The Secret of Saturn’s Rings (2 page)

All during the next two hours, when his jet plane was hurtling across the land, with its cargo of bored passengers, businessmen commuting, vacationers anxious to get to their goal, Bruce kept silently to himself. For a while he had time to think, to catch his breath.

How suddenly his life had been torn apart! At one moment, Terraluna was the pride of his life, a company he had always expected to work for. Now he felt like an outcast, yet he knew that his father must be able to tell a different story. The newspaper account could only be the company’s side of the affair.

Space flight was the great thing in the lives of all the people of Bruce’s day. Beginning back in the middle of the previous century when the first rockets had landed on the moon, a combination of brilliant scientists, daring adventurers, and imaginative businessmen had advanced man’s frontiers outward through the solar system. The moon had proved a rich source of atomic fuels and rare metals, and the mining centers that had been set up there by Terraluna, the pioneer organization that had financed and operated the first explorations, were the wonders of the ages. Terraluna’s ships had spiraled inward to prospect the strange seas and cloudy continents of Venus; one ship had already touched on the boiling deserts of Mercury. Other ships had reached ancient Mars, and many were working the rich deposits to be found in the asteroids. The moons of Jupiter had been pioneered, but beyond that no ship had ever gone.

Bruce’s father had been among the early science pioneers. He had been with Terraluna for over thirty years and had been for many years their head of research, a man held in high honor in the world. To Bruce it was unthinkable that his father could have fallen. Yet he could not doubt the evidence of that day.

It was not the first time that Bruce had been to the UN spaceport in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. He had been there before in past years, after one of his father’s brief vacations back at home. He and his mother had gone and waved good-by to his dad as the Terraluna-chartered rocket had taken off with its load of moon miners and engineers. But this time he stepped down from the jet express by himself.

No crowd of miners and their families were present today as in the past. Only Bruce got off, and the jet roared on its way to its next stop, leaving him alone at the entrance to the little terminal.

Carrying his bag, he walked into the waiting room. A familiar gray-haired figure was waiting there, and they rushed to each other in greeting. Bruce’s father was tall, strangely tanned by the harsh rays of the unprotected sun on the moon’s surface. But today Bruce noticed the tired lines on his brow, and a look of tension that seemed unwilling to permit the broad smile with which he usually greeted his son.

Without further delay, Bruce’s father took him by the arm and steered him to a waiting car. “Don’t ask too many questions right now, Bruce. I’ll get a chance to explain things in a little while. There’s still some important work I must complete in the next hour before I will have a little time to spare. Meanwhile, Waldron here will show you over the ship.”

Waldron turned out to be a young man wearing spacehand overalls, who was waiting in the car. He turned to Bruce, gave him a single narrow glance, shook hands rather limply. “Glad to know you,” he said.

Bruce returned the greeting and after that the three rode in silence, as Waldron drove the two-wheeled, teardrop-shaped ground car away from the terminal and onto the twelve-mile road to the base of the launching racks.

They made the trip in a few minutes, reaching an enclosure at the base of a towering peak. There they got out, passed through a gate at which was stationed an armed guard in UN police uniform. Dr. Rhodes signed Bruce in, and gave his son a card.

“This will identify you. As you see, this is all top-secret work. Waldron will take you out to look over the ship while I get back to the computing rooms and chart our course.”

“When are you going to take off?” Bruce asked quickly as his father started away.

“As soon as possible,” the old engineer called back. “In an hour perhaps!”

Waldron pointed to a gleaming vessel already standing on a long arrangement like a railroad flatcar. Bruce knew this was the trolley by means of which the space ships were rolled into place on the launching rack. The two walked over to it.

“Whose ship is that?” asked Bruce, as he noticed that it bore none of the markings of Terraluna or any of the standard space lines.

“It’s a special United Nations exploration craft. It’s being loaned to your father for this trip. It’s almost completely ready,” Waldron replied. “Come on inside. There's still some work I've got to complete.”

Bruce noticed a tank truck still pumping atomic rocket fuel into the ship’s tanks. “How many men are going along?” he asked.

As they climbed the ladder to the entrance lock, Waldron answered, “Were carrying a crew of five, including your father. Two spacehands, myself one of them, an astrogator, a pilot, and Dr. Rhodes as captain.”

They entered the ship. It was narrow and cramped, being built for endurance and having most of its space taken up with fuel storage tanks and equipment. Waldron proceeded to the engine room in the rear, a small chamber where the exposed tubes of the various connections were open to survey and where checks could be made directly by crew members on the operation of the various flows and wirings.

“Wait a second,” Waldron said. “There’s a job I have to do before I can show you the rest of the ship.” He glanced at a wrist watch anxiously, then knelt down, picked up a wrench from a wall rack and began to unbolt the cover over the center wall, the one that had meters of direction and speed which duplicated those in the master control chamber at the nose of the ship.

The panel unbolted, Bruce saw that the complicated wiring was exposed, a very neat and exact pattern of many colored wires and tubes. It looked very shipshape to him.

As it happened, Bruce had studied the wiring on the dummy ship in the school space class, and he was pleased to recognize how exactly the scheme was duplicated.

Waldron evidently was not so pleased. He stood for a moment staring at it, then, taking pliers in hand, carefully wrenched loose several of the wires and began to reconnect them.

Bruce watched him, puzzled. Somehow what he was doing didn't seem to make much sense. If anything, it seemed to him that Waldron was making connections that were simply completely wrong. After all, the wires were of different colors, the points of connection were very clearly marked and had seemed to be correct in the first place. Finally Bruce spoke up: “I don't understand how you can expect to get the correct reading for that with the wires as you have placed them. I don't claim to be a mechanic, yet that blue wire is plainly marked as coming from Tank Five. You have attached it to the meter listed for Tank Three. How will the pilot know?”

Waldron glanced at him sharply. “Mind your own business!” he snapped. “I know what I’m doing!” Bruce's nerves had been on edge all that strange day. He wasn't used to being treated like that and he knew he was right. Now a sudden suspicion surged through him.

“I still don’t think you’re doing the right thing. It doesn’t make sense.”

Waldron gave another wire a vicious twist, turned and said, “Why don’t you just keep quiet? In fact, why don’t you get out of here until I finish?” He raised the wrench furiously in a threatening manner.

“I won’t,” he said slowly, “and I am going to report this business as soon as I find someone else in this crew!”

“Oh yeah!” yelled Waldron, losing all reserve. The spacehand made a sudden thrust at Bruce with the wrench. The boy had expected it however, sidestepped and swung his fist. In a moment all the pent-up emotions of the day came to the surface. With a zest he waded into Waldron, grabbing his arm, punching him in the stomach, and crowding him back with another flurry of fists.

Waldron broke suddenly, dropped the wrench and ran out of the engine room, down the short corridor, and leaped through the open space-lock door. When Bruce got after him, he saw the spacehand heading for the car lot, evidently planning to make a quick escape.

Dr. Rhodes popped out of the charthouse nearby and stared after Waldron. Then he turned and ran up to Bruce in the ship. “What was that about?” he called.

Quickly Bruce explained, and his father went with him to the engine room to see. He was visibly shocked. Taking out a handkerchief, he mopped his forehead.

“That was quick thinking, son,” he said. “You were right. It was an attempt at sabotage. With the dials indicating the wrong tanks, we’d have been lost in space within days.”

Dr. Rhodes picked up the wrench and pliers and started to reconnect the wires carefully. “We’re going to be shorthanded,” he said softly. “I don’t know where I’m going to get someone to replace Waldron who can be trusted, and in such a short time. I plan to take off in the next hour.”

Bruce looked at his father, then said to him, “Suppose I take Waldron’s place? I’ve studied space ships and astronomy in school and by myself. I’m strong. And you know you can trust me.”

Dr. Rhodes lowered his pliers and looked long at him. He seemed to struggle with himself., “I have no right to ask you,” he said. “It will be a very difficult trip. Who will be left to take care of your mother if we don’t return?”

Bruce pressed his offer, his heart beating. “Mother will be proud of us whatever happens. I don’t know where you are going, but I’m sure it must be of real importance. Let me come along as the junior space-hand.”

Dr. Rhodes nodded slowly. “Yes, I know your mother would never say no. And the trip is important. It may be the most important trip ever made. It may mean life or death for the whole world. I guess you will do.”

The boy’s heart bounded with joy. And then he asked the one question he had failed to ask so far. “Where are we going, Dad?”

The old engineer smiled briefly, then his face became quiet and sober. “We’re going to Saturn,” he said.

Bruce’s eyes opened wide. The ringed planet of Saturn! It was beyond the farthest rim of human exploration! But what possible reason could there be for this terrible urgency?

trip to Saturn would represent a longer journey from Earth than had ever been made before. It had been Bruce's belief, from things he had been taught in school about space ships, that a trip of that distance was still considered beyond the ability of the spacecraft that existed up to then. If his father was indeed going to try to make such a record-breaking flight, why the secrecy, and what special plans did he have?

These thoughts brought Bruce’s mind back to the first problem—why was his father in trouble, what did Terraluna want, why the hurry? When he regained his tongue from the excitement of being accepted as a crew member on this flight, he bombarded his father with these questions.

Dr. Rhodes nodded. “I’d better explain the situation to you/’ He glanced at his watch. “We have a little time yet. I believe our course is charted by now, and Garcia can do the checking of the figures. Come forward.”

The engineer led the way to the control room at the craft’s nose, and there they sat down in the padded chairs that space fliers use. Dr. Rhodes rubbed his forehead a moment, then began:

“I suppose you’ve seen the papers today, with the story that Terraluna gave them about firing me. This represents their last effort to stop this trip. Up to now they’ve kept silent and fought this thing behind the scenes.

“To start at the beginning, a couple of years ago I was asked by the directors of the lunar mining project to devise some method of reaching the deep core of the moon. Up to now, our mining has not gone down more than about ten miles. We’ve taken in a lot of valuable material, tons of diamonds, and so forth, but it was believed that at the very center of the moon there would be rich deposits of the heavier and rarer metals, uranium, radium, platinum, and so on.

“The moon is very light, as you know. It hasn’t got the solidity of Earth; most of it is such light rock as pumice and ash and layers of meteor dust. There are huge empty bubbles through the moon’s interior, like giant caves dozens of miles across. When the moon was first created, it was liquid hot like all the planets, but as it cooled, the heavier elements sank toward the center. Being so much lighter than Earth, they sank completely down; on our own world, there are heavy metals that remained near the surface. Not so on the moon.

“So it seemed right to believe that there would be some very valuable findings if we could figure out how to mine at the moon’s heart one thousand miles below its surface. This was what I was asked to invent.

“I worked at that problem for a long time, until I finally solved it. I invented a system of rapid-fire atomic blasting, a sort of directed self-renewing series of atomic bombs that would blast off in any direction we wanted and continue as long as needed. I worked out the idea behind this and showed what was necessary to make the actual machinery to do this.

“For this work, I was praised and rewarded financially by them. But as for me, I was not quite through. I went on with my studies to determine just what might be the result of such deep-core atomic blasting. I ended my calculations four months ago.

“I found that the moon is too light and too loose a structure to allow that type of blasting safely. A little atomic blasting on the surface for mining purposes is all right. But if a series of such incredibly powerful explosions were set off near its center, the result would be the crack-up of the moon itself.”

Bruce was listening, his head resting on his elbow, which was propped up against a panel of the controls. He nodded to show his father he had understood thus far.

“The moon is not like a free planet such as Mars or Mercury. It is a satellite, revolving around a bigger and heavier world, our Earth. Because of this, it is subject to great strains from the gravitational pull of the Earth. You know how the moon’s pull draws the water of the ocean to cause our tides. If the moon had oceans, it would have even greater tides due to its lesser gravity and the Earth’s stronger pull. But even without water, it is affected by this pull. Only it is the very mass, the rocks and stuff of which the moon consists, that feels this tidal pull from Earth.