The Secret of Saturn’s Rings (11 page)

He seemed to be falling directly into this mass, into what would seem a boiling kettle of poisonous colors. Yet he knew that the temperature of these outer gas belts was probably far lower than anything he could bear. Perhaps, near the center of this monster planet, warmth existed. But before anything the size of his ship would ever get that far, it would be burned to a cinder by the friction of the fall.

A wide black band across one-half of the planet reminded him of the rings. That would be the shadow they were casting. And he focused again on the white line that marked their rim, edgewise to him.

It was already markedly wider. It was glistening and gleaming and sparkling, and slowly widening out. He knew it would be all too soon when he would reach that mysterious feature, that wonder of the whole solar system.

He mentally estimated where he would make his entry into the rings. He knew that the outermost rings revolved once around Saturn every one hundred and thirty-seven hours. His father had known this and had entered the ring at a point when it was first coming into sight around the edge of the planet. In calculating the speed of the ring and the time that had passed, Bruce figured he had to make his entry at a point where his father would now be if he had stayed at the original entry spot.

This was now about a third of the way beyond his fathers point, but very nearly in line with Bruce’s present direction. He directed his craft as close as he could to that spot in the ring. He adjusted his gyroscopic controls and blasted a bit to rise up above the rings as his father had done.

Now he relaxed and waited. He switched on his beam radio, adjusted it back to Mimas. Almost instantly he heard Garcia’s voice:

“Mimas calling Bruce Rhodes. Mimas calling Bruce Rhodes. Will you call us? Will you call us?”

He hesitated a minute, then switched on his own answering radio beam: “Hello, Garcia. This is Bruce. Everything is O.K. I am on my way to the same point where Father disappeared.”

Garcia replied instantly. “Come back, Bruce! Don’t throw your life away! We have too little time. Come back while you can.”

Bruce replied quietly that he would not. “If I don’t return in time, go home without me. Don’t try to persuade me. But let me know. Have you heard anything from my father?”

Garcia didn’t argue. “Not a word. We haven’t been able to locate him. Keep in touch with us at all times.” “O.K.,” said the boy, “I’ll not sign off.”

They kept up a running conversation from then on. Bruce described the course he was taking, described the appearance of space from where he was.

He began to approach the rings. The edge of the other belt was now visibly wide and he could see that the sparkling was apparently caused by the fact that it was not solid as it appeared from distance, but that it was composed of innumerable little flickering dots. All these dots seemed to be racing along in unison, some turning as they went and evidently many irregular in shape. It was these irregularities that reflected the sunlight as they turned and produced the sparkling effect.

He elevated his ship and began to turn it to move alongside the belt at a speed close to that of the moving mass. As he rose above it, it widened out more and more until it seemed to him that a vast glowing yellow field stretched out for hundreds of miles of space, almost a plateau, a plain of seeming smoothness.

Then suddenly he noticed a small round dot apparently between him and the ring. Rapidly it came closer, then suddenly seemed to loom before him, a huge mass of white-lit stone plunging toward him. He touched the control of his boat, and it shot forward and the strange mass passed rapidly and silently behind him and vanished.

Bruce was alarmed. What was that? A meteor? A part of the ring? He talked it over with Garcia.

Garcia explained that it must have been a lone particle of a ring, one of the billions of such particles that made up the whirling halo around Saturn, but one that had not yet lost enough speed to travel in the mass. It was erratic, faster than most, therefore traveling along just outside the rings by itself.

“There must be thousands and thousands of such outlying bits and chunks of rock. The closer you get, the more you will find. You’ll have to keep a careful lookout from now on. You may be able to estimate the speed of the ring-particles, but these are wilder.”

Bruce was keyed up, on edge. He saw another approach, whirl past and vanish. Then more loomed up, a group of them, passing beneath him. Now he was beginning to near the edge of the outer ring.

And he noticed something on his radio. He had been so intent on the new danger that he had failed to realize that Garcia’s voice was becoming obscured by humming, and that screams and squeals of static were beginning to come into the background of his reception.

“Garcia,” he asked, “can you hear me perfectly? Are you getting static now?”

The noises were increasing greatly. When Garcia answered, he could hear part and then had to strain for the rest. But he knew the answer. Bruce’s voice was being drowned out by the same mysterious static that had blanked out his father’s voice.

Bruce would have liked to examine his radio apparatus, but it was built in under his control panel. Besides, the task of keeping on the jump to avoid the stray boulders and meteors that were now coming heavier and heavier left little time for that.

Now he was over the outer edge, several hundred miles over at last and suddenly the sky was clear of flying dots.

Apparently these loose bits hung in the same plane as the rings. Whatever the original cause, the momentum and direction forced them all into the same level. Their speeds might differ, but rise above or below the level of the rest of the ring material they could not.

Yet the static continued. Now Bruce had time to examine his dials again. He saw now that one, which had been unmoving before was now wigwagging back and forth steadily. He looked at it and realized that it was the Geiger counter, the detector of radioactivity.

There was radioactive substance nearby somewhere. And he realized at the same time that this was the cause of the static, of the interference with his radio.

He explained this to Garcia, repeating and shouting, so that the squealing and screeching which his shipmate reported on the increase would not drown out his voice. Already his own ears were numb from the noise when he tried to hear Garcia. Finally, he realized that he had to do what his father had done. He yelled that he was turning the radio off, that they could no longer communicate because of the static. When he managed to hear a few snatches of Garcia’s voice acknowledging, he switched off.

The silence was stunning at first. He had become used to the fact that for the last couple of hours his tiny space boat had been vibrating with voices and humming. Now all was silent save for the faint hissing of his air system and a clicking in his controls. The click was the Geiger counter, checking off the stray hits of radioactive particles.

Bruce realized that one small part of his father’s theory about the rings of Saturn was correct. They were radioactive. Now the question was, were they so much so that to go into their midst would be to court death?

He thought about this a split moment, then shrugged his shoulders. He had gone this far. There could be no turning back. Death from radioactivity did not come at once. It would take days, weeks, months. He would have time to make all the observations necessary and to report them to Earth. Besides, the ship was insulated a bit and so was the suit.

He turned his ship and prepared to level down for a plunge into the coldly flickering flat plain that was the outermost ring.

As Bruce drew his little space boat down closer and closer to the glowing “top” of the outermost ring of Saturn, the seeming solidness gradually changed. What had appeared from far away to be almost a shining unbroken surface, became now a shifting mass, very much the same way that a diver leaping from a high board over a pool detects the tiny wavelets that move across the pool’s surface as he plunges downward—wavelets that had not been noticed from his higher perch.

For a moment Bruce had the odd impression that he was diving into a golden sea. But this impression changed again as the sea seemed to draw apart into droplets, moving together in one great current, but still, droplets separate from each other.

He leveled his boat out to skim above the flow, adjusted his controls so that his speed caught up with that of the current, so that the glowing droplets now slowed down until from his viewpoint in the boat they were at last standing still.

This was an illusion, of course, because it merely meant that Bruce was now moving in the same direction they were and at the same speed. The effect was that of two trains rushing along parallel tracks together, so that the passengers could look out and converse with those on the next train—even while both trains were tearing over the ground. So it was with the various tiny shining bodies that made up the glowing stream of the rings.

Bruce, having reached what was now to be his basic speed, wherein the particles of the ring beneath him were now apparently standing still, dropped his little boat lower and lower, closer and closer. What had been droplets became shining dots, became now masses, separated more and more from each other by space. Bruce could detect the faint disk of one of Saturn’s other moons shining through the ring, for the ring was by no means so tightly packed as to cut off all such stellar views. Stars could be seen through the mass as well.

The closer he got, the more the ring space opened up. And now almost before he realized it he was within the ring, moving with it, part of it. Before him there hung a great wall-like cluster of objects. Most were rather spherical in shape like tiny asteroids, many were irregular in shape, some were big, some small, and many were probably no larger than meteor nuggets.

Behind him a similar mass of objects filled the sky. On both sides and now above, other objects hung. Moving as he was at the same speed they all were, the effect was incredible for space—for the impression the mind got was that they were stationary, hanging in emptiness without support.

For a while Bruce simply sat and watched the eerie sight. Somehow, in all the trip he had simply never turned his imagination to what it would be like in the rings. Now that he was actually here, it all seemed so unlike what he had thought. He had somehow felt that the rings would be perilous, would be madly dashing in all directions, that it would be like being on a shooting gallery with lunatics firing machine guns in all directions. But this effect of stillness was something he was mentally unprepared for.

As he watched, he saw now that there were motions among the ring-particles. Some masses were slowly moving upward, others downward, and he noticed that a few here and there seemed to lag behind. He noticed now that two particles in front of him, one a great rocky sphere and another a small cubelike blackish chunk, were gradually drawing together. In a few seconds there was a slow bump, and just as gradually the two particles moved away from each other again.

The orderliness of the ring was not the result of any plan or system, it was simply the end product of millions of years of bumping and colliding, whereby the speeds of all the parts had been gradually slammed and shunted into unison, absorbed into each other, the faster particles gathering in one ring, the slower in another. The process was still going on, would undoubtedly go on as long as the rings lasted.

The sun shone through the ring and the light of Saturn shone as well and each little body was lit on one side and darkish on the other, just as if they were independent worldlets riding on their own instead of members of a vast crowd.

The Geiger counter was reacting wildly, and Bruce knew that the source of the radioactivity was here, in the rings. He suspected that the particles themselves were radioactive, but he knew it was his duty to check further. He picked a large mass among those in front of him, slowly increased the speed of his boat and moved toward it.

As he drew nearer, it grew larger and larger. With amazement it suddenly dawned on Bruce it was large, that it was perhaps a half-mile in diameter, bigger than many city blocks. Its size was not apparent from a distance. Bruce felt a slight chill as he realized that most of these ring-particles were big. If one brushed against his boat, it would not be the nudge of a pebble; it would be the nudge of an object whose momentum and weight would smash his little boat like an eggshell, no matter how apparently slight and slow the touch came.

The problem was one, however, that Bruce could handle. It resolved into the same thing as making a landing on a small asteroid. Bruce worked closer to the moonlet, down to its surface, which loomed up like a small world, and with scarcely a jar rolled his ship down in a groove on its side. He pressed his magnetic anchors out. The moonlet, like most cosmic material, had iron in its make-up. The little boat stuck fast.

Bruce closed the visor of his space-suit helmet, started his airflow, and opened the cockpit panel. With pick and drill fastened to his belt, magnetic shoes in operation, Bruce stepped out. Before letting go of his boat, he fastened a nylon rope to a stanchion on the boat’s side and the other to his own suit. He dared take no chances. If something should nudge his moonlet somewhere, it might throw Bruce and his boat off.

Standing outside the boat, on the surface of a particle in Saturn’s ring stream, Bruce looked about. Above him and on all sides, great rocks and tiny worldlets hung, apparently suspended in black space. Beneath his feet was a world, a very, very tiny one, whose horizon seemed to fall away fifty or sixty feet from where he stood. He seemed thus to be on a mountaintop whose sides would be very steep and precipitous.

The worldlet was mainly grayish, rocky, but where he had landed his ship was a deep sharp valley, dipping down a couple dozen yards. Having approached it from above, Bruce knew that this valley was a scar, a gash caused by some collision with another ring-particle, some time in the past.