The Secret of Saturn’s Rings (8 page)

“That’s strange,” he remarked to Arpad. “Two in succession.”

“Three,” said Arpad, pointing to a third spurt rising near where the first one had struck.

Suddenly a cold chill ran through Bruce as it struck him what they were watching. “Those aren’t meteors!” he shouted. “They’re explosions! They’re shells from a cannon! We’re being shot at from Achilles! From the Terraluna base there!”

They started running wildly back to the ship, calling Dr. Rhodes on their helmet phone. Even as they ran, another shell struck, this time near where they had been standing.

Bruce shouted the alarm as they neared the ship. Dr. Rhodes called to them to hurry. They reached the ship, threw themselves through the airlock and slammed the door. Already Dr. Rhodes was buzzing the engines and Garcia was trying to activate the tubes. As the boys came through the lock without bothering to remove their space outfits, Jennings came from his sleeping quarters in a rush to the controls.

Bruce opened his helmet as he ran to the control room. Once there, he found his father at the controls with the ship already off the ground. “Father,” Bruce yelled, “I know where we can take the ship. They’ll never be able to hit us.”

As his father shot the ship over the surface, Bruce told him of the deep meteor crater on the other hemisphere. If they put the ship down there, they’d be safe until Achilles was out of range.

Dr. Rhodes was personally flying the ship to that spot. Bruce had found their map of the surface and if they got to their hiding place in time, no cannon could reach them.

It was really easy to operate a cannon from an asteroid. If you could line your sights, any simple artillery gun from even hundreds of years before could get enough power to break away from the weak asteroid grip and cross space to strike a visible target. Obviously the Terraluna mining camp had rigged up a cannon, knowing that Hidalgo would pass right in their sight, had awaited their chance, and bombarded the ship which they could see plainly through their telescopes. In a short while longer they’d have corrected their aim sufficiently to hit the ship and put it out of action forever.

As Garcia and Bruce were discussing this angle, their ship was already crossing over into the side of the asteroid away from the Fore-Trojan view. Bruce noticed that Jennings was standing by the radio, apparently fiddling nervously with the microphone. He watched Jennings’ fingers tapping on the mike, and suddenly he realized that the radio sender was on, the lights lit on the dials. For an instant he was stunned.

“Stop!” Bruce yelled and made a dash for the radio. He tried to grab the switch but Jennings made a swing for him, Bruce twisted in his grasp, slammed the power control off the radio.

Garcia had started up in amazement. But Jennings grappled with Bruce. Then Arpad came up the corridor holding a wrench and joined the fight. Bruce was outweighed, but when Arpad raised the tool, Jennings suddenly quit, let go of the boy and stepped back, his hands raised. “O.K., O.K., cut it out. I’m through.”

By this time Garcia had secured a pistol from their stores and held it on Jennings. “So you were the spy?” Jennings nodded. “I’m the man. You ought to listen to me. You know this trip can’t succeed. The odds are too high. If I could have stopped you, I’d probably have saved your lives.”

“What if we’d been hit by those shells?” said Arpad. Jennings shrugged. “Even so. We’d probably just lose our air, and have to abandon ship. The Terraluna base on Achilles would have picked us up safely. They have some small ships.”

Dr. Rhodes glanced around from the controls. “Keep him under guard until we get this ship safely landed. We’ll decide what to do with him then.”

The ship crossed the asteroid, dropped into the deep meteor crater Bruce had discovered, and in the dark shadow of its bottom, miles beneath the surface, came to a rest.

They held a discussion. From where they were, the Terraluna guns could never reach them. Jennings admitted that he had not had time to let the enemy cannoneers know, by tapping in code on the side of the live microphone, where they were going.

But time was precious. In a little while, the asteroid mining ships from Achilles would be on Hidalgo itself searching for them. In time they’d be found.

Dr. Rhodes and Garcia conferred over their charts and records. They looked up. Rhodes glanced at Arpad and Bruce, then said, “We’ve got a very serious decision to make. We will have to abandon Hidalgo and go on by our own power to Saturn. We figure that since we have already acquired Hidalgo’s own speed and orbital direction by riding on it, we only need to speed up and move ahead on Hidalgo’s own orbit. We have the fuel, though it will leave us very dangerously limited after we reach Saturn. Our only hope of return, if we do this, will be to catch Hidalgo when it arrives near Saturn—at the very point where we had originally intended to leave it. If we delay on Saturn too long, we will miss that call and never return to Earth. I will ask you two to decide. The odds are long. Shall we do it? Shall we go on to Saturn days ahead of Hidalgo by our own power?”

Arpad was silent. Bruce hesitated. He wanted to say yes, but he felt that as Dr. Rhodes’ son, that would have been expected of him. He’d rather Arpad made the decision. He turned, looked at Arpad. The other’s eyes caught his. They had a merry twinkle, then Arpad’s face broke into a smile.

“What are we waiting for?” Arpad said. “Let’s get going!”

They abandoned Jennings on Hidalgo. This was not as deadly as it seemed. They unloaded and set up on the level plain outside their meteor crater hideout an airtight transparent tent, the type used by asteroid miners for short stays. They installed a small atomic-fueled heater and a spare oxygen purifier from their space-suit stores. Enough food for a couple of days was also placed in the tent.

Just before they left Hidalgo, they radioed the whereabouts of Jennings to the Terraluna station on Achilles, told them to pick him up. As soon as their call had been received and they knew that it had been noted, they signed off.

Bruce spoke with Jennings just before they abandoned him, as the task of setting up his tent had been given to him. The pilot was gloomy, but insisted he was right.

“Really, Bruce, in spite of your faith in your father’s ideas, they are wrong. I tell you that Terraluna’s research staff has proven positively that there would be no danger in their new mining project. I saw the figures myself—that’s what convinced me that this trip to Saturn is very foolhardy, and that you’re taking unnecessary dangers with good men for nothing.”

Bruce shrugged, went on with his work. Finally he said, “If you felt that way, you had no right to come with us. If it’s our lives that are to be lost, let us take that chance. Even if Terraluna is right—and I don’t believe it—our own discoveries on Saturn’s rings would be the final proof. If were wrong, we’ll find it out and say so. But no one, not even a powerful outfit, has any right to take a chance with all humanity while there’s the slightest possibility of my dad being right.” Jennings looked at him. “I’ll be sorry to see a smart young fellow like yourself get killed so early in life. Even if your father is right, he can’t prove it by this trip. This ship isn’t big enough to make the trip and get back. You haven’t the fuel, and nobody can survive in the rings anyway. I’d have gone along with you if I felt that you had even a fair chance of success. But I don’t. I’m an expert space pioneer—you know my record—believe me, I am sincere.”

Bruce gritted his teeth but said no more. He felt that Jennings was giving his true views, and he had to respect the pilot’s record. Yet he wouldn’t let himself dwell on the possibility of failure. He refused to discuss any more. Besides, they had no time.

When they blasted off, Bruce caught a final glimpse of the little bubble of transparent plastic that imprisoned Jennings. He wondered whether he would be rescued in time.

They were edging just beyond the orbit of Jupiter at the moment of leaving Hidalgo. They blasted along at full tilt for several hours, gaining tremendous acceleration. Garcia had adjusted their direction so that they were taking full advantage of Hidalgo’s momentum, yet directing their ship at a point where Saturn would be long before the tiny asteroid would arrive.

As before, they tried to conserve fuel. They would turn off the engines and coast along for many hours at a time. Had they been keeping the same distance from the sun, they need never have turned their jets on again—they could maintain the same speed for millions of years since there was nothing in empty space to slow them down. But moving as they were, away from the sun, their speed was still insufficient to break away from the great parent star’s gravity. When they coasted without power, the sun’s grip fastened on them imperceptibly, and in the course of hours a slow dragging loss of speed was always detectable. When the ship came back to a certain speed, the jets had to be blasted on again and the lost speed regained.

In answer to a question of Arpad’s as to what would happen if they did not use their jets again, Dr. Rhodes said, from his position at the pilot’s seat: “We would continue to move outward from the sun along our present orbit until we came to a dead stop some distance inside Saturn’s orbit. We would then instantly start falling back toward the sun, following the other half of our same orbit until we fell faster and faster back toward the sun, perhaps as far as Mars’ orbit. At that point we would swing around the sun and hurtle outward again, and we’d simply continue to circle the sun for a million years or so, just like any asteroid, until eventually we would fall into the sun itself and be disintegrated.”

Bruce overheard that question. It helped make clear why the problem of their store of fuel was so important. He knew they had enough fuel to make Saturn and a little to spare. But any excess or emergency, and they would be lost.

The trip was long, long and for the most part dull. After the constant changing sights of the asteroid belt, there was little new to see in this vast space between Jupiter and Saturn, a distance of about four hundred million miles. Behind them, in crescent form, they could see Jupiter, a huge glow, visibly striped, with several of its great moons plainly visible as disks. Mars was out of sight behind the sun. The Earth could be seen just at the sun’s rim, between them and that glowing body, which meant that only the night side of his home world was toward the Rhodes ship. To them the Earth was a faint circle of light, a ring around darkness, the ring being the reflection of the sun’s glow through the atmosphere. Venus was invisible, lost in the sun’s glare.

On the other hand, Saturn was slowly growing day by day.

It was at first a tiny ball of yellow with a thin, sharp line of white cleaving it at both sides. This line was the rings seen head-on. As they neared it and changed position, this line widened out, until it assumed the familiar form of the rings, circling the glowing golden ball like a wide halo.

As they neared Saturn, Bruce could see that it was belted like Jupiter. It had no surface markings, such as continents and water areas; instead, it was banded along its equator and upward with several wide areas of different colors. Some were near-white, others yellowish, or approaching orange or even bluish tinges.

All around the ship was the blackness of empty space, the stars of the galaxy glowing in the distance. Once, just once, a glowing sphere passed their view—a comet, Dr. Rhodes explained, that had not developed a tail and wouldn’t until it came much closer to the sun.

Bruce spent most of the time in study, his father having insisted that he master the elements of star navigation and continue his mathematical studies that were so necessary to space flight. Garcia and Dr. Rhodes took turns, in their off moments, in drilling him in the various problems. They were hard and complex, but, as Garcia put it, “No harder and no more complex than the universe itself. If you want to play among the stars, you must learn the rules they play by.”

In the passage of time, they approached Saturn. Its moon system was visible and quite impressive, even if you overlooked the ever-amazing rings. They held a brief conference as to where to establish their base.

Garcia was in favor of landing on Titan, the largest moon. “It’s got an atmosphere of sorts, it's the biggest of the moons, almost half again bigger than Luna, and we’ll be able to stand and walk fairly comfortably. We can probably find frozen water and oxygen around and build up our stores.”

Dr. Rhodes, however, insisted on making their base the innermost moon, called Mimas. “It’s only about a hundred thousand miles from Saturn, almost on top of the rings. It’s tiny, about three hundred and seventy miles in diameter. This means that it won’t take much fuel to go to the rings from there, whereas it will take a lot of fuel to get off Titan. Since Mimas has no atmosphere, our observations will not be clouded and will be absolutely clear. In every way, we should make for Mimas. It may be less comfortable, but it will be best for us.”

So it was decided. Saturn had ten moons in all, three of them impressively large. But Mimas was the one they had selected.

By this time Saturn loomed large in their view-plates. Bruce watched as they narrowed in, under jet drive, for the landing. They passed Titan close enough to see that it had a soft glow around it, proving the presence of an atmosphere. Bruce knew from the astronomical records that this atmosphere was nothing that he could breathe. Any oxygen would probably be in frozen form, the air that it was composed of would be thin, mainly ammonia and swamp gas. But he could see that Titan had mountain ranges and glistening blue-white areas that would have been oceans and lakes if they had melted.

Mimas was a small crescent against the great glowing surface of Saturn as they closed in. Bruce had the strange feeling that they were falling to the surface, that they would brush against the rings, so close to these the little moon was floating.

Now, however, they came up to the outer side of Mimas, and it filled their view, a black circle covering more and more of the sky. They swung around it, circling down, and the ship was bathed in the soft golden glow of Saturn. Down over rocky plains and sharp jagged mountains until finally with great skill Dr. Rhodes set the ship down on its runners on a flat plain. They skidded over loose rocks, bumped wildly, and Bruce could hear the thud of loose stones against the metal hull. Finally they were stopped, and the engines brought to rest.