world would have to expend any energy just keeping warm.
In any event it appears to be this one or none,” Kamblin concluded. “Does
anybody want to enter a demurrer?”
“Well…” Jorn said hesitantly.
‘Yes, go ahead, Jorn.”
“I’ve been thinking, ies kind of enervating to live where ies warm-to-hot
all the time–and I think we’ve
110 fames Blish
all bad a full enough dose of hot weather over the last five years on our
own planet to last us a long time. What about the biggest satellite of the
giant planet? That planet radiates a lot of heat, enough so the satellite is
tolerably warm around the equator even at night. And this sun is plenty
bright enough to give it enough light to raise crops by–even though the
days might be pretty dim to our eyes.”
“Interesting,” Ertak said. “I’m against it but I can’t think why; it may be
only emotional. Dr. Kamblin?”
I have two objections,” Kamblin said. “To begin with, the reason why that
planet is hot is that it has a core of collapsed atoms, and it’s generating
a small amount of energy by the red giant or deuteriumhydrogen reaction.”
He got up and went to the blackboard, where he wrote:
-,D2 + 1111 -* ~Hel + gamma
“In fact it’s not really so much a planet as it Is 4 spoiled star, what we
call a ‘gray ghost.’ Note the last term in the expression; it means that on
any of those moons we’d be getting much more hard radia. tion than would be
good for us, especially genetically. The other reason is, that satellite
isn’t massive enough to hold its atmosphere long enough to be a permanent