The Secret of Saturn’s Rings (5 page)

In a few minutes more, Bruce and Arpad opened the hull door and emerged onto the floor of the hangar. As he set foot on the moon’s surface, Bruce felt his heart pounding with a strange feeling of excitement and danger, his weariness forgotten. Around his waist was slung a thick leather belt, set with bullets and a bulky glistening machine-pistol swung in a holster at his side. His hand rested gently on the palm-fitting rubberized grip as he strode to where a group of workmen in Terraluna’s blue overalls were wheeling over plastic drums of atomic fuel.

The space-ship hangar was a huge enclosed metal bubble large enough to house several ships and leading into a series of similar metal bubbles housing the homes and workings of the mining enterprise. The ground was hard-packed lunar slate and the lighting came from giant atomic bulbs built into the tops of the domes, bulbs which once activated would not burn out for a thousand years. The air and heat were all artificially supplied and regulated. Outside these domes, life could not live for the airlessness of the moon and its weeks-long day made for terrible degrees of cold and heat, neither extreme of which would be tolerable for even an instant. Everything here was man-made and had been transported from Earth piece by piece.

Bruce reflected on this as he watched the fuel drums being rolled out. Even though Terraluna was now bent on a project which might well be the ruin of all that man had built up over a million painful years of struggle, he could understand their desire to complete the mastery of this alien world. For a moment he almost forgot the danger of their visit until the harsh voice of one of the workmen brought him back to Earth—or rather to moon.

“You the guys getting this special speedy order, kid?”

For an instant Bruce flushed angrily. He knew he was young for a spaceman, but he doubted that he was any less the equal of these men. He fought back the angry retort that came to his lips, realizing in time that nothing nasty had been intended by the questioner.

“Yes,” he replied quietly, “we’re the ones. Take it around to the rear and run it into Tanks Four, Five, and Six.” He gestured with one hand and stood back.

“Don’t let them get you riled,” said Arpad, coming up to him from the ship. “Keep your eye peeled.” He waved a hand and walked around the ship to check it for flaws, for pitmarks that might have been caused by tiny meteors or cosmic particles.

Bruce walked slowly back and forth, warily watching the loading. There seemed to be nothing going wrong. The tanks were coming out of a connected dome whose entry door was plainly marked: Fuel-Keep Out—Danger. The fuel drums were all sealed and bore the standard markings of the United Nations Atomic Fuel Commission. Besides the workmen, no strangers were near them, though there were a couple of men watching from a doorway across the hangar.

Arpad came into sight again and caught Bruce’s eye. The young spaceman waved a hand. “We made a pretty clean trip this time, only one little meteor scratch. Wanta see?”

“Sure,” Bruce replied. “Where is it?”

“Around here,” Arpad answered, taking his arm and leading him to the nose of the ship. He pointed out a thin scratch running diagonally for a couple of feet across the gleaming surface of the round nose of their vessel just beneath the transparent observation ports. “A small one grazed us. This is superhard metal so you can guess at what a speed this little pebble was traveling to even scratch it.”

Bruce looked at the mark with interest. He thought of what might happen if a really big one got through their radar screens, and while he was thinking this, his ears registered something slightly different from the trudging and rumbling of the workmen and their hand trucks.

He turned and for a moment saw only one of the workmen wheeling the last drum of their fuel up to the loading vent. But this man was not alone, he was accompanied by three other individuals who were not in the regulation blue overalls. One of them, a short, plump, balding man, was wearing civilian gray moon-jumpers and was carrying a leather brief case. The two others were hard-faced, soldierly looking men, in Terraluna guard blues, wearing belts to which holstered weapons were attached.

Instantly Bruce turned and walked rapidly up to them. The workman went on about his job, but the three others started toward the airlock entrance. Bruce called out to them:

“Wait just a moment, please! Nobody is allowed in the ship!”

The three paid him little attention, dismissing him with a glance, hastening their steps. Bruce made a dash for the entry, gained it a few steps ahead of them and blocked the door. “Hold it! If you have any business with this ship, tell me and I’ll have someone come out, but I can’t let you in.”

The short puffy man stopped short, turned red. One of the armed men, however, came ahead, scowling. “Go on, fellow, and don’t block us. We’ve got to see the captain and we’re going in.”

He tried to brush Bruce away with his hand. Almost without thinking, Bruce darted his hand to his belt and drew out his machine-pistol. He thrust its muzzle to within a few inches of the man’s body. “Stand back!” he snapped.

Taken by surprise, the three stepped back quickly; and the two in blue reached for their own weapons. Bruce raised his gun, tightened his grip. “Don’t try anything,” he said. “I have my orders. You can have no legitimate business aboard this ship!”

The little man in gray regained his composure and waved his companions back. He spoke to Bruce impatiently, “But we certainly do have business here. I happen to be the UN’s official agent at this base. It is my duty to certify all ships reaching this port before they leave. I shall have to examine this craft in person before I can give that permission. So let us in at once and let us get on with our affairs!”

Bruce shook his head stubbornly. “I can't let you in, regardless of what you say. This ship is a UN ship itself and on business for the UN. You can check that with Copernicus by radio. In fact, you must know that already because you got orders to fuel us.”

The official grew red-faced again. “I don’t care what Copernicus may say. How do I know this is actually the ship it claims to be? My orders are that no ship may leave here without being certified. If you do not instantly put that ugly gun down and stand aside, I shall see that you do not leave here at all!”

He started forward as if to brave his way through, but Bruce thrust a hand across the entry and kept his gun leveled. “Come a step farther and I will shoot!” His heart was beating fast. He didn’t know what would happen if he had to make good his threat, but he remembered only one thing. He could not permit these men aboard the ship. It was obvious that the official’s claim was merely a trick. Probably he wasn’t even a UN representative. Legal or not, whatever it was, was just a means to Terraluna’s efforts to stop the expedition.

Evidently the men realized that Bruce was not bluffing, for they stepped away and drew back. Arpad, who had been watching with amazement, stepped up beside Bruce and whispered, “I’ll get the chief.” He went into the ship.

For a while Bruce blocked the door in silence. The three men were whispering among themselves. Several of the workmen were standing near the domes watching the events in silence.

Dr. Rhodes came to the portway. “What’s all this about?” he said.

The puffy official came back to the ship and explained what he had told Bruce before. Dr. Rhodes frowned and shook his head. “No, I cannot permit you aboard this ship. I was informed that the United Nations had radioed advance clearance for this ship and priority. This should be sufficient for your certification.”

The little man went back and whispered some more to his Terraluna companions. He looked back to Dr. Rhodes. “As the official agent of the UN here, I refuse to grant you clearance. Until you allow my inspection, you are denied permission to leave this base.” He turned to the men in blue. “I charge you to see that they obey my orders!” He then stalked away and disappeared into one of the domes, as if whatever followed would no longer concern him.

Dr. Rhodes looked after him silently, then he turned to Bruce. “Did they complete the fueling?” When Bruce nodded, he added, “Come inside.”

The engineer stepped back into the airlock, followed by his son, who closed the outer door and began to bolt it. Dr. Rhodes gained the central corridor and called out, “Everybody get to take-off stations! We are leaving immediately!”

Bruce hastily slammed the inner airlock door and began to seal its rubberoid fastenings. Arpad was already running down to the engine room, while Dr. Rhodes rushed back to the control room.

Bruce heard Garcia’s excited protest, “But our figuring is not completed yet!”

“Never mind that!” shouted Dr. Rhodes. “We’ll finish it in space. Jennings, get her started! We’ve not a second to lose!”

Bruce got the last seals shut. Outside he heard the muffled shouts of men and someone began pounding on the side. He heard a voice call out:

“You can’t take off! You have no permission! We’ll blast you as an outlaw if you don’t open up at once!” He glanced forward along the central corridor. He could see Jennings already in his control seat, Rhodes and Garcia beside him.

By a side port, Bruce saw the men outside run away from the ship as Jennings signaled their intentions. A single blast of their smallest jet made everyone in the hangar run for cover. The ship swung around, faced the great gates of the hangar. Bruce heard Jennings’ voice boom out on their radio speaker: “Get those gates open or we’ll blast through them without waiting!”

The ship’s engines were rumbling away. Another puff of rocket energy and the ship swung slowly forward on its runners. In the nick of time, the gates started sliding back. The remaining air in the hangar dome puffed out, but the Terraluna base operators had all gotten safely under cover.

The ship slid through the gates, slid out onto the vast expanse of the gray dust sea, which stretched before them as a plain that reached to the horizon, where Bruce could see the white sunlit tops of the jagged lunar mountains that ringed it in.

The ship jockeyed slowly into position. Behind them, at the hangar, Bruce now saw several men come out, dressed in bulky red and yellow space suits. He caught a glimpse of something bright and shinily metallic being rolled out before them.

“They’ll stop at nothing,” he heard his father say, “they can’t afford not to. They mean murder!”

As their ship gathered speed, its runners moving smoothly over the thick velvety surface, the radio announcer in their control room boomed with a strange voice:

“Stop that ship or we’ll fire! This is the port commander ordering!”

“Go ahead,” said Dr. Rhodes to Jennings. “Full speed and up!”

The ship’s rockets blasted out in full. As they pulled rapidly away from the domes of the mining camp, Bruce saw a puff of yellow flash from the tiny figures outside. There was an explosion somewhere behind them. They were being fired at!

But it was too late. The Rhodes’ expedition skimmed along faster and faster, its runners gliding over the sea bottom. Then easily and gently it lifted up, shot into the black sky, skimmed the jagged tops of the mountains and tore onward into the interplanetary void.

Behind them Bruce saw the mining camp quickly diminish into a group of tiny gleaming bubbles, then into a speck on the edge of a flat grayish plain, then vanish against the face of the moon. He saw the moon itself pull together, shrinking until it became a single disk against the black sky, and then finally there was the breath-taking vision of two disks, the softly glowing green and blue Earth and partly blotting it out the black and white harshly outlined features of its dead satellite.

They were off at last with Saturn eight hundred million miles away!

"Hey, snap out of it!” Arpad’s voice cut into Bruce’s thoughts as he stood staring back at the receding moon. ‘There’s work to be done; no time for sightseeing now.”

Bruce reluctantly took his eyes off the breath-taking sight of the dual planet of his birth and brought his attention back to the present. Arpad was already at work picking up some papers and stuff that had become loose in the unexpected take-off. Without being told further, Bruce joined him and checked the cargo again. Fortunately, not very much had been unfastened during their brief call at Luna, and so the sudden dash away had not created the havoc that it ordinarily would have.

Again, the fact that their take-off was from a small body had not involved the intense pressures and speeds that their original breakaway from Earth had demanded. The smaller the planet, the easier it is for a rocket to break away from its gravitational grip. This was an old story; every schoolboy in Bruce’s time knew it.

Jennings came back down the corridor and waved to the two spacehands. “Drop what you’re doing. We’ve got a job that’s more important!”

When they made their way to him, Jennings said: “Dr. Rhodes thinks there’s a chance the ship was hit by one of those shots. I don’t think so myself, but we don’t dare overlook it. One of you will have to get into a space suit and check the outside hull carefully.”

“I’ll do it,” Bruce exclaimed just a second before Arpad could offer. The other shrugged his shoulders, stepped back.

“O.K.,” Jennings nodded, “but don’t waste any time about it.”

Bruce went to the airlock, got into the space suit just as he had before when they were attaching the landing runners, and, controlling the lock’s air pressure, let himself out. Again he felt the frightening feeling of immense height, of being suspended over a bottomless hole in which two immense balls were floating and a number of brilliant pin-point stars peering up from the infinite depths.

Concentrating his gaze on the shining metal outer surface of the ship, being careful to keep his magnetic shoes firmly flat against the side, and his safety line clear of snags, Bruce crawled slowly over the ship’s outside.

From pointed top to blunt and tube-studded end, along its vanes and runners, Bruce checked minutely. But there was no sign of any of the Terraluna shells having hit the ship. He was glad, some time later, to be able to make his way back to the airlock and return to the safety of the interior. By this time, he observed as he closed the outer door of the lock that the Earth-Moon globes had receded noticeably.