The Secret of Saturn’s Rings (13 page)

The little moon-particle was spinning rather slowly, so that in the course of time his little beam opening would cover most of the directions around him. Unfortunately his time was limited, by the amount of food and air left—and that was little. He could not tell whether Mimas would happen to come under the focus of his radio in that time, and whether also no static-producing moonlet would not be between him and it to ruin the hope of reception.

He stuck to his radio, listening, sending out calls. For several hours he hung wearily to his cockpit, in the blackness and darkness of the ring-particle, watching the slowly moving lights of the other particles slowly drift overhead, hearing the rise and fall of their passage in the humming and screaming of his radio, sending out his message every time the noise was low.

Then, as he felt himself almost dozing off, he thought he heard an irregular sound, a staccato dot dot dot. He leaned closer to his phones, listened. Amid the humming, amid occasional screeches, he again heard the faint faraway sound. It was code, of that he was suddenly sure, but he could not read it, it was too faint and too irregular.

He looked up, expecting to see Mimas’ disk visible through the haze of the ring. But it was not there; instead, the glowing surface of Saturn was there and against it the dark line of the inner rings. The signal was not from Mimas! It was from the other direction! It must be, it had to be, from his father!

His father was alive then! A surge of energy ran through Bruce. Suddenly he felt that the cause was not lost. He strained to hear, but the sound was faint, and fading again as a moonlet swam between him and the inner ring.

He stuck with his radio in earnest, calculating the moments when the particle’s motion would bring him again into line with the inner ring. After a half-hour of agonized waiting, he again heard the code. It was faintly stronger, but still not quite strong enough to make it out.

He wondered if he should try to send a message, then decided against it. If he could not understand his father’s calls fully, he should not risk a message until the time was ripe. He carefully spotted the exact direction the code was coming from, left the rocket boat and got out of the hole.

He watched the inner ring from there. Somewhere in the next ring must be where his father was, and he presumed that Dr. Rhodes must have been disabled even as his own little ship was. Bruce understood that the rings of Saturn revolved at different speeds. The outermost one was the slowest. The next faster, and so on, until the nearest one whirled around the huge planet in only five hours.

Dr. Rhodes, then, was on the inner ring from his, and slowly overtaking Bruce’s position. In a while he would pass the spot where Bruce’s own particle was and go on, eventually passing around the planet and out of hearing . . . probably forever.

They were like two riders on a merry-go-round, the one on the faster turntable passing the other slowly but certainly; first narrowing the distance as the faster rider came up, then passing closely side by side, and finally traveling away from each other.

This was the position of Bruce and his father. At the moment, Bruce noted with a glad heart, his father was obviously overtaking his son’s position. They would probably not pass each other for a dozen hours or so.

This meant that Bruce would get his father’s signals so much clearer in the next hours that they could communicate, and perhaps, just perhaps, figure out some way out of their problem.

Bruce couldn’t imagine what such a way would be but knew that while there was life there was hope. But he knew also that the wherewithal of life, for both of them, measured in terms of air and food, was running steadily lower and lower.

Now followed a period of anxious waiting, Bruce l crouched in the cockpit seat, listening at his radio as the scattered code appeared and disappeared, noting with the passing of time how it grew steadily louder. During an interval he managed to eat, closing the cockpit panel, stuffing the visible leakage points with paper and wadding until the air loss was reduced to a slow leak. In that time he was able to open his helmet, gulp down a couple sandwiches, a couple vitamin tablets, another antisleep pill, and as much water as he could drink.

The code was coming in stronger, though still badly distorted by static. Bruce opened his own key, directed his sending beam toward the inner ring:

“Calling Rhodes; Bruce calling Rhodes. Can you hear me?”

Intently he listened, but the code continued to come on its wavering course. Again he opened his key, called. Still no evidence of response. He listened to the monotonous dot and dash, now fairly steadily audible. Again he sent out his call.

The dot and dash continued for a second or two, then suddenly stopped. A humming came on, and then, far away, he heard what seemed to be the tones of a voice. But amid the squeals and moans of the ring static, he simply couldn’t make out what the voice was saying.

He gritted his teeth in his impatience, opened his key again: “Bruce calling Rhodes. I can hear you. Can you increase power? Bruce calling Rhodes.”

Again he heard a voice replying, but still it was muffled, drowned out. He wondered if this was all to be a ghastly teasing, nothing. He tried again. Listened again. Now he seemed to make out a word or two:

.. Rhodes . . . fuel dis . . . to . . .”

He called again, asked for a repeat, strained. Now he had luck; during a lull in the constant static barrage he distinctly heard the voice. It was that of his father: “This is Dr. Rhodes. Stranded here by failure of fuel distributor. Can you come to me with replacement? Where are you?”

Bruce opened his key. “This is Bruce on outer ring. I am wrecked myself. Cannot come to you. Can you suggest advice?”

The reply came back. His father’s voice, now faint but still clear. The engineer was excited, wanted to know how Bruce had got there, then told Bruce not to answer, to stick to fundamentals. “How badly is your boat wrecked? Is your boat’s fuel distributor still intact? Can you remove it? Look quickly, we may be able to figure out something.”

Fortunately, one of the things that Bruce had made himself familiar with during their long journey outward was the design of rocket jet engines. He knew where the fuel distributor should be. He got out of the cockpit onto the ring-particle’s surface and walked around to the broken side of the boat.

He was able to unbolt the siding that covered the vital parts of the engine and remove it. He peered into the mass of wires and tubes and valves. The little boxlike device that played the part on an atomic rocket that a carburetor used to play on an ancient gasoline engine was there, unharmed. The bouncing meteor had passed it by a few inches, shattered all beside it, but the fuel distributor was good as new.

Bruce fumblingly detached tubes and unscrewed wires from the box, worked it out of the engine, shook it free of a few drops of atomic fuel. He carefully brought it forward, deposited it beside him in the cockpit.

Now he opened the radio again. It was a few minutes before he could again contact his father.

“I have the distributor here. It is O.K. What shall I do now?”

His father’s voice came back. “Listen carefully. Take down my location. You must try and come to me, and bring the distributor. It is our only chance to get back. You must bring it to me. If I have this one part, we can both return in my craft. My own ship is otherwise all right, but the distributor was faulty, and broke completely. I have not been able to repair it.”

Bruce announced his readiness to try anything. He could not imagine how it would be possible for him to go to his father without a ship, but he felt that one might as well try anything. “How are you fixed for food and air?” he asked.

“I’ve a little, but not much,” came his father s reply. “You have no time to waste. Besides, judging from your radio position, I am catching up with your position on the outer ring. You must not let me pass you or you will never catch me. You must start now. Listen ..

He talked for several minutes, giving Bruce directions as to how to proceed. Bruce opened his radio for one last second: “O.K. I’m on my way. Keep talking so I can locate you.”

He snapped his sender shut. His father’s voice was now audible over his helmet phones, though no longer understandable in the uproar of static and electronic interference. But it was understood that his father’s voice was to serve as a guiding beam for him to follow, much as an airplane follows a radio beam to its airport.

Bruce stuffed the spacious pockets of his space suit with as much food as he could stow. He carefully strapped the little boxlike fuel distributor to his belt. He pulled the seat out of the cockpit, unscrewed the three small oxygen tubes stowed there, strapped them to his back.

Now, with a wrench in hand, he climbed to the back of the small boat, tore open the cowling and plates, exposing the entire innards. The long tubes of fuel stood exposed, the exhaust valves, the smashed parts, reams of wiring in many colors. He found the tube he was looking for, a yard-long plastic cylinder, fitting into the mixing chamber. This he carefully unscrewed, making sure to avoid any chance of the cylinder’s contents escaping. He lifted this cylinder clumsily out of the boat, stood it on the ground, and easily leaped down to join it.

Taking part of the nylon ropes that held his boat to the ring-particle’s surface, he turned the cylinder valve end down, and strapped it to himself, so that he straddled the thing like a witch on a broom, his feet hanging down.

Looking briefly around, looking at the small rocket boat which was now beginning slowly to drift and roll with the motion of the little moonlet, he gazed upward.

The great glowing mass of Saturn filled the sky, bathed everything in a golden glow. Against its surface he could see the thick black line of the next ring inward. Between himself and that line, a half-dozen moonlets hung, part of the outer ring like his own. He spotted the nearest one, a small body, several yards wide, perhaps a hundred feet away. He braced his legs, and suddenly jumped upward.

Weighing practically nothing, he shot up into the space between. Almost before he could catch his breath, the tiny round ball grew larger, and he barely had time to brace himself before he hit it.

lie grabbed its surface instantly, held himself from bouncing off again. Beyond hung another chunk, this one rough and rocky, several times larger. Again he braced, jumped. He nearly missed it, but got a hand on it as he almost passed it, and pulled himself back.

From there, the darkish ring-particle where he had left his ship was already small, the boat a mere sparkle against its side. Again he jumped, this time a longish distance to a huge sphere, several hundred yards in diameter.

This one, though rocky, held promise of interesting discoveries. But he was not on an exploring trip. He was traveling, by jumps, from worldlet to worldlet. He drew breath and jumped again to a farther ball.

All this time his father’s voice was coming through, in snips and snatches. For a moment he could hear a few words, then a new series of screams and howls would cut in from the radioactive moonlets.

When he could hear anything, it sounded as if his father were describing his trip and his theories of the moonlets. He gathered from scattered phrases here and there amid the interference reference to intelligent life and to ruins. Evidently his father had made the same discoveries that Bruce had made.

Now Bruce began to feel a little uneasy. The ring-moonlet where he had left his ship was out of sight, lost in the mass of shining disks behind him, they in in turn making a vast glowing belt across the black sky. He was alone, utterly alone, without a ship, without a means of feeding himself, with nothing but a. thin space suit between him and death.

Above him more moonlets and yet more moonlets blocked the way. Again and again he jumped, and gradually as he did so the space cleared. He saw the black outer edge of the inner ring grow clearer and the space between him and Saturn grow less clustered with black balls of moonlets.

He became quite skilled at his jumping progression. He learned how to estimate the strength of his leg push, how to steer himself in the correct direction without having to fumble, he dared take longer and longer leaps, picking the larger bodies to aim for, thrusting himself upward, floating through emptiness, watching his target grow, twisting his legs under him, landing asprawl, the great tube tied to his body kept from touching the rock and thereby cracking.

At long last he saw that the edge of the outer ring was at hand. He made one final moonlet, and stood now, silently staring.

The tiny worldlet beneath his feet was shining softly in the Saturn light. Its horizon curved away a few feet from where he stood. Beneath him he could look down into a bottomless pit in which swam countless lights, beyond which he could see the vague face of one of Saturn’s large moons. Looking out to his sides, he seemed to feel himself standing on a large flat plain, stretching shining and soft across the sky, the illusion of solidity caused by the unending parade of millions and millions of fragments, reduced by the processes of the ages to a certain unison of direction and speed.

Above him shone the huge round bulk of Saturn, a molten sea, its belts of swirling gas like veils concealing a mystery that none might ever look upon. And before him, seeming but a step away, was another ring, a flat circular platform to his eye, darker than his ring, but still glowing silent and untenanted in the sky. Between him and that other platform seemed but a short distance, a narrow gap over starry depths.

Bruce knew that this was a dangerous illusion. This was no narrow step, no close-lipped abyss. This was a space that was not a few hundred feet or even a few miles wide. It was a gap two thousand two hundred miles across! It was like the distance from New York to Denver, taking the familiar measurements of his homeland’s geography as a guide to understanding.

Could a man cross such a space in one leap?

The answer, astonishingly enough, was yes. Bruce understood that. That was the trickery of outer space. If you weighed nothing, if you start yourself in motion, and there is nothing to slow you down, no air to push against, no force to pull you back, then you will continue to move with your initial speed forever. Forever, that is, until you do hit something, or until something pulls you to it.