a form of cancer. The compound seemed to be as close as Jupiter came to an indigenous form of life. It grew, fed, reproduced itself, and showed something of the characteristic structure of an

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