Saturn Rukh (7 page)

“I will,” promised Sandra. “I’ll get good pictures for sure, and perhaps bring back some samples. We’ll be in the clouds for six months. I should be able to snare something in the nets I’m taking a—”

An agitated young man in the observing gallery interrupted her. “And make sure you determine the intelligence level of the Bubble People of Saturn. If they are intelligent, then the Peaceful Planet Protectors will
demand
that Space Unlimited terminate its plans to exploit the resources of Saturn, for they
belong
to the Bubble People.”

“Don’t worry, Jerry,” replied Sandra, reassuringly. “I’ll do my best. Don’t forget, I’m a member of Triple-P myself. I doubt, however, that something that is as simple in structure as a large jellyfish is going to have any measurable level of intelligence.
Bulla volitare
is certainly a new species of animal, but I doubt it is an animal species smart enough to be called a ‘People.’ “

The CrewComm spoke to Rod. “Take care. Once you’ve escaped Earth, you’ll be pretty much on your own. The round-trip communication time delay will soon become so long that any attempts on our part to run the mission or solve problems from a distance wouldn’t make sense, since we have equally qualified and intelligent people,
you,
right there where the time delay is zero. You also have one of the world’s best flight computers in Jeeves. We didn’t skimp on his trajectory analysis programs and specialized parallel processing chips. He can calculate trajectories as accurately and as fast as our computers here can,
plus
give you the results instantly—instead of you having to wait an hour or two.”

A chime rang and a countdown clock started on the upper right of Rod’s screen. “Time to go,” said Rod. “See you in thirty months.” He turned and spoke over Dan, who was lying next to him. “All yours Chass,” he commanded.

Chastity pulled down the pilot console a little, locked the pantograph arm that held it in place above her middle, and reached her right hand into a hand-sized compartment under the console touchscreen. Her trim-nailed fingers closed softly around the “joyball” floating in the middle of the compartment, suspended by magnetic fields generated by the highly sensitive sensing and feedback circuits. Twisting or pulling the joyball slightly would cause the attitude control jets on
Sexdent
to rotate or translate the ship, while lifting the ball forcefully upward would cause the main engines to fire, accelerating them forcefully ahead. When the countdown clock reached zero, she lifted up firmly on the joyball. The twelve main engines roared into life and they sank into the acceleration cushions behind their backs.

~ * ~

They left Earth when the thirty-kilometer-per-second velocity vector of the Earth was pointing to where Saturn would be a year later. The one thousand tons of meta in the booster tank boosted
Sexdent
away from Earth, adding another twenty-six kilometers per second. Now moving at fifty-six kilometers per second, they started their year-long climb out of the Sun’s gravity well. The booster stage separated and used the last of its meta to deflect itself away from their course. The booster’s next destination was interstellar space.
Sexdent,
its mass now less than half of what it was when she started, settled into its almost straight-line trajectory toward the ringed planet.

For the crew inside
Sexdent,
it was time to reinstall their habitats, which had been pulled back inside and stored for the duration of the three-gee boost phase. With plenty of large, heavily muscled crewmembers to heave and shove the bulky habitat tubes around, Sandra found she was more in the way than being of assistance. So, as soon as her habitat tube was installed, she stuffed her bedding and personal belongings ahead of her into the empty tube like a hamster remaking its bed and followed them inside to organize things in the comfy arrangement she had grown used to.

The bedboard frame attached by pinrods to holes in the wall of the tube. The frame was segmented and hinged, so that by raising a segment of the bedframe by the edge, one could gain access to the storage area formed underneath by the curved tube wall and the flat bedboard lid. Into other holes in the “ceiling” of the tubular habitat were plugged reading lights, personal computer consoles, squeezer holders, artistic decorations, and other necessities for making life comfortable in the aerospace equivalent of a sewer pipe, the holes supplying power and communication links as well as physical support.

Sandra finally finished laying away her clothing and other personal belongings under the lids of the bed. She could still hear the swearing and clanks of the habitat installation crew going on outside, so she stayed inside until they were done. She folded her console up against the ceiling and turned herself around in the tube so that her head was hanging over the “foot” of the bed where she could see out of the large slanted viewport window. The viewport was facing rearward and she looked “down” at the rapidly disappearing Earth-Luna system. They had passed the orbit of the moon only four hours after takeoff. They were now nearly eight hours into their journey and the Earth-Luna system was beginning to take on the familiar aspect that she had become used to on Mars. The two globes of the double planet were in half-moon phase because of their takeoff direction.

When she was a child, she had thought the Earth was flat, and made of “earth,” while the Moon was a bright globe made of silver. Now, as a space traveler, she knew the Earth to be a globe covered with water and clouds, with an occasional splotch of “earth,” while Luna was a globe covered with gray dust. When she looked at them both from a distance, especially during her travels to Mars, she also began to realize that the globes of Earth and Luna were not the typical “big planet with tiny moons” system typified by Mars, Jupiter, and the outer planets. Because Luna was comparable in size to its primary, the two really were more of a “double-planet” system, or perhaps a “mother-child” system.

The glaring orb of the Sun started to intrude through her viewport, so she found the window controls and rotated the viewport so that it was facing in the direction they were going. Ahead of them was Saturn, racing along in its orbit to meet them at the designated rendezvous point a year later. Sandra reached up into the tight corner formed by one end of the elliptical viewport window and the pointed end of the habitat, and pulled down the binocular viewer on the end of its pantograph arm. Setting the biviewer for “visual” and “motion compensation,” she raised it to her eyes.

“There are strange lifeforms there…” she whispered to herself as the brilliant globe-and-halo swam into her ken. “And I’m going to see them...”

Reentry probes dropped into Saturn over the past decade had sent back a few poorly resolved pictures of floating and flying lifeforms swimming in the thick air beneath the clouds of Saturn—”saganlife” some called them.

When the first lifeform pictures were returned, the scientific community had exploded with excitement. Even Sandra had been sure the discovery of life elsewhere in the solar system would reactivate the scientific exploration of the outer planets, leading to the establishment of crewed stations around each of the major planets and on the surface of the major moons. But when the politicians began to reckon the cost, and the scientists could promise nothing in return but better biological insight, no intelligent advanced technological species that would have new or different technological know-how that would pay back the massive investment that would be needed, then the dreams of crewed deep space stations evaporated, and the scientists had to be satisfied with the funding for a few more reentry probes.

Now, because of the needs of commerce, not the needs of science, there were going to be crewed space stations on and around at least one of the outer planets. There was room and need for a biologist on the first of those, and Sandra had been the lucky one chosen. She would be the first biologist to study these new lifeforms firsthand. With any luck, and the fishing nets she had arranged to have stored in the ship supplies, she would hopefully obtain a few specimens to bring back. She could hardly wait to get there....

“For the first time, someone will be able to stay long enough to do a thorough job of finding and describing these air creatures.” She, being the biologist who would find and describe them, would also have the privilege of naming all the new species that she found. “It’ll be like starting over in the garden of Eden ... getting to name all the creatures, one by one. I wonder what new and marvelous creatures I’ll find there?”

Sandra released the biviewer so the pantograph could retract it back. She crawled under the restraint straps over her bed, and stretching her neck, nestled her head into its protective niche in the head-restraint pillow. Grasping the bedding restraints on each side of her with both hands, she closed her eyes and went to sleep, oblivious to the talk of the crew outside, to dream of meeting strange new creatures on strange new worlds.

~ * ~

Petra finished her climb with the rest of the flock. They had risen far into the sky during the long climb upward in the darkness. Bright was rising in the east and its warming light was streaming down through a break in the cloud layers above. That didn’t happen very often and the flock circled in the beam of light, enjoying the warmth, singing gossip back and forth to each other. Petra could feel Petra’s air sacs expand in the warmth. With the additional buoyancy of Petra’s body, she could gain even more altitude for Petro, so she had Petra swallow another mouthful of bitterly cold rarefied air, and tilting the wings upward, she jetted Petru higher into the sky, the rest of the flock following along behind, maws opening and closing to feed the pulsing jets that drove them ever higher. As Petru climbed, Petra raised her head and gazed upward at Bright. Petra’s large eye could see the flock of smaller lights that circled around the distant glowing sphere of warmth. She could easily see the larger red globe, Rexu, and the smaller red globe, Talu, that circled Bright at great distances. She knew there were three other globes closer to Bright, but usually they were so close they could not be seen through the glare. She raised a claw in front of her eye to block out the light from Bright and was rewarded for the effort by being able to observe two small bright spots close together—a larger blue-white light and a smaller gray light. It was Parent-and-Child. They must be at their farthest excursion from Bright, since the two globes were well separated from the glaring orb and were in their half-moon phase.

Petra knew that Rexu, Talu, Parent-and-Child, and the others must be globes, like the world Air that she lived on. Ancient long-dead elders of the flock had determined many dimmings ago that Air was a globe by reasoning its shape from the shadow Air cast on the rings of Arc. There was even a tale passed from flock to flock of one ancient and reckless young ruus that had left its flock flying east and had managed to fly all around Air, returning to the flock from the west, proving Air was round.

Although the smaller of the moons around Air were not globular, the larger ones were, and the illumination of Bright on the globular moons went through phases. The ancients had reasoned that since the lights circling Bright went through the same phases, they also must be globes. The globes were obviously far away, so they must be large compared to the moons of Air, perhaps even as large as Air itself.

“I wonder…” thought Petra.

“Wonder what?” replied Petro through their thinklink. Petro had woken early because the break in the clouds had let the light of Bright in early. He had remained aloof in his head, however, letting Petra control Petru, while he watched what was going on down below them.

“I wonder if there are creatures like us on the globes of light around Bright,” said Petra back through the thinklink.

“If they are good to eat and we could catch them, then it might be worthwhile bothering to think about them,” said Petro. “But since we can’t fly there, then they aren’t worth thinking about. Petru is cold and hungry, and I am ready to hunt. You have given Petru good altitude, so the hunting should be good. We will talk more when Petru is full and warm. Time for me to take over and you to rest....”

Petra released Petru so Petro could take control of the giant body they shared. She crawled under the restraint feathers over her resting notch, and compressing her neck, nestled her head into its protective niche in Petra’s prow. Grasping the restraining feathers on each side of her with the myriad of claws along her neck, she closed her eye and went to sleep, oblivious to the talk of the flock nearby, to dream of meeting strange new creatures on strange new worlds.

~ * ~

2

CLIMBING DOWN THE RINGS

“Good morning!”

The voice of Jeeves echoed loudly in the habitats. “Please awaken and lower your foot platforms. Rotational acceleration will commence in five minutes.”

Pete groaned, and with his eyes still firmly shut, pulled his legs out from under the leg restraint band. Tucking his toes under the sides of the bed, he lifted the bottom quarter of the bed up on its hinge until the square panel was blocking the bottom end of the habitat. He then drifted back into sleep, to be awakened again when he felt his body slipping down the bed and his feet contacted the “floor” of his now “vertical” habitat. The first half hour of each day was spent spinning at six rpm, which produced a quarter of a gee in the habitats and a tenth of a gee in the toilets. Pete, eyes still closed, stood up on the panel and took off his pajamas. Pulling open the second of the cushioned panels on his now-vertical bed, he felt inside for a roll of clothing, and pulling it out, filled the hole left with the pajamas. In a series of motions that had become almost an unconscious habit, he donned his underwear, jumpsuit, and capsule socks with their sticky-patch bottoms. Back braced against the now vertically oriented “ceiling” of the habitat tube, and sock bottoms gripping the fabric of the cushioned bed, he chimneyed himself up to the top of the habitat tube, the downward pull getting noticeably weaker as he did so. By the time he had lifted the hatch, opened his eyes, and pushed his way into the near free fall of the control deck, he was wide awake.