Saturn Rukh (3 page)

“If you’re not interested in the job, I’ll have to go to the next name on the list…” replied Art firmly. He then broke out his most ingratiating smile and tried again. “But Rod and I would
both
like you to be part of this mission.”

Chastity thought for a long time. She didn’t like it, but she couldn’t complain too much. For the rest of her life she could live like a multimillionaire on just the interest from a billion dollars.

“Okay,” she finally said. She turned and looked at Rod. “Let’s go up and look at the ship.”

~ * ~

The vehicle for the Saturn mission was being put together at the Boeing-Mitsubishi Assembly Station in LEO. After the trip up in the crew shuttle, Rod and Chastity put on spacesuits and went out on a Jet-Do, Rod at the controls and Chastity sitting behind him. They approached the crew capsule at the front of the ship. The capsule was in the shape of a cone seven meters high and seven meters wide at the base—like a gigantic Apollo capsule. There were three small view-windows toward the top of the cone, six larger ones in the middle, and an airlock door on one side near the bottom.

“Looks like a standard Boeing-Mitsubishi crew capsule,” said Chastity as they approached. “Holds six—three in comfort. That’s going to be pretty close quarters for a thirty-month mission.”

“I don’t mind if you don’t mind,” said Rod.

Chastity squeezed her thighs tighter against him. “I’ll be fun the first few months,” she agreed. “But by eighteen months I’ll bet you’ll be tired of having me around all the time.”

“Never!” said Rod.

“Well, I may be tired of you!” she replied, giving him a punch in the ribs.

As they approached closer, she asked, “What’s its name?”

“I’ve named her
Sexdent,”
replied Rod. “After the trident that the god Saturn carries, only I changed it to ‘sexdent’ ‘cause there are six of us, and when our habitats are installed in its side, the capsule has six ‘teeth.’ “

“You ninny!” Chastity shouted, giving him another punch in the ribs. “It’s
Neptune
that carries a trident. You’ve got your gods and planets mixed up.”

“Oh, well,” said Rod. “At least the name has a nice nautical flavor ... sexdent...sextant…”

Sexdent
sat on a fuel tank module that continued the conical shape, so that the combined cone was eleven meters high and eleven meters wide at the base. At the base of the fuel tank module was an engine module with twelve large rocket nozzles spaced evenly around its base. This squat conical rocket ship was sitting on a large squat cylindrical fuel tank thirteen meters in diameter and eleven meters tall.

“The stack doesn’t have the right proportions,” said Chastity. “When we go on a normal mission to Luna or Mars, the conical crew capsule up front is followed by a stack of cargo or passenger modules, with the fuel modules and the engine module at the end, all the same diameter as the crew capsule. Of course, for this mission there’ll be no cargo or passengers, but these certainly aren’t standard Boeing-Mitsubishi fuel modules. They’re too wide—and what’s that donut-shaped thing floating over there at the end of that tether?”

“Since meta is so powerful, only a single fuel module and engine module stage is needed for a round-trip mission to the surface of Luna or Mars,” said Rod. “For this mission, even though we have no cargo or passengers, we’re going to need six stages. So things are built and stacked differently. The whole stack weighs a little over two thousand tons wet, most of it in the first two stages. At the base is the booster stage, with a fifty-ton tank and engine module, which holds a thousand tons of meta to get us up to speed. Sitting on that is the rendezvous stage, with a twenty-five-ton tank and engine module containing five hundred tons of meta to stop us at Saturn. Sitting on top of the rendezvous stage is the cone-shaped portion that we’ll use to carry out the rest of the mission. It has the standard crew capsule on top, while underneath is a fuel tank and engine module that is not only our third stage, but part of our fourth, fifth, and sixth stages.”

“How’s that?” asked Chastity, not yet fully understanding.

“The fuel tank module gets refilled and the stage is reused,” replied Rod. “When we arrive, the tank will be full of meta. We use up nearly all the meta to descend into the upper atmosphere of Saturn. We make more meta while floating around in Saturn’s atmosphere, refill the tank, and use the same tank and engine module as the ascent stage. We then refill the tank again from the storage tank we left behind in orbit around Saturn, and use the same module as the return stage and the stopping stage.”

“Storage tank?”

“The donut-shaped thing over there is the storage tank that holds the return fuel,” said Rod, pointing. “It is the last thing to be added, and goes on top of the stack. It fits around the fuel tank at the base of the cone. We left it off until last, so Pete can get to the meta manufacturing facility underneath to check it out. Let me take you down there.”

Rod zoomed the Jet-Do to the base of the house-sized cone, and tied it to a strut holding one of the meter-high magno-shielded engine bells. In free fall, it was easy for Rod and Chastity to float between the engine bells, where they found an airlock leading into a cylindrical structure tucked between the ring of engines around the base of the conical stage.

The airlock into the meta-manufacturing facility was a tunnel-like entrance that allowed only one person to cycle through at a time. As Chastity exited the inner port she was pulled through by a tall man with a balding head. He wasn’t wearing a spacesuit, or much else for that matter, just the bottom half of his “cooljohns.” She could feel the coolant in her own cooljohns switch to cold—it must be hot inside the facility. The man bent over the airlock door to start the cycle again and she looked him over from the back. He was built like a football tight end, with broad shoulders, muscular arms, slim butt, and long tapering legs. The only thing that destroyed the wedge-shaped symmetry was the roll of fat that jiggled over the elastic on his cooljohns.

With the cycle started, the man turned around and stuck out his hand. “You must be Chastity Blaze,” he said. “I’m Pete Stewart, photochemical engineer. The facility is at normal pressure, but much too high a temperature, so if you want, you can strip”—a mischievous grin appeared at the sides of his mouth as he watched the annoyed look build on her face as the pause continued—”off your helmet and spacesuit to your cooljohns,” he finished innocently as they shook hands.

She took off her helmet and put it under her arm. “I’ll keep the suit on,” she said. The airlock bell chimed. As Pete opened the inner door and pulled Rod out of the airlock, she took the opportunity to look around the room. They were at the end of a narrow corridor, which branched off into other narrow corridors. The walls of the corridors were formed of ceiling-to-floor racks of identical pieces of intricate-looking equipment with blinking indicator numerals and toggle buttons. There was a muted hum of electrical power permeating the hot dry air.

“I take it Pete introduced himself,” said Rod as he removed his helmet.

“Yes...” said Chastity coolly.

“This is where we make the nitrometahelium,” said Pete as he led the way down the corridor. “If this pilot plant can make the one hundred twenty tons of nitrometahelium we need to get off Saturn in less than a half year, then the consortium will send a full-sized factory that can produce a million tons a year—at a cost less than five percent of the price of nitrometahelium in LEO today.”

Chastity was going to ask what would happen if the pilot plant didn’t work, but she put the negative thought out of her mind by concentrating on Pete’s bare back—it was a very nice muscular back and she wondered how it would feel to run long fingernails down that back and feel it twitch in response.

“These are the laser filters,” said Pete, pointing to one wall. “The nitro-stabilized metastable helium clusters are only stable if there are absolutely
no
impurities in the cluster. Not one atom of hydrogen or any other foreign atom, not even an atom of helium-three, the lightweight version of normal helium-four. These racks of tuned lasers take the input gas flow of impure helium, which will have been extracted from the hydrogen and other stuff in Saturn’s atmosphere by front-end physical and chemical filters, and clean all the impurities out of it, leaving pure helium-four gas.” He turned a comer and led them down another corridor, which had similar racks of equipment, with slightly different arrangements of indicators and toggle switches. Most of them were dark. “These racks of tuned laser exciters take the helium-four gas stream, and apply pi pulses of laser light at just the right frequency and pulse length. The pi-pulses flip
every single one
of the helium atoms from its normal nonexcited state into the excited state at the same time. The stream of excited helium atoms is then merged with a beam of excited nitrogen atoms, here”—he pointed to the midsection of the illuminated unit—”tickled with another laser to induce the formation of the sixty-four-atom cluster ... and out the end comes a stream of nitrometahelium, which condenses on the walls, is collected, and sent to the fuel tanks. If you look in this window you can see some droplets. They’re pretty small, but that’s all I have to show you, since for my helium source I only have a small pressure tank of a hydrogen-helium mixture pretending it’s Saturn.”

“Y’know,” said Chastity as she moved to look in the window. “I’ve used tons of meta in my career, but I’ve never actually seen the stuff.” She looked in the window at the tiny, almost spherical, metallic-looking drops collected on the far wall of the chamber. They had a silvery blue surface.

“Looks like blue mercury,” she said.

“Acts like mercury, but it’s a lot lighter,” said Pete. “When we’re in the cloud-tops on Saturn, the gravity will pull the droplets down the walls, where they will collect at the bottom of the chamber, then electromagnetic pumps will pump the liquid nitrometahelium into the fuel tanks.”

“How come only this one unit is on?” asked Chastity, pointing to the dark units above and below the one they were looking at.

“The helium exciters are real power hogs,” said Pete. “Since this stage is where the energy is put into the fuel, a lot of power is required to run each one. At Saturn we’ll have Seichi’s multi-megawatt nuclear reactor up and running, and I can run all the exciters at once. Here, I have to borrow power from the Assembly Station, so I’m checking them out one at a time. So far I’ve only found one bad one.”

“Make sure you find them all,” said Chastity. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life on Saturn.”

“Don’t worry,” said Pete with a wave of his hand. “I’ve designed this system so that it’s not only redundant and failsafe, but is completely repairable by a person working in a space-suit.”

“You designed all of this?” asked Chastity, looking around. She was impressed.

“Every bit,” said Pete with pride. “And it was assembled under my supervision. I’m now checking out each unit personally. After all, my life depends upon it working properly when we get to Saturn. If you two can get us down into Saturn safely, then I’ll give you the fuel to get us back out.”

“You can’t ask more of the builder of a system than to bet his life on it,” said Rod to Chastity. “Now let me take you to see another engineer who is betting his life on his system, but unlike Pete, he can’t turn it on to check it out beforehand.”

Leaving Pete to the task of checking out the facility, Rod and Chastity donned their helmets, exited the airlock, and leaving the Jet-Do tethered to the base of the conical ship, climbed up the rungs in the side of the crew capsule to the airlock at the center of the cone, where they cycled through together. This airlock was big enough for four people in their spacesuits. In a routine these two professional astronauts had gone through many times before, they turned their backs on each other, stripped down past their cooljohns, then redressed in the underwear and jumpsuits waiting for them in their personal lockers tucked into the wedge-shaped corners of the airlock.

“Ready, Chass?” asked Rod, his back still turned.

“Ready,” Chastity replied.

As they turned around, Rod took a quick look at the altitude of the zipper up the chest of Chastity’s jumpsuit. The zipper was well past mid-chest and almost no cleavage showed—she was all business today.

They entered the lower facilities deck in the crew capsule. The open space was a hexagon, two meters from side to side. Up the center of the room ran a ladder leading to the upper control deck. On the opposite side of the ladder from them was obviously the galley, with its preparation counter, compactor, oven, mixer, and microwave, and hatches above and below the counter leading to a freezer and refrigerator. Each of the six walls of the hexagonal room had doors. Three walls, the galley and two others marked food and equipment, had multiple small hatches leading to storage areas. The food and equipment lockers were blocked by a large tube two meters high and a meter in diameter that took up nearly a third of the space in the hexagonal room. The opposite two walls, marked AIRLOCK and LIFE SUPPORT, had full-sized doors. The last wall, to the left of the airlock door, had two narrow doors, side-by-side.

“As Queen Victoria once said…” said Chastity, as she slipped into the nearest narrow door.

“... never pass up a chance to visit a W.C.,” continued Rod as he slipped into the other narrow door.

By the time Rod exited his bathroom, Chastity was already halfway up the ladder to the upper deck. He followed her up the rungs and through the half-circle hole in the grating that acted as a ceiling for the lower deck and a floor for the upper deck. The triangle-shaped open area in the top deck was slightly larger than the hexagonal-shaped open area in the lower deck, but it seemed more crowded since the conical shape of the ship caused the upper part of the walls to tilt inward slightly.