Saturn Rukh (41 page)

“Okay,” replied Uppereye finally. “I now understand. Home is where you are happy, have much to eat, and have many friends to talk to. If Sandra stay here, Sandra will have only a few friends to talk to, Sandra will not get enough to eat, and Sandra will die. Uppereye not want Sandra to die. Uppereye want Sandra to go home.”

I only wish you could fly us there,
thought Sandra to herself as she started to put away the portable console. Above her on the control deck, Dan started the airlock cycle that would let Sandra inside. He gave a yawn. It had been a long night. It was time for him, Sandra, and Uppereye to all get some sleep.

Sandra exited the airlock onto the facilities deck, where Dan was having a light supper before going to bed. Dan looked worried.

“I think Chastity is having problems,” he said. “She’s supposed to follow me on watch duty and she’s not out of her habitat yet.”

“That’s not a good sign,” replied Sandra.

“Tell Rod when he gets out of the men’s that he’d better take over the watch,” said Dan, taking his medical kit out of the engineering sector locker. “I’ll go check on her.”

When the hatchdoor slowly opened to his tap, Dan was dismayed at what he saw. Chastity’s countenance was contorted with pain and her eyes were red. It was obvious she had not slept much during the night period, if at all. He quickly slid inside to join her and shut the hatchdoor behind him to give them some privacy.

“I keep telling myself that it’s all imaginary,” said Chastity bravely. “But it still hurts. Hurts so bad I can’t get any sleep.”

“What hurts?” asked Dan sympathetically, stroking perspiration-wetted wisps of errant jet-black hair from her forehead.

“My fingers,” replied Chastity. “The fingers I don’t have. They feel like they’re being crushed in a red-hot vise. Yet they can’t be hurting. They’re not there.”

“They’re called phantom pains,” said Dan in a professional tone. “But they’re real enough. The injured nerve endings in the stump are sending messages back to your brain, which is misinterpreting where the pain is. You should have come to me earlier instead of trying to tough it out.” He pulled a hypodermic out of his kit and gave her a shot. “Sometimes massage helps,” he said, taking the stump between both his hands and gently kneading it with his fingers.

“Stop!” she cried, pulling her arm away. “How can you stand to do that! It’s so ugly ...
I’m
so ugly ... I don’t blame Rod for not wanting to sleep—”

“Wait
a minute, there,” interrupted Dan loudly, trying to get her to think logically instead of emotionally about her condition. “You’re not ugly ... you’re
beautiful!
You have one of the most beautiful faces on Earth—you know yourself that you are now as beautiful as Elizabeth Taylor ever was. If you had not been such an excellent space pilot, you could have
easily
become a video star. Yes, you have lost a hand, but you still have one of the most desirable curvaceous bodies a man could ever wish for.”

“Are you positive about that?”

“Yes,” replied Dan with certainty, allowing his eyes to stare at her cleavage to emphasize the point.

“Then sleep with me!” said Chastity almost desperately, pulling him toward her with her good hand.

“I would be honored to sleep with you,” he said, giving her a strong, long hug and a lingering kiss. “There is nothing I would enjoy more than making love to you, passionately and fiercely and softly and naughtily and adoringly and lovingly.” He pulled back and looked her straight in her deep violet eyes. “But I can’t. I’m still technically married, and I may yet be able to win Pamela back and save my family. I could never do that if I had been unfaithful.”

He reached again for her stump and continued to massage. “The shot should be taking effect by now,” he said.

“It is!” said Chastity, surprised that she hadn’t noticed that the pain had gone. A pleased smile brightened up her otherwise sodden face. “Thanks for all those nice words about how beautiful I am. They really cheered me up. I won’t argue with you about them, but just pretend you really meant them.”

“I
did
mean them,” Dan replied. “Chastity, you are the most beautiful, most desirable, most wonderful woman in the world. You’re smart, you’re fun, and God knows you’re sexy …” He let go her stump. “I’d better go.”

Chastity stiffened and pulled back her stump. “Of course you’d better go! Of course! How could I have forgotten? How could
any
of us have forgotten! You’re married. Married to a mewing little cat with the face of a doll and about as many brains! That selfish little idiot has all your loyalty—all your love!” Frustration rose in her throat, choking her.

“God no!” Dan spat out angrily, shaking his head in vehement denial. “Don’t you get it? It’s you I love! I love you totally ... completely ... I want you more than I have ever wanted anything in my life ... but I’m not going to trade in the love I feel for you just to become another roll in the hay when your ego needs petting.”

Chastity looked at Dan’s angry face in amazement. She had seen Dan argue with Rod, fight with Pete, even suffer through Pamela’s tirades, but she had never seen him truly angry.

“I have been watching you. Wanting you—as you made yourself available to each man you met, as the mood suited you. At first I burned—God, how I burned with jealousy. But then I saw that it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter to
them.
It didn’t matter to
you.
It was just sex. It wasn’t important. But the way I feel about you. That’s important. You’re important. You deserve a man who is free, really free, to give you the kind of love you need, and the kind of respect that
you
can respect.”

Gently, Dan took her into his arms and whispered in her ear. “Soon I will be free. Out of this mess of a marriage. And when we
do
make love ... it’s really going to matter.” He didn’t let go and Chastity returned the embrace, holding on tight to him in return.

Later that night Chastity lay with her head on Dan’s sleeping chest, listening to his heartbeat through the rough material of his coverall. She was still in a state of wonder.
This is the first time,
she thought,
that I have spent the night with a man and kept my clothes on.
Yet she felt more satisfied than she had been in a very long time. Chastity had first learned about sex on top of a cemetery bench on Earth, looking up at the stars. Now looking up at those same stars through a viewport on top of a giant bird on a planet halfway across the solar system, she was finally learning about love.

“How come no one ever told me?” she asked them.

~ * ~

7

ESCAPE FROM THE WELL

POSITION: 22.22 DEGREES NORTH, 108.52 DEGREES EAST.

The repeated number 2 for the latitude on the console screen drew Rod’s attention.

“That’s funny,” he mused. “I thought we were at twenty-one degrees north.” Later, at dinner with the rest of the crew, Rod asked Sandra about it.

“The flock seems to be slowly drifting northward,” he mentioned to her. “We passed over the twenty-two-degree north latitude line yesterday. What’s going on? Every degree north we move will make it that much harder to get off this gasball when the rescue ship arrives.”

They all knew the chances of their still being alive when the rescue ship arrived were minuscule, but the only thing keeping them going was hope, so those negative thoughts were never mentioned aloud. They always said “
When
the rescue ship arrives,” not
“If... “

“It’s because the rukhs are afraid of the millistoma,” replied Sandra. “It’s coming up to the time in the year when the millistoma is supposed to rise up out of the depths and swallow everything in sight. Since it supposedly lives near the equator, the flock has gone far north to stay away from it. The rukhs actually prefer hunting near the equator. There’s more food available there. Later on in the Saturnian year, when the threat from the millistoma is less, they’ll be heading back south.”

“Say! That may be the solution to our problem!” said Rod excitedly. “Chass and I have been doing all our trajectory calculations assuming we were going to have to launch from twenty-one degrees north. If we can get Peregrine to fly us to the equator, then we might be able to get off this planet all by ourselves, without having to wait for a rescue ship. The gravity force is weaker at the equator and the rotational velocity is higher, so we get more of a boost from the planet.” He put his dinner aside and headed for the ladder to the control deck, the others following. Settling himself at the pilot console, he tapped an icon on the screen. “Jeeves! If we take the nonessential mass off
Sexdent,
but keep the tether so we can unwind the reactor from Peregrine, how much delta vee will our sixty tons of meta give us?”

“Approximately twenty-nine kilometers a second,” came the reply.

“And how much delta vee do we need to reach our fuel tank in the orbit of Titan if we launch, not from twenty-one degrees north, but from the equator?”

“Taking into account the J-sub-two gravity term, subtracting off the rotational velocity of the planet, and adding the drag and gravity losses, the velocity increment needed at launch to enter an elliptical orbit with an apoapsis at the orbit of Titan is 27.5 kilometers per second,” replied Jeeves.

“And we have twenty-nine,” said Rod. “More than enough, with plenty to spare.”

“And to circularize the orbit at the Trojan point in Titan’s orbit that contains the fuel tank, another burn at apogee of four kilometers per second, for a total delta vee requirement of 31.5 kilometers per second,” concluded Jeeves.

“Right... forgot about that bum,” said Rod with a dejected shake of his head. “Even if we strip
Sexdent
bare we can’t meet that target.” He turned around and looked apologetically at the crew. “Looks like the gain we got from going to the equator wasn’t as much as I thought.”

There was a long silence as the implication of the numbers sank once again into the assembled crew. For a while it had looked like Rod had found a way out of their predicament, but now it seemed their hopes had been dashed once again on the harsh cold rocks of the rocket equation. But Rod and Chastity were not the type to give up. Both had gone into their test-pilot-in-trouble mode—twitching eyes staring blankly, body motions and breathing slowed to glacial pace.

“Use Titan to help us stop—” Chastity finally said.

“Of course!” said Rod, coming out of his trance. “Jeeves, instead of stopping at the Trojan point of Titan, how much delta vee do we need to stop using Titan’s gravity well? Once we circularize our orbit there, we can drift over to the Trojan point.”

“The required burn for a circular capture orbit around Titan is three kilometers a second, for a total mission delta vee of 30.5 kilometers a second.”

“Fifteen hundred klecs short,” said Rod, discouraged again. “Might as well be a billion.”

“Wait!” said Chastity. “We don’t want a circular capture orbit around Titan. Our fuel depot isn’t at Titan, it’s out at the leading Trojan point. What we want is a highly elliptical orbit around Titan that stretches out to that Trojan point.”

“Good thinking,” said Rod, cheering up again. “Jeeves. Recalculate the capture delta vee about Titan assuming the capture orbit is one that is just a fraction of a klec of an escape trajectory.”

“The required periapsis burn at Titan is now two kilometers per second,” replied the level voice of Jeeves, “with a total mission burn requirement of 29.5 kilometers per second.”

“Damn!” said Rod. “Still half a klec short. In orbital mechanics, a near miss is as bad as a mile.” He turned to Dan. “We’re going to have to strip more mass off
Sexdent.
To get those last five hundred meters per second of velocity, we’re going to have to leave another ton of something behind. Which is least important, food, air, or water?”

Dan frowned and paused, not wanting to make the decision. “You’re already assuming a stripped ship where all three of those are cut past safe limits. We can’t cut any one of them any more—”

“Then our only alternative is to leave the tether behind,” said Rod, driving the point home by adding, “leaving our best friend on Saturn with a heavy burden it will have to carry for the rest of its thousand-year lifetime—unless, of course, that heavy burden shortens that lifetime.” He paused to look directly at Dan with eyes half-veiled by lowered eyebrows at the base of his brow, a brow deeply furrowed by the demands of command responsibility. “As our physician, you are the person most qualified to make decisions that affect the future health of the crew. Which should it be, Doc? Risking Peregrine’s future health or risking
our
future health? One or the other has to be put at risk to get us that last five hundred meters per second.” Rod didn’t help Dan out by making reassuring noises, but continued to look gravely at him, patiently waiting for an answer. Dan looked down at the deck, avoiding the intent, demanding stare from Rod’s eyes. The seconds ticked on ... Suddenly Dan’s eyes blinked wide as he thought of something. He looked up at Rod.

“Five hundred meters per second,” repeated Dan. “That number reminds me of something. Did Jeeves count in the winds?”

“Winds?” asked Sandra, turning to Dan with a slightly puzzled look.

“No, I did not,” replied Jeeves.

“The equatorial trade wind bands that blow in the same direction as Saturn’s spin,” explained Dan to Sandra. “I remember reading that they often reached velocities as high as five hundred meters per second.”