Saturn Rukh (14 page)

Petro thought for a while of reporting the falling object to Petra when she woke at the end of the day. It might be one of those meteors that she was always talking about. But Petro’s mind was focused on the hunt and he soon forgot all about the incident.

~ * ~

Minute after minute, the crew felt the uneasy feeling of being once again under gravity instead of free fall, but this gravity wasn’t steady and comforting; it had the uneasy variability of something falling....

Chastity used the vernier jets to keep the capsule from tilting or rotating while Seichi got the reactor going. The reactor was hanging below the heat radiator and flexfan complex up at the mouth of the balloon above them. As the reactor started to generate electricity and heat, it passed the waste heat through secondary cooling loops to the radiator fins. The fins started to glow as they radiated away the waste heat, while the electricity from the reactor started to rotate the flexfans. The fans pulled cold Saturnian air past the glowing radiator fins, turning the high-density cold air into lighter-density hot air that flowed into the mouth of the balloon and started to inflate it.

The crew, still in their acceleration couches, looked upward at the nearly transparent strip of plastic stretching upward above them as it slowly expanded. Sandra read off the altitude, while Dan read off the outside pressure.

“Sixty thousand five hundred,” said Sandra.

“One bar,” said Dan.

“We’re still falling…” whispered Pete.

“But slower…” added Sandra. “Sixty thousand.”

The minutes passed. The balloon above them began to take on a more rotund look. The sinking feeling in the pits of their stomachs slowly faded away as the random motions of the capsule damped out. Rod had half expected a spontaneous cheer to rise up from the crew. He had experienced many such from the passengers after successful landings on Luna and Mars, but this “landing” in the soft clouds of Saturn took so long and arrived so slowly that no one could really tell exactly when the event occurred.

Pete was the first one to acknowledge their safe arrival. Even though the altimeter was still dropping, he unbuckled his couch restraints and got to his feet.

“I don’t know about the rest of you,” he said, heading for the ladder to the deck below, “but I’m going to have my first worry-free shit in over a year!”

~ * ~

3

LIVING IN THE CLOUDS

ALTITUDE STABILIZED.

Rod read the situation message from Jeeves on the console screen. He gave a small sigh, generated by a combination of relief and pride in a job well done. The balloon had inflated enough to keep them aloft and they were safe. He could now relax, get out of his safety harness, and put away his acceleration couch. Rod had noticed, with a slight bit of annoyance, that most of the others had left their couches some time ago. The others, not having the burden of command responsibility, were off wandering about the ship, making coffee and gawking out the viewports at the scenery like a bunch of hick tourists.

Another message appeared in the box for messages that reported non-urgent but out-of-nominal situations.

EXTERNAL PRESSURE DIFFERENTIAL 1.8 ATMOSPHERES. The number
1.8
was in yellow.

“How many atmospheres can the hull take, Seichi?” he asked, turning his head. Like Rod, Seichi took his responsibilities strongly and he too was still lying supine on his acceleration couch, safety harness snugly keeping him in place, scottyboard hanging above his midsection.

“Four is the nominal limit, sir,” Seichi replied, “but it can hold off more than that.”

“I don’t want to get anywhere close to the limit, nominal or not,” said Rod. He turned and hollered down through the grating: “Doc! Is it okay for Seichi to boost the air pressure inside here?”

“Sure,” Dan hollered up from the galley. “We planned on doing that anyway, but let me come up and monitor things.” He clumped heavily up the ladder in the nearly Earth gravity of Saturn, one step at a time, encumbered with a squeezer of hot coffee that kept squirting hot brown liquid out its straw and onto his wrist as he grasped it tightly to keep it from falling. It would be some time before the crew got used to living under gees again.

“I’ve already started the pressure increase,” said Seichi, as Dan appeared and went to the science console to check on the life support system. By the time Dan had clumsily made his way up the ladder to the control deck, Seichi had reinstalled the scottyboard in its normal position below the holoviewport and was taking his acceleration couch apart.

“Fine,” said Dan, reading the pressure gauge on the console screen. He didn’t really need to read the gauge, for he could feel the pressure change in his ears. He brought up a copy of the scottyboard on the science console and started to push some icons. “Let me slow it down a little to give our ears a chance to adjust.”

Down in the airlock, Chastity was helping Pete into his saturnsuit.

“These saturnsuits are sure a lot easier to put on than vacuum suits,” said Pete, shivering in his underwear as he pulled the long flap between his legs and snapped it closed in front. Chastity then shook him into his tight-fitting insulated bright yellow-green pants from behind. She finished by giving the “love handles” spilling over his belt line a pinch for luck, then helped him into his oxygen tank harness. It was much lighter and less bulky than an underwater scuba tank harness, since all Pete had to carry was his oxygen. The inert hydrogen-helium atmosphere of Saturn would take the place of the inert nitrogen that makes up 78 percent of Earth-normal air. Last thing on was his helmet, which regulated the oxygen flow and kept the small amount of ammonia gas in the Saturnian air from getting to the wearer’s eyes and face. The helmet had other functions as well. Because it is always dark underneath the multiple cloud decks of Saturn, the helmet had an infrared video camera built into the crown and a light-amplifying holovisor built into the visor. For communication with the ship, there was a high-bandwidth radio link that could transmit video as well as audio.

Chastity cycled Pete through the airlock and stayed just inside the door, watching on the airlock console display a copy of what Pete was seeing in his helmet visor. She kept the volume on the display down so as not to disturb Sandra, who was trying to go to sleep on the facilities deck so she would be fresh and ready to hunt for biological specimens when sunrise came to this part of Saturn. Now that they were in Saturn’s gravity field instead of free fall, the sleeping sacks had been arranged to hang like hammocks. The Sun was just setting and Sandra would be able to sleep until sunrise. Saturn had only a ten-and-a-half-hour day, however, so sunrise was five short hours away.

The outer airlock door swung downward in front of Pete with a hiss. He stopped at the threshold of the large opening in the side of their conical ship and looked upward. It was dark, for they were under the ammonia cloud layer and the Sun was setting. He thought he saw one or two faint patches of light in the cloud deck. Probably the light from some of Saturn’s moons. He would let Jeeves figure that out later. He looked straight up at the balloon, far above them. In the infrared band of the holovisor, the balloon glowed with a warm red false color from the temperature of the hot air inside it. At the mouth of the balloon was a glaring white spot that was the waste heat radiator for the lesser white spot below it—the plutonium reactor and its electrical generator. The reactor, with its load of twenty kilos of Japanese plutonium, was the “Sun” for this little portion of Earth floating in the cold air of Saturn. The photons from the hidden glowing-hot surface of the nuclear reactor were turned into electricity by the thermophotovoltaic cells that surrounded the reactor. The photons that didn’t get made into electricity were reflected back to the reactor, where they were converted into heat again and recycled, while the waste heat generated by the photovoltaic cells went up the secondary cooling loops to the radiator to heat the air in the balloon. The megawatts of electricity generated were shipped down the tether on wires made of room temperature superconductors. Some of the electricity was used to supply power and heat to the crew inside
Sexdent,
but most of the electrical power went to the meta plant, where it was to be turned into fuel. Since the meta plant had not been turned on yet, nearly all of the reactor power was going into making hot air to fill the balloon that was their sole means of support. A small amount of electrical power went into operating floodlights that illuminated the balloon above, and the tether and capsule below.

Pete next stepped out onto the open airlock door, and holding on to the cable attached to the door, he looked over and down, turning his head slowly from side to side so that Chastity and the all-absorbing memory of Jeeves could see what was below them. Far below he could see the next layer of white clouds, illuminated partially by the glow of the setting sun, and partially by the floodlights from the reactor complex above. They looked like water clouds, but he couldn’t be sure. Then he spotted a thin cloud formation off in the distance. It hung midway between the ammonia cloud deck above and the cloud deck far below.

“What’s that in the center of my view, Jeeves?” asked Pete, holding his head still. “A cirrus cloud?”

“I suspect it is an ammonium hydrosulfide cloud,” replied Jeeves. “According to the calculations of the atmospheric physicists, that compound is expected to condense out into clouds at an altitude higher than water vapor but less than ammonia vapor. The ammonium hydrosulfide cloud layer seems to be sparse in this region at this time.”

“Good thing, too,” said Pete. “Ammonia is bad enough, but ammonia
and
hydrosulfuric acid combined sound like bad news to someone outside in their skivvies.”

The cold of the below-freezing atmosphere was beginning to penetrate through the insulation in his suit, so Pete stopped gawking and started the short climb down the rungs built into the conical side of the capsule, being careful to always have at least one safety line attached to either a rung or a safety ring.

As he came to the level of the meta plant and started in on the catwalk between the engines, he could see the heat exchangers for the meta plant hanging below. They had automatically deployed when the heat shield had been dropped. They were glowing dark red in the infrared band of his holo-visor, cooled by the nearly two atmospheres of dense, cold hydrogen gas surrounding them. He entered the small airlock in the meta plant with relief, for the walls of the metal tube were warm from all the equipment heating up the inside of the plant. It wasn’t long before Pete had every unit in the complex plant busily turning Saturn atmosphere into meta.

When Pete returned an hour later, both Rod and Chastity were waiting for him at the airlock door.

“How does it look?” asked Rod, although he was already relieved at the bright, confident smile on Pete’s face.

“You can start planning on how you’re going to spend your money, you billionaire,” said Pete. “All the units are operating perfectly and pumping out meta by the liter. We’re making over a ton a day. We should have the hundred and twenty tons we need well before the hundred and eighty days we planned.” He turned to Chastity and started opening his mouth again, but she put a long-nailed index finger in front of her lips and pointed to the hammock behind him. “Sandra’s still asleep,” she whispered. “We’ll see you upstairs and you can tell us more.”

“First things first,” whispered Pete, pulling open the door to one of the toilets and going in.

~ * ~

Later, up on the flight deck, Pete, Rod, Chastity, and Dan discussed their plans for the next few days.

“I can operate the plant up here at this altitude,” said Pete, “but the meta production would be improved if the input gas were at higher pressure, so the partial pressure of helium would be higher.”

“Sandra and I would like to get down in the water cloud layer,” said Dan. “I doubt we’ll find any significant lifeforms up here where it is dry and cold.”

“Cold is right!” said Pete. “That’s the other reason I want to go where the pressure is higher—the air will be warmer and I won’t freeze my balls off every time I check on the meta plant.”

“I’ll start a descent trajectory, then,” said Rod. “But at the same time I’m going to head north. We had to land near the equator so we could take advantage of Saturn’s rotation. But the trade winds are high near the equator and high wind velocity means high turbulence. We’ve been lucky so far, but the farther we get out of this region the better I’ll feel.”

“Take the descent portion real slowly,” said Dan. “It’ll make it easier for all of us to readjust. I’m also going to have to change the mixture. Nitrogen is okay up to a few atmospheres for short periods, but since we’ll be down here six months at even higher pressures, there’s the problem of nitrogen narcosis. I’m going to switch us over to a deep-diving mixture of helium and oxygen. Fortunately, there’s plenty of helium outside, and with all the electrical power coming down from the reactor, we can make all the oxygen we need by electrolysis. I’ll also set up the science console so when we exceed six atmospheres it will slowly change us from a helium-oxygen atmosphere to a hydreliox mix.”

“Hydreliox?” asked Chastity.

“A mixture of hydrogen, helium, and oxygen,” replied Dan. “It’s what the deep-sea divers use for saturation dives, where you stay down for days at a time. Even though it has hydrogen mixed with oxygen, it won’t explode, since above six atmospheres the oxygen content needed to keep the partial pressure in our lungs at twenty-one percent Earth normal is less than four percent. The record for hydreliox breathing is sixty-six atmospheres’ pressure for forty-three days. It was set by a group of researchers in a dry tank, sort of like the conditions we’re working under. They came out fine.”