The Secret of Saturn’s Rings (6 page)

No sooner had he returned to the interior, and the automatic buzzer that always accompanied the operation of the airlock had quieted, than the atomic jets blasted again, and Bruce felt himself gaining an apparent weight as the ship moved forward in a new acceleration.

Another buzzer indicated that everyone was wanted in the control room. Bruce, having taken his space suit off and hung it away, made his way forward, clumsily stumbling against the force of the ship’s blasts.

In the control room, at the front of the ship, Jennings was seated in the pilot’s chair, watching the movement of the dials that recorded the operation of the engines and the direction of the ship. Guided by a series of notations and figures that had been produced by Garcia’s navigational calculations and planet charts, he moved a dial every now and then to check and regulate the enormous energies being liberated into space by the disintegration of their atomic rocket fuel.

Garcia was still punching out figures on his calculating machines, apparently checking his information again. Dr. Rhodes was holding a star chart and studying it.

Arpad was already in the room, and when Bruce came in, all looked up. Dr. Rhodes glanced briefly at his son, smiled, then became serious. He addressed them all:

“Our unexpected departure from the refueling base has made it necessary to refigure our course and replot our charts. We are now a few hours ahead of our plans and facing in a slightly different direction than we had expected. We are therefore swinging the ship around and going faster in order to try to catch our first scheduled stop. We’ll be moving under jet blasts off and on for the next few hours as a result.”

The others nodded. Bruce was puzzled, and as he realized that his father was engaged in explaining everything for the mutual benefit of all, he felt it only right to express his puzzlement.

“I don't quite understand, Dad,” he said, “what you mean by stops. Aren't we going directly to Saturn? Wouldn't that be the speediest and straightest course?”

His father nodded. “That would be the speediest and most direct way to go, if it were possible to do it that way. Unfortunately, it is not. We do not possess either the energy or the type of engine to make such a trip. Neither, I must add, does any other space ship ever made. It might be possible to make one, but it would be so big and expensive that no one would see any use for it. You see, the trip to Saturn is tremendously farther than any space ship has ever gone before. Not only that, but speaking in terms of the sun and the solar system that revolves around it, it would be an all uphill trip.”

He paused for a moment, then waved a hand. ‘"Gather around this chart.”

Arpad and Bruce looked at the map which showed the various bodies of the sun’s system. Dr. Rhodes explained:

“As you know, a space ship does not travel directly to its planetary destination. Instead, to save fuel, it establishes its own closed orbit around the sun, but in such a way and at such a speed that sooner or later it will happen to cross the orbit of its goal at the same time that the goal is there. In other words, if we head for Mars, we ignore where Mars is when we take off, but head for the spot in space where it will be when we reach that spot.”

“You mean,” Bruce put in, “something like making a date to meet a friend at a place where you and he both must travel to get to.”

“That’s the idea,” said his father. “And since we can’t ask the planet to go some special way, we have to do all the planning to be where the planet will be going.”

“Well, then,” said Bruce, “aren’t we simply going to find out where Saturn will be and go there directly?” “No,” was the engineer’s answer, “because that would require traveling all that far way against the pull of the sun. Such an orbit would require immense amounts of energy to establish, because instead of merely breaking away from the pull of the Earth, which is hard enough as you know, we would have to fight all the way against the pull of the sun itself. Saturn is farther away from the sun than the Earth, eight hundred million miles farther, since our home planet is only ninety-two million miles ‘upward’ from the sun. This is a pull which would require blasting all the way and no ship could carry that amount of fuel. “So what we are going to do is to hitchhike our way!” “Whaaat!” said Arpad incredulously. “How can you do that?”

Garcia, who had stopped his work at last, smiled, looked up. “We’ll thumb a ride on the asteroids.” Rhodes nodded. “Exactly. It so happens that the tiny little planets called asteroids that mostly revolve between Mars and Jupiter give us our steppingstones. There are thousands of these little worlds and some of them, fortunately for us, have very wild orbits.”

“Yes, that’s right,” said Bruce excitedly, “some of them come close to the Earth, too. There’s Eros and Amor and Adonis—they all come to a few million miles of the Earth.”

Rhodes nodded. “There are asteroids that go clear inward to the orbit of Venus, nearer the sun than ourselves. And what interests us more, there are some that go out way beyond even Jupiter. One especially, named Hidalgo, goes almost out to the orbit of Saturn itself.”

“Then are we going to Hidalgo?”

“Not directly, that’s impossible,” said Rhodes, “but that will be our final hitching post. Hidalgo happens right now to be passing the orbit of Jupiter and to be heading almost directly for Saturn. If we can catch it in time, we can simply ride it almost all the rest of the way.

“But were not even going to go there directly. We’re going to pick up a near asteroid first, one near the Earth that’s heading outward. We’ll ride it beyond the orbit of Mars, where we’ll jump off it and jump onto another asteroid that will take us most of the way through the asteroid belt. Then we'll leave that one for another that will take us near Hidalgo, where we can make our landing. We’ll settle down on Hidalgo for a few weeks until we are close to Saturn, and then we’ll make our final leap to our real objective.”

“Wow!” said Arpad, while Bruce whistled.

“It took plenty of figuring,” said Garcia, shaking his head over his machines. “Plenty. We had to work out the orbits of dozens and dozens of these little worldlets. We had to figure speeds and directions and timing. That’s why we’re wasting fuel now trying to get back to where we should have been if we had followed our original calculations. Otherwise the new figures will be terribly difficult.”

“Then, actually we won’t do too much flying, only short hops between asteroids, letting their own orbital force carry us along against the sun’s pull,” contributed Bruce again, studying the chart with its circles tangled in each other like the web of a drunken spider.

“Correct,” said Rhodes.

At that moment Jennings called out, “Apollo is in sight, sir!”

Rhodes sprang to the viewing port. Bruce could see nothing save the usual mass of stars and lights, but evidently the trained eye of the pilot had spotted a new one. The engineer squinted a minute, looked up. “To stations!” he called.

Bruce and Arpad dashed back to the posts that had been assigned them on such occasions. Arpad was stationed near the engines to watch for any trouble. Bruce was located by the airlock to be able to take any necessary steps that an emergency might call for. Fortunately for him, it was also located near a port from which he could see most of what was going on.

He felt the ship changing course as the gyroscopic controls swung it about. He felt a series of jets blast against the body of the vessel as it worked in for a landing.

Now he could see the tiny disk of white which was the oncoming asteroid. Apollo was a very tiny one, he knew, but one of those that came close to Earth’s orbit. It swung back and forth in his view as the ship switched in toward it.

Gradually it assumed shape, and he saw to his surprise that it was not a sphere as he had always assumed planetary bodies to be. Instead, it seemed to be a huge chunk of rock, irregular in shape, rather like a big boulder, longer on one side than on the other, and slowly swinging end over end on itself.

For a moment Bruce was puzzled until he remembered his school studies in astronomy. He realized then that Apollo could not be more than a few miles wide, and its own internal gravity therefore much too weak to pull it into a spherical shape when it was originally formed, hot and molten. It had cooled off too quickly to become anything more than an irregular mass of barren rock.

Landing on Apollo was tricky as a result. It was not a question of skimming in on a smooth surface. Rather it was a swinging about, gauging the weird swing of its sharp edges, dodging under one huge overhanging jagged end and swooping down into a valley scooped out of one side.

It took a couple of hours for the dodging and twisting landing to be made, during all of which time Bruce was glued breathlessly to the port, watching the mass of gleaming gray and white streaked rock fill the view, move suddenly into them as if they were going to fall violently against it, suddenly swing away with dizzying speed, then level off, shift again and again. It was like watching a landscape go mad as the dwarfed space ship edged up against the free-moving mass of rock, a mass probably not larger than the Island of Manhattan, yet a world of its own. And then the Apollo landscape leveled off and the ship touched surface with unexpected gentleness, and stopped.

They had made their first hitchhike safely.

Apollo was a strange place. When everything had been made shipshape, Jennings and Bruce were given leave to go outside and explore the little world. Their trip would not be just for fun; there were very practical reasons.

For one thing, as Dr. Rhodes explained to everyone shortly after their landing, there was a very specific and limited length of time which they would stay. Apollo was moving outward toward the orbit of Mars. At a certain point it would come within a few hundred thousand miles of another asteroid. This asteroid would be at its own nearest point to the sun. They would then transfer there, ride that body out almost to Jupiter’s orbit and finally be able to leap to Hidalgo.

Bruce asked if Mars would be near them at any time, but Garcia shook his head. The navigator said, “Mars happens to be on the other side of the sun at the moment. We may pass its orbit, but if we wanted to meet Mars we’d have a wait of more than a year before it came around to where we’d be.”

“But what would happen if we failed to make one of our jumps on time?” Bruce then asked.

There was a silence for a few minutes. Garcia frowned. “It would be very serious. We’d have to figure where next best to leap, or else make a very wide jump on our own. The latter would cut into our fuel more heavily than we could afford. Either course would compel us to spend an awful long time on new calculations. Time is what we cannot afford.”

So when Bruce and Jennings stepped out, suitably protected in their space clothes, it was mainly for the purpose of observing the little worldlet’s motion in space and the apparent movements of the stars and planets in the jet-black airless sky. There would be need of making astronomical observations to check their position and these could not be made without first determining the tricks of sky as seen from Apollo.

The effect was strange. Bruce felt almost as weightless standing outside the ship as he had in deep space. The little asteroid was so tiny that his weight would be measured in ounces only. With his Earth muscles capable of carrying many pounds, he had to be extremely careful when he moved. A normal step might cause him to fly up hundreds of feet, to drift slowly down far from where he took off. He did this the first time he tried to walk, and it was an eerie experience.

From where he floated helpless, drifting like a feather very gently downward, he could see the surface of the asteroid. It was all rocky, unrelieved by either water or air or soil. Its edges were sharp and harsh. The light of sun and stars glinted brilliantly in spots and where there were shadows, they were utterly dark.

As he drifted down, he could see Jennings standing by the side of the space ship waving to him. The pilot was hanging on to the rocky surface with a long hook. In addition, he had tied a long rope to himself running to the ship. He was holding another end for Bruce to fasten, and had been about to give it to Bruce when the boy’s thoughtless first step had sent him into the sky.

Bruce caught his breath and waited. Eventually, minutes later, he floated to the surface, and Jennings drifted over to him and attached the rope to a ring in the space-suit’s belt.

“Must have gotten a real scare, eh?” said Jennings on their helmet phones.

“Well,” said Bruce, “it was a surprise for sure.”

“Look up,” said the pilot, pointing. Bruce gazed with him up at the sky.

It was brilliant and wonderful and quite unusual. Instead of the blue of Earth, the sky was as black as if seen from a space ship. The stars and planets seemed also as if seen from space, but they were moving. The whole sky was slowly turning. It made Bruce quite dizzy to watch it for any length of time.

“Apollo is revolving rather rapidly, which is not surprising in a world of this size,” said Jennings. “We’ve got to calculate just how fast and in what way it is turning, so that we can figure out just which stars we are seeing and when we can expect to spot the various bodies we will be guided by.”

They set up automatic cameras which would snap sky pictures regularly over several hours. These would then be studied and used as the basis for Garcia’s calculations. They set up telescopes for identifying rapidly the various bodies, and in a fairly short time they had solved the basic part of their problems.

Bruce looked about him from time to time. Because the worldlet was not spherical but almost oblong, and their position was in a rather hollo wed-out valley near the line of its axis, the effect was almost frightening. Instead of a horizon, they seemed to be camped between two incredibly tremendous mountains—for each pole of the tiny planet loomed before them like a mountain many miles high.

As the days passed, and the routine of remapping their charts neared completion, Bruce had a couple of occasions to go exploring out to the ends of the asteroid. He discovered to his astonishment that the apparent mountains seemed to lie down as he approached them. For their effect of towering was a gravitational trick. As he walked along the flat ground, the mountains would lean farther and farther down away from him. But when he would look back, he would get the equally horrifying effect of seeming to be gazing down a steep precipice. All about would be the sharp edges of the black sky, the hard cold rock, the slowly whirling sky and the shifting madness of the view as seen from the ground.