The Secret of Saturn’s Rings (4 page)

The tracks led upward through hoops that were magnetically activated. Once a space ship started in motion at the end of the track, each hoop picked up the metal cylindrical body and thrust it further along. Attraction from ahead, repulsion from the hoops they passed, and the ship was thrust faster and faster along the rails.

Once started, the process could not be stopped. As the ship began its slide upward, Bruce felt the first effects of acceleration. His hammock began to slide down and the cabin tilted steadily as the ship began to nose upward along the tracks.

Now faster and faster Bruce saw the hoops flash by his porthole. Jennings turned on more jets, adding to the speed of the vessel's passage.

The rocket ship sped along the launching-rack slide with ever greater speed. Now it was angling almost straight up and from the control-room seats the open blue-sky end of the magnetic tunnel came into sight and enlarged rapidly.

With steadily increasing momentum the great metal bullet raced upward, streams of atomic fire now blasting from its rear. Bruce felt himself being pushed down more and more into the padding of his hammock. He felt as if a great hand was shoving down on his chest.

Then like a bullet from a gun the ship shot out of the end of the half-mile long rack, and Jennings slammed in the full force of its engines.

There was a moment of intolerable pressure. Bruce felt as if he were strangling, as if an invisible elephant had suddenly sat down on him, crushing him deep into the padding. He gasped for breath, fought to keep himself from blacking out.

For instant after instant he seemed about to be crushed completely. He caught glimpses out of the comer of his tortured eye of the porthole getting darker and darker, of the blue merging into blackness.

Then, at last, as he began to feel that he could bear the strain no longer, as if he would sink into total unconsciousness, the terrible pressure ceased. There was a moment of intense relief and he found himself fighting to control his pumping lungs.

Bruce knew then that the ship was free of Earth’s grip; it was on its way!

As soon as Bruce had unstrapped himself from his hammock, he found himself in the state of “free-fall” that is so familiar to space fliers. Bruce discovered that there was nothing at all pleasing about having no weight, in spite of the fascination this no-gravity condition seems to hold for those who have never been in space. He felt as if he were going to be sick, as if his stomach were jumping, and his eyes and ears straining to detect something which wasn’t there. It was the same sort of sensation that he would have had had he been falling from the top of a very high building and had not yet hit the ground.

It took a little time to readjust himself to this strange feeling. He had to think about his every motion rather consciously for the first few hours, for when he did not, his muscles, expecting through habit to find the resistance of weight, would strike out forcefully and then wildly in sudden panic. The uneasiness of the falling feeling was always there, and it took concentration to build up the new set of mental commands for his body to act by.

Bruce was not entirely unfamiliar with the feeling. When he’d paid the visit to his father at the Copernicus research base, he’d gone through all these sensations before. Although he had tried to steel himself for what was coming, it was still alarming when it came.

Fortunately, perhaps, he did not have time to sit around and worry about his feelings. In the few hours that the moon hop would take, there was work to be done. Arpad Benz was already in the central corridor, swinging from the various straps and stanchions that were the means of motion in the floating interior of the ship. “Come on, Bruce,” he called. “Now’s the time to pitch in. We’ve got to get the moon-runners unfolded and set up.”

Bruce reached for a leather strap that hung from the wall nearby and, using it as Tarzan in the movies once used the branches of trees, swung himself after Arpad. He knew what the moon-runners were, but he had never quite realized that it was necessary to go outside the ship to adjust them. The young spaceman who had guyed him originally was now climbing into a pressurized space suit.

Bruce wasn’t sure what he would have to do, but he had made up his mind that there was nothing anyone could do that he could not do also. He was ready for anything. Let Arpad kid him about his age, let the others think what they would, they would find that he was up to the job.

Arpad helped him into the space suit, zipped up the pressure-tight fabric coverall, fitted the transparent plastic helmet, and checked the heating and air regulators. The helmet phone on, Arpad explained what they had to do while they stood in the little space lock as the ship’s air was pumped out.

When the outer hull door swung open, Bruce gazed down into the blackness of outer space. Covering half the view was the glowing surface of the Earth, a gorgeous and awe-inspiring hemisphere, like a relief map in school, save for the breath-taking depth and color. The soft greens and deep blues of field and ocean, the blinding white of the poles, all merged into each other. Over all the misty masses of clouds and humid air belts, a creeping twilight purple zone along one rim drifted slowly. Bruce stared, forgetting for the moment the bottomless gap that hung between the tiny bulk of their ship and his home world.

“Come on, come on,” said Arpad’s voice, “no time for daydreaming, we’ve got work to do!” Bruce snapped out of it, turned, and followed Arpad along the outer surface of the ship, the magnetic gloves and shoes of his space suit sticking to the outer hull just as a fly sticks to a ceiling.

The moon-runners were in the form of long ridges that Bruce had at first taken for part of the ship’s streamlining. Now he saw that they were really hard-metal runners, the length of the ship, which could be cranked outward from their snug contact to extend into two parallel runners just like the runners of a sled or a pair of skis. Though they would have been very heavy on Earth, here in weightlessness Bruce and Arpad were able to crank them away from the hull by hand, snap their bracing girders into place, and thus clear the ship for its lunar landing.

When the job was done, Arpad and Bruce worked their way back to the lock, returned inside, and took off their space suits. It bad not occurred to Bruce that this ship would be landed in the way most commercial and explorer craft used, rather than in the fancy tail-jet acrobatics plus magnetic absorbers which were in use on the elaborate passenger liners. He rather looked forward to the experience. As he made his way to the front of the ship, he realized that the craft was laid out as an airplane would be, to be flown from front to back and not from top to bottom.

Arpad announced as they entered the control room, “Runners all set, Doc. Shall we secure the gear?”

Dr. Rhodes, Jennings, and Garcia were all present there. Rhodes and Garcia were at the calculating machines, working on their course. Jennings was in the pilot seat, watching the engines and the oncoming features of the moon.

Over Jennings’ shoulder, Bruce saw that the white and gray features of our satellite were looming large, showing the sharp and cold barrenness familiar to telescope observers. It was a scene that disturbed him by its lack of warmth, by the intensity of its harsh shadows and dazzling white spaces. Now, without any atmosphere to blur the vision and approaching it at speeds of many miles a second, it took his breath away.

“Yes,” Bruce’s father raised his head from his work, "you’d better see that nothing was damaged by the take-off. We shall be landing at the mining base by the Einstein Sea to take on our final fuel load. I don’t want to stay there any longer than is absolutely necessary.”

Garcia looked up at them briefly, grunted. Jennings, at the controls, shook his head slightly as if uneasy at the prospect. Bruce noticed these reactions and, as he and Arpad went out, he glanced at his fellow spaceman in wonder.

But for once Arpad was silent, a thoughtful look on his face. Without conversation, they went through each chamber and locker checking the contents and testing the straps and locks. As they were buckling down a box that held a small stock of weapons and ammunition, Bruce finally broke the silence:

“Is something wrong? What’s the worry?”

Arpad hesitated a moment. “Well, it’s going to be kind of risky to land there. After all, that is one of Terraluna’s main bases. They’ll have to fuel us, because that’s UN orders, but you can just bet they’re going to try to think up some way of making trouble for us, maybe cripple the ship. It’s going to be very risky to stay there long.”

"‘Then why don’t we land somewhere else—say at the regular UN Commission post near Mare Crisium?” Bruce suggested.

“Uh-uh,” Arpad shook his head. ‘‘That’s on the Earth side of the moon. We’ve got to make our takeoff from the outer side of the moon in order to avoid the extra complications of Earth’s gravity. The only good bases on that side are the mining company’s. So that’s where we’ve got to go.”

Bruce tightened his lips as they continued. He’d never been on the far side of the moon, the side that was never seen from Earth, but he knew that it was almost like another nation, so extensive were the Terraluna holdings and control there. If something underhanded happened to them there, some “accident,” there would be no one to help them or to get them justice. It was going to be up to them to be on the alert.

Their landing time came soon enough, though it was actually a number of hours more. In that period the ship had been reversed and jets applied for the purpose of bringing the ship down to a safe speed for landing. To land a ship flat on runners, it is necessary first to circle the planet two or three times in order to brake the speed, to bring it down to something low enough to be controlled like an airplane on the Earth. Space speeds are so great that in order to do this it is necessary to allow the craft to swing about the planet in a narrowing orbit, coming nearer and nearer the surface as it slows. Its speed in relation to that of the planetary surface had to be made nearly equal.

Bruce found that it took almost the same length of time to slow down in this way as it had taken them to cross the distance from the Earth. During all that period, he and Arpad were standing ready for emergencies, as Jennings skilfully guided the craft over the face of Luna.

Bruce had a wonderful opportunity then to look at both the hemispheres of the moon, the one we know and the one Earth never sees. Both sides were very similar. On the outer side there were also the same type of flat, wide craters, of dry sea bottoms, and sharp high mountains. It had not been until after the first space explorers had circled the satellite that these features had been given names, generally those of the great pioneers of science and government of the last century.

Finally the ship was skimming low over the surface, passing over a last mountain range, and down over the wide, flat surface of the great Einstein Sea. This “sea,” like all the others so called, was actually a vast, flat, dry plain. The mining base was tucked away in one comer near the jagged wall of a small deep crater.

Jennings brought the ship down lightly until they seemed to be skimming the surface. Then lower bit by bit until finally the runners touched and a sharp whistling vibration went through the space ship. They bounced a couple of times and finally went skiing over the surface like a toboggan over snow. For the sea was a sea in one sense—a sea of dust.

For millions of years cosmic dust had slowly settled over the airless surface of the moon. Its flat plains were layered with a thick coating of extremely fine dust, dozens of feet deep. It made an excellent landing spot for a ski-equipped ship. Their runners served the purpose.

Now they were skidding over the surface, a spray of dust finer than snow thrown up behind them that fell back again slowly onto the surface without leaving a cloud. Bruce was puzzled for a moment until he realized that without air there could be nothing to hold this dust up to make a cloud. It had to fall back immediately. Had this been on Earth, their dust spray might have hung in the air for hours.

Stationed at one side port, Bruce watched for the unexpected dangers or tilts, while Arpad watched from the opposite side. Jennings jockeyed the ship sliding toward the domes of the mining base.

Neatly the craft slid, with a last puff of its jets, through the huge gates of the hangar-dome and onto its smooth runway. The great doors slid shut, and they heard the throbbing of the pumps as the dome-enclosed hangar pumped air back. When the pressure was normal outside, Arpad unbolted the outer lock.

“Wait a minute, everyone,” called Dr. Rhodes. He was hurrying down the corridor of the ship, followed by Jennings and Garcia. “Don’t go out until you hear my instructions.”

Bruce pulled down a wall-seat and sat down. He realized suddenly that he had weight again, even though it was much less than at home. Arpad grinned at him, “Tired?” Bruce realized that he was actually quite tired, but in the weightlessness of space, he simply hadn’t noticed it. But he shook his head, determined not to let on.

Rhodes reached the port, and the others gathered around. For a moment he hesitated, then said slowly:

“I don’t want anyone to leave this ship except on business. I want you all to be very, very cautious, to watch everything very carefully. Terraluna will certainly try again to stop us from making this trip. We are going to take on our final fuel load from their stores, and they are going to do this under UN orders. I don’t know how, but I am sure that in some way they will attempt to damage this ship or prevent our success.

“Arpad, will you break out that case of guns and arm yourself and Bruce. I want you two to stand guard at all times outside this ship. Allow no one to enter it. Allow no one near it except those engaged in the fueling operation. I expect this to take no more than an hour and I intend to leave immediately afterward. Garcia and I still have some calculations to make on our asteroid hops, and I want Jennings to check the engines. That leaves it up to you two to see that we fuel all right and no one gets a chance to do us dirt.”