Destination: Saturn

VII

Ajax Calkins climbed into the pilot’s seat and switched off the autopilot. Seizing the manual controls, he kicked the little ship around in a shrieking curve—paying no attention to the ear-rasping groan of structural steel strained to the limits of its stress-capacity—and sent the Destiny whizzing like a deranged meteor towards Saturn and his runaway kingdom.

“Ajax? What are we going to do?” Emily wailed.

“Go after ‘em and get my kingdom back!”

“How?”

“I dunno, but we’ll do it. We’ve got to do it! If Admiral Kreplach reaches the planetoid-ship first, he’ll blow it out of the sky rather than let the Saturnians get their slimy pseudopods on all those precious weapons. If the planetoid-ship gets within protective range of the Saturnian border patrols before we or Kreplach catch up to it, my kingdom and poor old Wuj are lost forever. So—the only thing to do is that we’ve got to reach Ajaxia—and soon!”

There was a new note of genuine steely determination in Ajax’s flat tones that made Emily do a double-take, and look at him with speculative, suddenly admiring eyes. For all his pompousness, play-acting and pretense, Ajax Calkins was an active, capable and remarkably determined young man… or, at least, he could be, when the situation urged him to the point of putting aside his romantic dreams and actually doing something. Still, you could forgive Emily Hackenschmidt for being a bit dubious…

“That’s all very well, Ajax, but can we get to Ajaxia first? Remember what the broadcaster said. Admiral Kreplach’s squadron left over an hour and forty minutes ago!”

“Yes, but Kreplach left the EMSA station on Ceres, Emily! We’re millions and millions of miles nearer to Ajaxia than that… why, Ceres is halfway across the Zone from Ajaxia! Not only that, but I’ll bet my bottom credit the Destiny can outfly anything that EMSA can put into space. Now shut up and let me fly this thing…”

Nervously, Emily shut up, sat down, and drew on a stimulette till the self-igniting tip caught. She forced herself to calm down. And it occurred to her that, perhaps, after all, Ajax could beat the pursuit-squadron to the runaway world! For there was a certain amount of truth in what Ajax said about the Destiny … it was one of the fastest craft in space. After all, as one of Earth’s richest multibillionaires, Ajax could buy the very best; and he had not stinted a mini-credit in constructing the Destiny. The slim, trim little yacht, superbly streamlined for atmospheric flight as well as hyper-powered for interplanetary trips, was a miracle of fine engineering, a sleek projectile, gleamingly enameled in purple and gold, and surely the fastest, most powerful private spacecraft money could buy. They just might have a fighting chance to beat Kreplach to the punch and get to Ajaxia first!

Like a glittering steel arrow, the Destiny cut through space on roaring jets. Their velocity was already terrific, but instead of cutting the jets and allowing the ship to speed through the non-resisting medium of a hard vacuum at top speed, Ajax was piling on the power. With no atmospheric friction to make additional speed a hazard, there was no theoretical reason Emily could think of why constant acceleration wouldn’t double and triple and quadruple the Destiny’s speed all the way up to the fantastic borders of the speed of light itself. Beyond that, of course, no known form of energy or matter in the physical universe could travel… but there would certainly be no need to go any faster than light. Emily stopped to do some rapid mental math problems.

Light traveled at the incredible velocity of 186,000 miles per second! That worked out to something like an inconceivable speed of 661,600,000 miles per hour… that’s right, six hundred and sixty one billion miles an hour! Even if the Destiny could only achieve a healthy fraction of that mind-boggling speed, it could still outfly anything else around… why, Saturn itself was considerably less than one billion miles from the Sun!

But . . . what was to keep Admiral Kreplach from trying the same trick? Why couldn’t he just keep constantly accelerating even as Ajax was doing… ?

In a moment, Emily knew why the Admiral would and could not. She suppressed a snicker. The simple fact of the matter was that atomic fuel was frightfully expensive. Think about that for a moment, then stop to think that an Admiral, for all the glory of his gaudy uniform and medals aside, is primarily a management official, not a warrior or a hero. He’s a bureaucrat, a department head, traditionally deskbound, and far more accustomed to firing off a salvo of memoranda than a salvo of weapon-fire.

Kreplach would be trained in cost-cutting and red tape from his ensign days. Extensive waste of high-priced nuclear fuel would be anathema to his soul; his habitual thought-patterns should react as violently to the notion of frightfully wasteful continuous acceleration as to the idea of giving his office-team an extra quarter-hour coffee break or permitting his men to use expense accounts while on vacation.

In other words, he simply would never think of it!

But what did such as Ajax, the Calkans King, care about wasting a little money? When Ajax was born he already owned more of the folding stuff than any normal person could ever spend… so what price plutonium?

“Step on her, Ajax,” Emily urged. “Give her the gun, pile on more coal, full steam ahead and damn the fuel-bill!”

Beyond the Asteroid Zone lies Jupiter, largest of all the planets in the Solar System. Besides its many moons, the giant planet with its enormously powerful gravitational field has, over millions of years, gradually pulled into its sphere of influence a number of worldlets filched from the belt of asteroids that stretches between Mars and Jupiter. Among these are a group called the Fore-Trojans, to which Ajaxia had belonged before the Saturnians disguised as Ajax Calkins and Emily Hackenschmidt activated its age-old drive engines. It is a moot point as to whether Ajaxia and the other Fore-Trojans belongs to the Jovian system or to the Asteroid Belt; however, a good case could be made for the Jovian side of the argument.

It was, in fact, upon this point that Ajax Calkins’ claim to independent sovereignty for Ajaxia rested. EMSA had legal claim over all spatial bodies from Mercury to Mars, and including the Asteroids. EMSA jurisdiction, however, did not extend to the system of moons and asteroids about Jupiter, partly because these had not yet been explored or colonized, and partly because the Jovian system made a convenient buffer-state between the hostile Saturnians and the inner worlds. The precise location of the boundary was an imaginary line some millions of miles beyond the orbit of Jupiter, and it was towards this line that the runaway planetoid-ship, the pursuit squadron and the Destiny were all traveling.

From the view screens of Ajax Calkins’ speeding yacht, Jupiter was a blurry area of mottled and striped ochre and yellow. Here and there in near space the dull globes of three of the nearer Jovian moons were faintly visible—visible, that is, only because their under-portions reflected the ochre radiance from their giant primary.

Visible in the upper portion of the screens were two of the larger moons, Io and Callisto both of which had been discovered by Galileo in ancient times. Although they seemed to be very close to each other, they were actually separated by a vast distance. Io was the second closest moon to the surface of the planet, only some 260,000 miles above the atmosphere; and the slightly larger moon, Callisto, was the fifth closest. The intervening bodies, Europa and Ganymede, were on the other side of the planet and thus invisible.

The only other moon visible, tiny Alcmene, was a framed curiosity and Ajax would have liked to have had time enough to pause and investigate it. The smallest of all Jupiter’s twelve moons, only fourteen miles in diameter, it was discovered in 1951 by S. B. Nicholson and was the last of the Jovian satellites to be found. Its outstanding mystery, however, was not its incredible smallness, but the fact that alone of all the other moons, it revolved backwards!

The Destiny tore through the Jovian lunar system, missing the smaller, outer moons, Semele, Leda, Antiope, Danae and Taygete, and curved off into space for the EMSA/Saturnian border. The misty yellow bulk of Jupiter fell below, and dropped behind them as they raced against time.