The Secret of Saturn’s Rings (7 page)

Then one day he was out near the ragged end of the asteroid. Several hundred yards before him he knew the ground fell away into a bottomless cliff. He anchored himself carefully to an outcropping of rock, and pulled out a set of the newly revised sky charts. With a pocket telescope adjustment that he could attach to the eye frame of his space-suit helmet he set out to identify the planetary bodies visible. This end of the asteroid happened at the moment to be facing front in Apollo’s course outward. It was a little like riding the prow of a ship.

There were several disks in the black sky, discernible as planets rather than the far-off stars. Saturn was visible, its rings noticeable even at that distance. Jupiter was out of sight and so was Mars. One disk could be identified as Uranus, out beyond Saturn.

But the several other observable disks were all asteroids—for they were approaching the rim of the asteroid belt.

Bruce focused on a bright one and with a little mental figuring determined it to be Juno, one of the largest asteroids, one of the very first ever to have been discovered by man. He picked another bright one and studied it.

He became puzzled. He checked his chart, but the body in the sky did not seem to correspond with any given there. Something was wrong. Bruce knew that a body so visible should be marked on their charts—after all, he and Jennings and Garcia and even Arpad had worked on these sky maps the past few days.

He studied the body again, noticing its evidence of motion in relation to the other bodies, especially to Juno. He saw that it was near Apollo, very near. He saw that it would pass them quite closely. And he knew that there was only one asteroid that was due to pass them that closely. That was the asteroid that was to be their next landing spot!

Bruce was electrified. This was all wrong! The chart was wrong, it was off by a couple of days. Yet on it, the other bodies were correct. Just this one asteroid, this most important of all asteroids, was misplaced on his chart.

If he had guessed right, they would have to take off almost at once to make their leap in time. And nobody back at the ship would be ready!

He detached himself from the rock, heart pounding. He started back to the ship, several miles away, trying to call on his helmet radio. But the ship could not hear him, for between Bruce and it was half an asteroid of rock, and there was no atmospheric layer in the sky to bounce a message down.

Bruce leaped and floated dangerously along, breathless, desperate. Finally he saw the ship, called it directly, and Dr. Rhodes’ voice answered:

“What’s the matter? What’s up?”

Even as he was thrusting himself over the rocky landscape, Bruce gasped out his discovery. He heard his father’s startled exclamation and then his father called to Garcia for the charts.

As Bruce reached the ship, got through the airlock, and peeled off his suit, Gareia and his father had checked their charts with the oncoming asteroid.

“You’re right!” yelled Garcia. “These charts have been tampered with! We’ve got to take off now. No time to lose!”

Dr. Rhodes pressed the warning buzzer. Arpad came dashing out of the hammock where he had been sleeping, and jumped to secure the various loose objects. Garcia assisted him, while Dr. Rhodes quickly determined their course and speed.

“Where’s Jennings?” Arpad shouted, passing the control room for a moment.

“Why? Isn’t he here?” Dr. Rhodes looked up.

“Oh, blazes!” he said. “He just left to do some outside observing! Call him, Bruce.”

Bruce leaped to the radio sender, switched it to connect with the helmet phones of any space suit in outside operation and called. He knew that if Jennings was on the other side of the little world, he wouldn’t hear the call. But within a second, Jennings’ voice answered.

He hadn’t gone far. In a few more minutes, he was inside the ship, divesting himself of his suit. Dr. Rhodes by this time was in a fury of excitement. Garcia had shown that they had bare minutes to take off.

In a mad dash for the controls, Jennings seated himself, Dr. Rhodes set the engines, and Bruce just had time to grab a hand strap before the ship tore off out of the surface of Apollo, and headed full tilt for the shining white disk that Bruce had spotted.

They made the asteroid on time. They settled down again for another long wait, this time of a couple of weeks, while their second asteroid sailed on its eternal orbit through the bulk of the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. Their next stop would be Hidalgo.

But then Dr. Rhodes kept the charts in his possession and after every observation made by anyone outside, this finding was checked independently by someone else and noted on a master chart that could not be tampered with.

On this asteroid it was necessary again to make the same type of study made on Apollo, for it had its own peculiarities of motion, its own time of rotation.

As the members of the crew discussed it among themselves, at first they felt that the mistake on their original charts was an accident. But more and more the conviction grew that it was deliberate. Someone among their tiny group was trying to delay or even prevent their trip to Saturn. There was plainly a spy among them.

But they kept their suspicions to themselves as long as they could. Meanwhile the work went on of charting the skies anew, of determining their location, until finally one day one of the now many disks in the sky was definitely identified as the little planetoid Hidalgo.

When it was finally in plain sight, Bruce stared at it in fascination. No different apparently than its thousands of brother asteroids, it alone dared out farther than the rest. It had been to Saturn’s orbit, it would go again, and they would go with it.

Then finally the moment came, and the ship blasted off once more. They crossed the thousands of miles of space between the myriad asteroids that now filled the view, and Hidalgo loomed larger and larger in their sky like a new moon.

They caught up with it, matched its speed and direction, and leveled down lower and lower, until at last their ship rested on its surface.

As Bruce prepared to make the first exit to Hidalgo’s surface, a sudden thrill ran through him. The next time he made such an exit on a world, it would be out beyond where any man had ever been, out at Saturn’s doorstep.

Hidalgo was only about forty miles in diameter, but it was nearly spherical, a little globe moving along in space on its own. Much too small to have an atmosphere, it was like most of its brother asteroids mainly rock, with here and there some glistening white patches which were frozen water or gases frozen into perpetual icy solidity.

In the days to come—for aboard the ship they still continued to measure time by Earth’s twenty-four hours—Bruce learned to know the little world pretty well. They had a long stretch before them, and little enough to do after the initial period of star-charting which Dr. Rhodes had taken over entirely for himself. Bruce spent much of his time, aside from routine duties aboard the ship, in exploring the surface of Hidalgo and studying the changing wonders of the sky around them.

Aboard ship a certain uneasiness seemed to be everywhere. With so few in the crew and the knowledge that one of the five was a spy with the failure of the expedition at heart, no one felt like getting too friendly with others. Bruce and Dr. Rhodes could trust each other, but the old engineer was usually much too busy with his calculations to offer Bruce any companionship. Doubtless each man in the crew wondered who the Terraluna agent could be. Bruce thought about it a good deal in his wanderings.

He liked Arpad and found it hard to consider him a traitor. Yet, after all, who knew what another man might feel about things? Arpad Benz, who was of Hungarian birth, was a poor boy in his youth. He had not had many of the advantages that Bruce had enjoyed. He was a good friend, though given to a certain amusement at the actions of others. At first he had been rather patronizing toward Bruce, who wasn’t really very much younger. But he had dropped that attitude as he had learned that Bruce was capable of hard work and good comradeship. Yet, would not the remembered unhappiness of poverty make Arpad open to tempting offers from Terraluna? Bruce turned that over in his mind. Was it not always possible that if a nice big amount of money were offered, money that would assure Arpad a good easy life the rest of his days, that it might make the young spacehand willing to betray the trip?

In his heart Bruce could not bring himself to believe that, yet someone aboard ship was a spy.

Garcia, the navigator, was a married man with two children whose pictures he had stuck on the wall over his calculating machines. He was a kindly sort of man, a bit quiet, a man who had been on many trips and who seemed to be passionately interested in the success of this one, which would be his greatest exploit. Bruce couldn’t figure Garcia as the spy.

Jennings was a brilliant pilot with a wonderful record. He had pioneered a number of space flights in the past, including the first trips to two of Jupiter’s big moons. He was still young, in his late twenties, tall and serious. Bruce knew that this trip would crown his youthful career, make him in line for important posts in the UN space service, probably raise him in standing to the most valuable space pilot in the field. Surely, Bruce thought, he could not and would not sacrifice such a future.

And that left only his father and himself, two suspects who were out of the question. Could the tampered chart on Apollo just have been some error, some strange accident? Unfortunately, that seemed to have been ruled out.

He and Arpad went on journeys clear around the little world. Their weight was almost nothing, just as on Apollo, and after a little while they acquired great skill at propelling themselves in huge leaps that would carry them floating along in jumps of many hundreds of yards. They mapped out the surface for the exercise of it.

Though tiny, Hidalgo had many features that their imaginations could work with. There were miniature ranges of mountains—actually ridges thrown up from meteor scars or shrinkage as the little planetoid cooled over the course of creation. There were several really huge mountains, like great spikes sticking out of the surface, masses of iron that had projected from the surface as other parts had cooled faster. In a number of spots there was evidence of smaller asteroids or large meteors having buried themselves in the ground, leaving various hummocks or depressions. Around the other side of the little world there was one such meteor crater about three or four miles deep and wide enough at the bottom to house a spaceport all its own.

Speculatively, Bruce and Arpad amused themselves by imagining that this deep pit could serve as a space-pirate hide-out, just like in the stories they had often read. Actually, there were no space pirates—the problems of space flight were much too difficult for such things—but the idea was a thrill.

The sky above them was a constant source of amazement. They were passing through the bulk of the asteroid belt now and there were always dozens of them in sight. They took every shape and most of them were visibly in motion at differing speeds. Some between Hidalgo and the sun looked like moons of various phases. Others close by loomed large enough to show surface markings. Juno passed fairly closely; this was a big body whose surface was striped almost like one of the big outer planets. Not infrequently a puff of dust on the still surface would indicate the falling of a meteor.

As the days passed they came clear to the orbit of Jupiter and the bulk of the asteroidal disks disappeared from the sky. Then a new group came into view.

Garcia, who had gone out with the two spacehands, pointed to a cluster of disks nearly overhead. “See those? They are something really special. They’re what we call the Trojan Asteroids, the Fore-Trojans to be specific, since there is another set of them. They fly around the sun exactly in Jupiter's orbit, at the same speed as Jupiter, but always the same distance ahead of Jupiter. They remain in a cluster fixed forever by the laws of gravity and mathematics.” “Why are they called Trojans?” asked Arpad. “When they were first discovered, astronomers decided to call them all after the heroes of the war between Troy and Athens in very ancient times. So their names are Achilles, Ajax, Agamemnon, Hector, Nestor, and Odysseus. The Aft-Trojans are also named after these ancient heroes.”

“Any good?” said Arpad, being practical. “I should think maybe they’d make good space stations if we ever develop travel to Saturn as a regular thing.” Garcia chuckled into his space phones. “I imagine you're right. They’ll probably do that in the next hundred years after our trip is a success.” He paused and added:

“As a matter of fact, I believe there is an astronomical station there now, on Achilles. That would be the biggest one near us. It’ll be passing us by a few hundred miles any minute now. See, you can see the lights and shades of its surface now.”

They gazed up. It was quite a sight, looming larger for a short time than the moon did in Earth’s sky. They saw patches of brightness and dark spaces. The thought struck Bruce that if indeed there was still an astronomical station up there then it was the nearest they would be getting to other human beings for a long, long time. This lonely Fore-Trojan group would be their farewell point to other human beings. And another memory struck him suddenly.

“Say,” he murmured, “I seem to remember reading about an asteroid mining base being set up on one of those planets, near the observatory . . . and if I remember right, it was a Terraluna expedition!”

“Awk!” exclaimed Arpad, while Garcia sucked in his breath. Then the navigator let out a sigh and said, “Perhaps, but I can’t see that that need bother us any. Probably they know nothing about us. Still, I better tell Dr. Rhodes, anyway.”

He swung off and glided back to the space ship. Bruce and Arpad stood watching the six bodies in the sky above them.

Arpad nudged Bruce. “A meteor,” he remarked and pointed. A few hundred feet from the space ship there was a small cloud of dust falling back to the surface. Bruce looked. Even as he watched, another such spurt of dust went up in the air about the same distance on the other side of the space ship.