Harry Harrison To the Stars Trilogy

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most singular situation. Earth had an axial tilt of only a few degrees, and
that was enough to cause the great change in the seasons. The axis is the line
about which a planet revolves; the axial tilt the degree that the axis
deviates from the vertical. Forty-one degrees is a very dramatic deviation,
and this, combined with the long ellipse of its orbit, produced some very
unusual results.
Winter and summer were each four Earth years long. For four long years there
was darkness at the winter pole, the planetary pole that faced away from the
sun. This ended, suddenly and drastically, when the planet turned the brief
curve at one end of the elliptical orbit and summer came to the winter pole.
The climatic differences were brutal and dramatic as the winter pole became
the summer one, to lie exposed to sun for four years, as it had done to the
winter darkness.
While in between the poles, from 40 degrees north to 40 degrees south, there
was endless burning summer. The temperature at the equator stayed above 200
degrees most of the time. At the winter pole the temperature remained in the
thirties and there was even an occasional frost. In the extremes of
temperature of this deadly planet there was only one place where men could
live comfortably. The twilight zone. The only habitable place on -Halvm6rk was
this zone around the winter pole. Here the temperature varied only slightly,
between 70 degrees and 80 degrees, and men could live and crops could grow.
Wonderful, mutated crops, enough to feed a half-dozen crowded planets.
Atomic-powered desalination plants supplied the water, turning the chemicals
from the rich sea into fertilizer. The terrestrial plants had no enemies,
because all the native life on the planet was based on copper compounds, not
carbon.
Each flesh was poison to the other. Nor could the copper based plant life
compete for physical space with the faster growing, more energetic carbon
forms. They were
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logy%20(UC).txt (83 of 234) [5/21/03 1:29:01 AM]
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logy%20(UC).txt squeezed out, eliminated-and the crops grew. Crops adapted to
the constant, muted, unending light, and unchanging temperature. They grew and
grew and grew.
For four years, until the summer came and the burning sun rose above the
horizon and made life impossible again. But when summer arrived at one
hemisphere, winter fell in the other and there was another habitable twilight
zone at the opposite pole.
Then it would be possible to farm the other hemisphere for four years, until
the seasons changed again.
The planet was basically very productive once the water and the fertilizer
were supplied. The local plant life presented no problems. The Earth's economy
was such that getting settlers was no problem either. With the FTL drive,
transportation costs were reasonable. When the sums had been carefully done
and checked it was clear that food crops could be produced most reasonably,
and transported cheaply to the nearest inhabited worlds, while the entire
operation was designed to show a handsome profit as well. It could be done.
Even the gravity was very close to Earth norm, for while Halvmo~rk was larger
than Earth it was not nearly as dense.
Everything was very possible. There were even two large land masses around the
poles that contained the needed twilight zones. They could be farmed turn and
turn about, for four years each. It could be done.
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Except how did you get your farmers and equipment from zone td zone every four
years? A distance of nearly twenty-seven thousand kilometers?
Whatever discussions and plans had been proposed were long since buried in
forgotten files. But the few options open were fairly obvious. Simplest, and
most expensive, would be to provide for two different work forces. While
duplicating machinery and buildings would not be excessively expensive, the
thought of a work force loafing in air conditioned buildings for five years
out of every nine was totally unacceptable.
Unthinkable to work managers who wrung every erg of effort from their laborers
with lifetime contracts. Transportation by sea must have been considered;
Halvm6rk was mostly ocean, except for the two polar continents and some island
chains. But this would have meant land transportation to the ocean, then
large, expensive ships that could weather the violent tropical storms. Ships
that had to be maintained and serviced to be used just once every four and a
half years. Also unthinkable. Then was there a possible solution?
There was. The terraforming engineers had much experience in making planets
habitable to man. They could purify poison atmospheres, melt icecaps and cool
tropics, cultivate deserts and eliminatejungles. They could even raise land
masses where desired, sink others that were not needed. These latter dramatic
changes were brought about by the careful placing of gravitronic bombs. Each
of these was the size of a small building, and had to be assembled in a
specially dug cavern deep in the ground. The manner of their operation was a
secret carefully kept by the corporation that built them-but what they did was
far from secret. When activated, a gravitronic bomb brought about a sudden
surge of seismic activity. A planet's crust would be riven, the magma below
released, which in turn brought about normal seismic activity. Of course this
could only be effective where the tectonic plates overlapped, but this
ustially allowed for a wide enough latitude of choice.
The gravitronic bombs had brought a chain of flaming volcanoes from the ocean
deeps of Halvm6rk, volcanoes that vomited out lava that cooled and turned to
stone to form an island chain. Before the volcanic activity died down, the
islands became a land bridge connecting the two continents. After this it was,
relatively speaking, a simple matter to lower the tallest mountains with
hydrogen bombs. Even simpler still was the final step of leveling the
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rough-shaped land with fusion guns. These same guns smoothed the surface to
make a solid stone highway from continent to continent, reaching almost from
pole to pole, a single road 27,000 kilometers in length. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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