Destination: Saturn

IX

The Third Least Wuf was very unhappy. For hours he had moped about his tiny cabin in the planetoid-ship, dreaming of the good old days back at the family spinnery before he had lost his job as a young apprentice bus driver and had been facing the dismal prospect of disownment from the Nest for disgraceful negligence. From this sad event, Ajax Calkins had rescued him; they quickly became fast friends, and the odd little Martian spider-being had been willing to follow his beloved leader to the very last strand of the Web. Or as we would say, to the ends of space.

But not to Saturn.

Heaving a woebegone sigh, the Wuj leaped up and seized the chandelier. Wrapping his eight furry, jointed legs about the light, he hung head downwards. This position, unlikely as it may seem, was one of ultimate comfort to members of his race, although it would have been highly disagreeable to you or me. The Wuj always felt that he thought better, somehow, in this inverted position. The blood rushing to his brain seemed to loosen up the thought-process and to provide extra stimulus and mental lubrication to one struggling with an unwieldy problem.

For a long time, after he had entwined his destiny to that of Ajax Calkins, they had comfortably spun on the same strand. Everything had been simply eggy, in fact, right up to the time when his dear leader and Emily Hackenschmidt had embarked for Earth to thrash out the details of the treaty between the Royal and Independent Kingdom of Ajaxia and the Earth/Mars Space Administration. Leaving the Wuj, his faithful Prime Minister in full command of the reins of power, King Ajax had zoomed off… only to return a half a day later a changed person.

The Wuj heaved a sigh (and if you have never seen an upside-down sigh, it is a harrowing sight, I can tell you!)”… suddenly his brave leader had become a very different web-mate. Suspicious. Speaking in falsely-hearty tones, but guarded and watchful. Claiming that he and Emily had decided not to go after all, they swiftly forgot all about the difficulties of the forthcoming treaty and spent the next couple of days taking a detailed inventory of the largely unexplored interior of the self-navigating planetoid.

It was all very bewildering to a Third Least Wuj, but for a while he passed off their strange behavior as only seemingly strange. After all, a brief and hardly meteoric career as a young apprentice bus driver had but ill-equipped him for the role of Prime Minister of Ajaxia, and his knowledge of the ways of Earthfolk was still strictly limited. Take for example, the male/female sex polarity so common among terrestrials… the intricacies of the explosive and hyper-emotional pre-connubial phase were all too complex for the Wuj to fully comprehend.

Among his people, the spider-beings who were but one of the many differing races who made up the United Beings of Mars, things were of course vastly different. In their pre-connubial period they frankly neither knew nor cared whether they were going to eventually mature as eggers or spinners. Your typical Martian spider-being might very well turn out to be either; there was little way of telling in advance, so to speak.

The Wuj was still quite young. When Ajax had come upon him (or her, as the case might be), the Wuj was still going through a sort of tribal testing period. After a dozen years of this, he (or she) would have achieved sufficient status to travel to the Main Web and the Central Eggery and proclaim his- or herself sexually. Until then, it was anybody’s guess! The Wuj regarded his (or her) current Prime Ministership as a sort of extension of the testing period: having failed in his (or her) first profession driving the bus wheel, he (or she) was having another chance—this time at interplanetary politics and diplomacy. It was all rather exhilarating for the Wuj, and he (or she) was very happy not having to be continuously distracted by the male-female attraction-repulsion polarity that so obviously plagued Ajax and Emily… (But let’s regard the Wuj as male for the time being, since Ajax and Emily did.)

Although… come to think of it, that was yet another way in which his dear leader and his dear leader’s future consort had changed recently. Before they had left the Wuj at the helm (so to speak) of the ship of state (in a very literal sense), the two of them had been always sneaking off to look at the stars together, or something. And he frequently had come upon them standing very close together so that their forelimbs had been enrapped about each other’s thorax, and once or twice he had noticed that their nutriment-ingestion orifices had been touching in a peculiar fashion. At his interruption, the two always sprang quickly apart and seemed strangely flustered and shy. It was all very peculiar, but he set it down to mere mammalian habits.

But since their sudden and unexpected return, Ajax and Emily had completely changed in this respect; they never attempted to dream up some pretext whereby they might be alone together, and they rarely touched each other except by sheer accident.

The Wuj sighed again. It was all so strange!

Wearying of his inverted position, the Wuj dropped down from the chandelier and waddled stalk-leggedly over to the interphone. He felt so miserable and woebegone ... perhaps a chat with his dear leader might perk up his spirits (for, ever since Ajax had magnanimously adopted the Wuj, the little spider-being had begun to think of itself as a “him,” and had pretty much made up his mind to declare himself a spinner when he came at last before the Main Web).

The interphone rang and rang, but no one was in the control center. Despondently, the Wuj ambled off down the corridor in search of his king. Doubtless he would be yet once again rebuffed by Ajax, who seemed to be deliberately avoiding the Wuj since his return, closing him out of his councils… why, even so important a decision as this latest one, in which the kingdom had declared for the Saturnians and boldly defected from EMSA-space… even this decision had been made by Ajax and Emily between themselves, without so much as a by-your-leave to the Royal Prime Minister!

The Wuj progressed by the jerky, eight-legged walk peculiar to those of the spider persuasion among the United Beings. He strolled down the long central corridor that divided the egg-shaped planetoid into two hemispherical halves, like a sliced orange, passing room after room of unknown purpose, chamber after chamber packed with mysterious equipment, artifacts and mechanisms of alien design and unsolved use and purpose. Only by a singular stroke of accidental luck had they been able to discover the location and control-system that powered and drove the planetoid-ship.

The control center or “bridge” (as his beloved leader called it) was the nexus of all the control systems. It literally bristled and bulged with dials, switches, panels, studs, meters, connections and bus-bars. Certain of them were under automatic, not manual, control—such as those which regulated the supplies of air, heat, light and water. Others—the as-yet-undiscovered protective systems and defensive machinery—were buried somewhere amid the profusion of weirdly-labeled dials and buttons.

Accident alone—the matter of a chance stud depressed by a careless elbow—had activated the drive engines. A few hours of careful, prudent experiment had proved enough to enable them to turn on and off the drive, and to maneuver the giant ship in space. Right after that discovery, Ajax and Emily had proclaimed their defection, and—without even discussing the matter with the Wuj, or inquiring as to his opinion in the matter—they had driven the ship out of orbit and started in off along the long, long road to Saturn.

Wandering out of the corridor, the Wuj took a narrow catwalk which stretched above a truly enormous room, large enough to house a herd of dirigibles, with room left over to bunk a dozen or more elephants, if the situation should ever arise. This capacious hall was the largest storeroom they had yet managed to find in all the hundreds of chambers and compartments with which the planetoid-ship was filled. Here the newly changed Ajax and Emily had sequestered themselves for hours at a time, striving to discover the uses and natures of the bewildering complexity of machines with which the elephantine store-room was crowded. The Wuj paused on the narrow catwalk, gazing solemnly down at some of the peculiar objects far below, over which they had exhausted their imaginations and ingenuities fruitlessly.

For what conceivable purpose, for example, could that system of concentric spheres of milky jade be designed? Or that silvery cylinder resting on fat coils of brass-colored tubing? Or that huge system of odd-angled mirrors arranged about a light-projector, there in the center? The little Martian’s pugdog nose wrinkled in a grimace: curiouser and curiouser, he thought, and curiouser yet.

This particular device, the mirror-thing, worked from the bridge. This had also been discovered by accident, when idly polishing the control panels one day in order to seem useful in the eyes of his strangely changed master and mistress, the Wuj had depressed one of a series of large flat crimson studs within a blue circular board. A shout had come up from Emily, then busily engaged in categorizing the unknown mechanisms in the store-room, that the mirror-thing was clacking and clanking and its reflective components were adjusting themselves into curious and seemingly purposeless new alignments about a multi-tube-studded globe. In hopes of eliciting some clue as to the function of the odd device, the Wuj had promptly, if gingerly, depressed another of the large red pedals. A beam of intense light had shot from one of the tubes to impinge upon and reflect through a series of the mirrors… but nothing seemed to come of it, and they had at length discontinued further perhaps risky puttering…

“Oh! Oh, my mighty Egg!” the Wuj gasped, his green compound eyes suddenly riveting upon a totally unexpected and heart-stopping sight. He gasped, frozen with sheer surprise and shock.

There, far below his high and aerial vantage point, he suddenly saw something that made the spiderfuzz tingle on the nape of his neck. He clasped several pair of hands together in an ecstasy of despair, meanwhile not daring to take his insectoid eyes off the horrific scene being enacted far below his perch.