Destination: Saturn

XVI

The trip to Saturn was long and dull, and I will not bore you with an account of such an uneventful voyage. Except to say that it was not as long as it could have been: Ajax tried his trick of continuous acceleration and found that it did indeed work after all.

Before very long he was nudging the Destiny into velocities that pushed close on the lower mileage of true light-speed. While his luck lasted, Ajax was strongly tempted to see what would happen if he did exceed the speed of light—at least, he wanted to see if he could.

“Theoretically,” he explained things to Emily in his best Oxford-professor’s voice, “at or near photonic velocity, the traveling object should grow in mass until it equals the rest of the universe put together… although, of course, ‘universe’ is a poor term—romantic, hardly scientific. Say the space/time plenum, to be accurate.”

“Ajax, I hate you when you get into your ‘more knowledgeable-than-thou’ mood. Cut it out. I took plenum mechanics in high school, and know my Einsteinian physics.”

“Quite.” He was not listening, of course, being Ajax. “As an interesting corrolary relative time-rate on the accelerating mass (the ship, in this case) should slow to near-zero in exact correspondence to the growth of pseudo-mass. Now some authorities postulate that two plenum-sized masses cannot exist simultaneously in the same continuum; hence the small must give way and pop into some jolly old sub-space or another dimension, or something like that. It would indeed be interesting to see what did result from travel at photonic velocities! What do you say we… ?”

“A-jax, cut it out, you’re giving me the willies! Leave sub-space alone and tend to business. We’re here to recapture the planetoid-ship for the benefit of all mankind, and down with the vile Saturnians, remember?”

“Oh, very well,” he muttered. And from there on he tended to business.

They ate, and slept, and ate again. They listened to programs of taped music (Ajax was particularly fond of Strauss’ “Emperor” Waltz, for obvious reasons). They read books with which the little yacht was well-stocked. They watched old movies on television. Often they held hands while looking at the stars. One way or another, they passed the time.

Saturn grew and grew in the ‘scopes, a big yellow peach against the blackness of space. At last the Ringed Planet neared to the point at which they could make out Titan, its largest moon, with the naked eye.

That wasn’t all they could see, either!

Emily grabbed Ajax by one arm and squeezed.

“Ajax! That’s a Saturnian fleet out there!”

“Hmm—so it is. What are they buzzing around like that for? They look like a nestful of hornets hunting for someone to sting.”

“I don’t know, but they don’t seem to have spotted us on their radar yet. Hadn’t you better slow down or something?”

“Quite right! Maybe if they don’t notice us, they’ll sort of go away quietly. I wonder where the good old Kingdom is? We didn’t see it on the trip out, so it must have gotten here already… could they”—his voice dropped to a horrified whisper—“have dismantled Ajaxia already, do you think?”

He slowed the yacht to the merest crawl. Baffles cut down most of the ship’s ion-emission and concealed it from radar or even mass-detectors—or so he hoped—and they watched as the Saturnian patrol buzzed about like a crew of homesick hummingbirds hunting for the nest. It was puzzling. They seemed to have lost something—but what?

“There! Oh, dear, it’s Ajaxia!”

And so it was. The planetoid-ship popped into sight out of thin air, so to speak, although it had not been visible a moment before. As they watched enthralled, the angry buzzing Saturnian ships zeroed in on the fat egg-shaped ship and flung themselves at it with the abandon of suicidal flies doing a kamikaze act against a windowpane. Just before they reached it, the planetoid-ship vanished again.

“What in the Nine Worlds do you think is going on out there?” Ajax marvelled.

“Search me,” Emily said. They continued to watch. Again the giant planetoid-ship appeared—this time way off by the rings, those dangerous rivers of whirling icebergs so numerous as to seem like solid sheets of light at any distance. Again the Saturnian patrol zoomed after their elusive quarry—and again it snapped out of sight, leaving the forefront of the patrol to go whacking and banging through the outer fringe of the rings, cracking up at least two ships.

“It must be the Wuj!” Ajax chortled. “Jolly old Wuj! He’s certainly leading them a merry chase… although, for the life of me, Emily, I can’t figure out what in Space he’s doing. How do you suppose he makes the planetoid-ship just vanish like that?”

“Search me. But he’s driving those Amoeba-Men nuts!”

And so he was. In their mounting frenzy to catch the extremely elusive planetoid, some of the Saturnian vessels were smacking into each other. The Amoeba-Men by this time were in a veritable frothing suit.

“Three down! Four!” Ajax crowed happily. “Keep up the good w-w-erk! Gakk! What’s happening?”

What indeed! Ajax was hurtled half out of the pilot’s chair as the Destiny gave a maniacal lurch. Consequently, their ears were assaulted by the most ferocious clamor you could imagine. Picture a truck-load of hollow anvils falling down a tool-steel staircase—truck and all—and you have a decent idea of the noise. The Destiny stopped dead, and her lights died. So did her air-conditioners, with an exhausted wheeze.

“Good gracious—Ajax—we’ve rammed into something!” Emily shrieked.

“Steady, steady now. We were only going at a crawl,” gasped Ajax, crawling on his hands and (bruised) knees across the sloping, up-tilted floor to the forward ‘scopes. “Perhaps we smacked into a moonlet, although radar alarms ought to have rung up a storm… I… say … !”

Ajax stopped, transfixed by the sight of what they had rammed into.

“Well? Speak up—what was that?” Emily snarled, fighting her way out of a pile of spacesuits into which she had tumbled. With an outraged gasp, she batted away the mitten-hand of one spacesuit which had impertinently come to rest on her rounded knee.

“S-search me,” he goggled. Then, turning to her with his expression of slack-jawed idiocy, he wheezed: “E—Em, girl! Do you know what I see out the front ‘scopes?”

“Of course I don’t, you flacking, pixilated cretin! What do you see?”

“Nothing, that’s what. Nothing at all… just lotsa space. Stars, and so on. Nothing. I say… Emily?”

“Well?”

“I think we’ve discovered an invisible planet…”

“… Oh.” she said. It was rather an inadequate reply, he thought, but, on the whole, it would serve.

And he was right. The Destiny had rammed nose-first into an invisible something or near planetary mass. What it was, only time would tell…