Destination: Saturn

XI

The Destiny fell slowly towards the vast curve of Jupiter. The bulk of the giant planet filled more than half the sky. It glowed with dim light, its surface a seething turbulence of stupendous, tossing streamers of methane and ammonia, underlit with weird radiance. Colossal bands of variegated coloration spread from horizon to horizon: umber, rich browns, lighter bands of palest cream, sharp yellow and sanguine gold and orange. Each of these bands were thousands of miles across; some of them were so enormously huge that the entire planet Earth could fall into them and be lost without a trace.

In comparison, the Destiny seemed to shrink into insignificance, to become a mote lost in immensity. The boiling, cloud-wrapped surface of the upper atmosphere roared with continent-spanning storms of a violence inconceivable to watchers raised amidst the little storms of tiny Earth. Titanic jets of seething gas were forced from the cloudy surface by cataclysmic pressures: among these gigantic plumes, Earth itself would be but a fleck of spinning dust.

The chemical imbalance of the Jovian atmosphere generated lightning storms whose ferocity beggared description or comparison. The energy released by a single one of these king-sized thunderbolts could supply light and power to an entire metropolis, enough to last it a good month. And the size of the blazing bolts was on a similarly Brobdingnagian scale: the jagged flare of exploding energy flickered across abysses into which the entire Atlantic Ocean could be put a dozen times over.

Emily Hackenschmidt shuddered delicately, and shut her eyes to close out the awful vision of Nature in one of her most titanic rages. She knew their chances of survival amidst such a convulsion were miniscule. Were the trim little yacht to fall into the upper regions of that seething turbulence, the craft would be shattered to atoms within moments. No man-made structure, regardless of its strength, could resist the stupendous forces that raved and raged below. She turned to Ajax helplessly.

“What can we do, anything? Anything at all?” she asked despairingly.

It was at moments like this that the very best that was in Ajax Calkins came to the fore.

“There’s just one chance,” he said thoughtfully. “I’ve got to admit it’s a mighty slim one, Emily, but even a slim chance is better than none.”

“What’s your idea?”

“Just this. We’re being pulled straight down into that boiling inferno—with our main drive shot out, we can’t command enough oomph to fight that pull and push ourselves back up into a stable orbit. But—our auxiliary and lateral steering jets combined should give us enough pazazz to push sideays against the pull…”

She didn’t get it, obviously. “Sideways? For what? Sideways to what?”

“To one of the moons,” he said calmly.

Her blue eyes widened as the sheer simplicity and beauty of his plan hit her.

“Ajax!” she marveled. “What a perfectly lovely idea! Of course… it’s so logical it, why it takes my breath away!”

“It’s nothing,” he grinned. “I’ve got a million of ‘em! Now—hop over to the scopes and start finding me a moon. Quick now!”

She hopped. Her EMSA training included a full course in spaceship control operations and she knew how to manipulate many of the most sophisticated concoctions devised by modern technology. She spun the wheel with deft hands, and began a search-pattern.

“This has got to work the first time, or never,” he said tightly. “Yon rising moon has got to match our elevation just about right on the nose… we haven’t enough juice in the tanks to do much flying to keep in horizontal flight against the pull of that monster down there .. .”

“Here’s one!” she said. “Elevation twenty point four…”

“No good. We’re at sixteen-point-nine, and we couldn’t get that high. Next please.”

The sudden relief from tension engendered by Ajax Calkins’ lovely scheme lent a mildly hysterical note of holiday gaiety to Emily’s spirits. Even though they were not yet out of the woods by a wide margin, she felt confident and happy.

“Next it is!” she sang. “Would you believe Semele, at eighteen-point-two… or little old Alcmene, now marked down to thirteen-point-six?”

“Semele is for the birds,” he said impolitely, “but Alcmene is just what the astronaut ordered. Give me a distance reading—hurry, we’re dropping even faster now!”

She read off the figures, and he relaxed with a deep wheeze of relief.

“Righto, I’ll buy Alcmene—that’s the little goofball that goes backwards, I believe? Well, here goes nothing…”

He spun the gyros on manual and kicked over the ship, bringing the small auxiliary jets into their strongest play. They engaged with a keen whine that steadily deepened into a drone that sounded like a Metropolitan Opera baritone gargling mouthwash. Imperceptibly, at first, their descent lessened, then, gradually, slowed as their lateral progress intensified. Wobbling along on its emergency jets, the little craft fought against the overpowering gravitational pull of the largest giant in the Solar System next to the Sun itself.

Bit by bit they inched across the face of Jupiter. The famous Red Spot, that vast ocean of seething crimson vapor, glared up at them like an angry Cyclopian eye. The giant roared with its storm-voice; it was hungry, and saw a succulent steely mote escaping.

Alcmene, the mystery moon that had puzzled astronomers for a century, drew steadily closer.

The main drive worked, of course, on plutonium ingots. The auxiliary jets in the tail, and the lateral steering jets set about the midsection of the ship like a belt, were powered only by highly compressed chemical fuel, and thus had a strictly limited firing-time. The flight to Alcmene, as the computer read it, was pushing the margin of safety perilously close. Ajax kept this uncomfortable fact to himself, seeing no point in scaring Emily. But it would certainly be heartbreaking, if the jets died before they had safely maneuvered into Alcmene’s field—heartbreaking and ship-breaking, for that matter.

Ajax set his jaw hard, and jiggled the controls, trying to squeeze every possible erg out of the rapidly diminishing supply of go-juice in the cans. The trouble was, Alcmene was so flacking small—only 14 miles in diameter—that her gravity field was trifling compared to the giant pull of that ravenous glutton down there. They would have to get very, very close to the mysterious little moonlet before the jets ran dry, or Jupiter would get them yet.

He sweated the short journey every painful, suspenseful mile of the way.

Alcmene grew in the screens, but with torturous slowness. The lumpy little chunk of asteroid-rock would certainly… Hmmm, that was odd, that sound…

“Ajax!” Emily shrieked as the ship gave a sickening lurch to one side. Simultaneously, the jets died to a wheeze… a whisper… then to a silence that roared deafeningly. Ajax felt his heart, or whatever the large lumpy organ was, rise into his throat, then drop like a lead balloon into his boots.

Close, but no cigar…

“Courage, Miss Hackenwhacken,” he said.

They fell like a stone… or did they?

He did a double-take at the meters, and felt his heart lurch back to its accustomed roost. They were no longer falling!

“What’s happening?” Emily demanded.

“Search me! But we’re being pulled into Alcmene’s gravity field—although no moon that small ought to have a gravity field one fiftieth this strong…” His eyes gleamed with sudden curiosity.

“Now what?” she snapped.

“Don’t ask me! But these geigers have either gone stark, staring mad, or there’s enough radio-activity out there to fry a carload of ostrich eggs!”

“Well,” she said, somewhat baffled, “there’s supposed to be a lot of radioactivity in space, isn’t there?”

“Sure—but not enough to slam these meter-needles over into the red!” Swiftly, he activated the dampener. This device projected a series of overlapping, heterodyning magnetic fields that enveloped the Destiny like a vast “sponge,” trapping and repelling on magnetic currents the alpha, beta, or gamma particles which were disturbing the geigers so. Without this kind of protection, the very fabric of the ship would soon become dangerously contaminated, so intense was the radiation now bombarding the ship.

Ahead of them, filling the heavens, tiny Alcmene loomed like a flying cliff, Jove-light gilding its jagged circumference with orange luminance. They drifted to it. As they came very near, Ajax set the gyros into action and revolved the ship about into a new position. He had exhausted only the lateral steering jets on one side; now he used those on the other side, to bring the ship floating into a “soft” landing on the worldlet. Its gravity was mighty feeble by Earth-measure, but incredibly powerful when you stopped to consider how very weak it should have been, by all the laws of 21st Century physics.

Mysterious little Alcmene was certainly living up to her reputation…

“Well, here we are.” Ajax sighed with relief. “And here we stay, without a bucketful of plutonium nuggets to speed us on our way. Shall we call EMSA and ask for help?”

Emily made a sour face. “I suppose so, Ajax. There’s no other way we… what is that?”

“That” was a twenty-foot robot which stood up against the nose of the ship and peered in the control-room port. Ajax almost fainted. Emily wrapped one arm around his neck and managed to keep him on his feet.

“Ajax, you idiot! Don’t pass out now—do something!”

“Ikk, gikk,” he said, commenting on the strangle hold she had on his throat. When she let go, he collapsed into the pilot seat and tumbled the vision screens to front/full.

Yes, there it was. And maybe more like twenty-five feet tall. It had several arms—or appendages of some kind—radiating in a circle about the middle of its thorax. The “head” looked more like a television camera than anything else, with a multiplicity of lensed tubes protruding from the front and sides. It had three legs—a tripod effect—which made it look, when walking, something like a drunken praying mantis. It was altogether a grisly bit of animated hardware. So far, at least, it wasn’t doing anything in particular—just looking in. But if it had a mind to crack open this mysterious steel walnut, it certainly had the equipment to hand. In fact, two at least of the robot’s arms looked very much like power drills, and there was a third hand in back that bore a spine-chilling resemblance to a 30-power laser torch.

Ajax made flapping motions. “Shoo! Go ‘way!” he said.

“A lot of good that’s going to do,” Emily commented scathingly.

“Well, would you rather I went out there and wrestled that scrap-iron King Kong two falls out of three?” He took another shuddersome look…

“Hey! Look—it did work! Monstro is going off in a huff!” And so he was. Within moments, the gigantic robot vanished behind some jagged rocks. Ajax got very busy.

“What are you doing now?” she demanded.

“Getting ready to call EMSA and give up. Better a few years in Deimos Prison, than any more of Alcmene’s little surprises. I’ll bet I’ve aged twenty years in the last half-hour. Emily, check the back of my head for gray hairs…”

“Oh, stop clowning and be serious for a change.”

“Boy, am I serious! We’re getting out of here just as soon as EMSA can dispatch a nice safe prison ship…”

Emily patted him soothingly on one flushed cheek. “Now, now, relax, Ajax, and turn off that flacking radio. Plenty of time to call EMSA if trouble comes…”

“Yeah? Well, there won’t be much time to yell for help if that walking junkyard comes back with a few of his pals and decides to open us up for inspection!”

“No, listen, Ajax, I’ve been thinking…”

“Well?” he demanded suspiciously. He didn’t like that speculative tone in her voice.

“If there’s as much radioactivity outside as you say there is… and if the only reason we’re marooned helplessly here is lack of plutonium…” She arched an eyebrow at him.

His mouth fell open. Awe shone in his wide eyes.

“Migawd, Emily, you’re a genius! Why didn’t I think of that? We’ll run a soil-analysis and see. Maybe, if the deposits are high-grade enough, we can get out of here after all—and by ourselves.”

He jumped up and strode back into the store compartments.

“Ajax? You’re not putting on a suit and going out there, are you? What about the radioactivity?”

“I’ve got a repairs robot back here with complete visual hookups. Ordered a few of them made back when I decided to have the Destiny completely automated. The robot has a radio-link with the ship’s computer, and can be controlled manually from within. Ah—here he is!”