The Secret of Saturn’s Rings (20 page)

The gyrowheel was firm. The various wirings seemed to be holding. He noticed that one of the trapezes had broken loose, was swinging dangerously. He worked over to it, took a wrench from his space-suit belt and cut the rest of the trapeze loose. Then he shoved the bar out of a nearby gap in the surface, so that it floated out into empty space and fell behind as the ship moved on.

Other pieces of the craft were loosening up, he noted uneasily. He mentioned it to his father.

Dr. Rhodes said, over his helmet phones, “I was afraid of that. This whole ship is made of aged metal. It may fall apart before we ever reach Hidalgo. I’m hoping it doesn’t. When you see something coming loose, try to tie it down or else get rid of it. Anything that isn’t essential can be thrown out.”

Bruce worked back to his perch near the nose. Through the circular gap in the hull nearest him he saw that they were passing close to Dione, the fourth moon outward. That meant that they had gone roughly a hundred thousand miles since their take-off, that they were traveling at tremendous speeds and still accelerating.

Dione was a gleaming sphere, marked with dark splotches that may have meant rocky plateaus and a patch of brightness that may have been a lake of frozen air. They soon left it behind.

Bruce noticed uneasily that the gap through which he had watched seemed to have spread a little wider. He realized that the outer hull itself was slowly tearing open. He mentioned this to his father, but there was no answer, only a shrug.

From time to time now, Bruce had to go down and cut loose other bits of the interior. A catwalk buckled. A trapeze cut loose and started floating perilously about the interior. Several bits of metal, bolts and suchlike were now floating about, and Bruce caught these when he could and threw them away.

The constant vibration of the engines and the vibration of the gyrowheel were slowly shaking the ancient ship apart. One of the barrels of fuel seemed to be twisting slowly as the girder on which one end had been roped was swinging outward. Bruce slid rapidly back to it, untied it, and fastened it to the much stronger central beam. The girder continued to swing away, flapped and bent back and fell outward into space.

By now the gaps where the various windows had once been were distinctly larger, and seams and cracks were growing along the outer shell.

“Bruce,” his father called, “see if you can hammer this front panel off. It's moving out too far.”

Bruce pulled himself up to the nose. Bracing himself along the inside of the solid and firm nose, he hammered out a plate that was buckling near his father. A few strong blows and it fell outward and was lost in the void.

He caught a glimpse of the misty sphere of Titan as he did so, and realized that time was passing and their speed continuing favorably. If the ship could but hold together . . .

It continued like this steadily. Bruce working around the ship, tying, cutting, bending, his attention constantly in need as the ancient craft gave way to its age. It occurred to him as he gathered loose bolts that were always floating about, that perhaps some of these were gold, perhaps even diamonds. But this was all of no consequence. Right now they were merely dangerous junk that had to be disposed of.

“How are we doing?” he thought to ask once while chasing a particularly elusive piece of metal.

“Very well,” his father replied. “Better than I had hoped for. It seems that this Saturn engine must have some tricks to it that we haven't discovered yet because we are making better speed than I had estimated.”

Bruce finally caught the metal, tossed it out. “That's good,” he said, “but won’t that interfere with your calculations on getting to Hidalgo?”

“Ha!” retorted his father dryly. “What calculations? When did I ever have a chance to make any?”

“Huh!” Bruce was momentarily astonished. “But how are we traveling then? How will you get to our asteroid?”

His father said, “We’ll go by rule of thumb and by sight direction. Since we have fuel to spare—all our fuel being a gift, sort of, from Terraluna—we can afford to waste as much as we want taking a more indirect course, taking a longer trip. This business of carefully calculating the shortest and quickest route to a planet is all because of having to save fuel and time. If you had endless fuel and all the time in the world, you could go anywhere in space without calculations.”

“Well, we certainly don’t have all the time in the world,” Bruce remarked. “As a matter of fact, I’m getting hungry.”

“Sorry,” said his father. “I don’t know what we can do about it in this ship. No airlock we can lock ourselves in and snatch a bite. Maybe we can rig an air bubble around us with some tent cloth, if we have any.”

“I think there's some among the spare rope,” said Bruce, and found it. After a little trouble and some tricky acrobatics, Bruce managed to get enough of a covering about his helmet and hands so that he could snap open his helmet and pop a bite into his mouth, as well as snatch a drink from his canteen.

Working back to his father, he was able to repeat the process. “Thanks,” his dad said when the tricky process was over. “I was wondering if we ourselves could hold out.”

By this time the ship was free of Saturn's moon system. And by this time also the ship was pretty much of a skeleton craft. Bruce could glance in any direction and see the stars shining unopposed. The ringed planet was always in sight, its moons attending it.

More and more the loose bits of the ship fell apart. As they progressed, Bruce wondered what would be left by the time they reached Hidalgo.

One fuel tank was now empty, and he cut this adrift. “Any sign of Hidalgo?” he asked.

“Not yet,” said his father, his eyes roving around the stars before the ship. “Look for a thin crescent showing up among the stars in that direction,” he waved a hand and pointed.

Another section of the side plates swung outward silently and fell away into space as Bruce looked. Checking the damage, Bruce finally again stared off.

His eyes were tired, and he was tired from the constant vigilance and work. He didn’t think he had been able to catch a moment's rest since the take-off. The unshielded vibration of the gyro and the blasting tubes were another steady strain.

He stared anxiously at the black star-strewn sky. Now he thought he saw the tiny crescent his father had mentioned. “Imagination,” he murmured to himself, and turned his eyes away, and then back. The crescent was still there. He called to his father and Dr. Rhodes confirmed it.

“It’s Hidalgo,” he said. “Maybe we could call Garcia on that radio Jennings gave us?”

Bruce looked for the radio, but then he saw another bolt floating along and went for it. “No time, Dad,” he said, and swung down for the new bit of wreckage.

He kept busy as the next hour passed. Finally he paused and glanced down. The bulk of the little asteroid was already filling the sky, and he saw that his father was angling down to circle the little world for a landing. He made his way to the nose and sat by his father.

“Can you see the ship?” he asked, and almost immediately answered himself, by pointing and yelling, “There it is!” Sure enough, the tiny metal gleam of their UN ship could be seen resting near the canyon that Bruce and Arpad had discovered. He thought he caught a glimpse of a figure standing near it, but it may have been a trick of his imagination.

Bruce looked around as their golden ship circled for a landing. It would probably be a crashing, skidding stop, he realized.

The craft was now a mere skeleton. A long central beam, at one end the blunted golden nose, at the center a revolving wheel, at the end a cluster of tanks and diamond tubes and flaring jets. Two men in space suits clinging to loose ropes and bits of thin spidery girders moving among the open airless interior.

“What a shock this will be to Arpad,” Bruce thought, as his father brought the spooky framework space ship down closer and closer and finally set it to rest with remarkable softness and skill. The jets shut off, the gyrowheel stopped, and Bruce and his dad flopped off onto the surface of Hidalgo. A moment later the central tube of the ancient ship bent slowly down and the whole mass collapsed in a heap of gold and diamond parts.

Bruce and his father sat there by the pile of glittering junk and laughed as the figures of Garcia and Arpad Benz came lumbering up, waving their hands in excited greeting.