Lucky Starr And The Rings Of Saturn

5. Skimming Saturn's Surface

And so The Shooting Starr flashed alongside Hidalgo and then out on the flight beyond the Ecliptic and up again toward the southern polar regions of the Solar System's second largest planet.

At no time in their still short history of space adventure had Lucky and Bigman remained in space for so long a period without a break. It had been nearly a month now since they had left Earth. However, the small bubble of air and warmth that was The Shooting Starr was a bit of Earth that could keep itself so for an almost indefinite period to come.

Their power supply, built to maximum by the donation of the other ships, would last nearly a year, barring a full-scale battle. Their air and water, recirculated by way of the algae tanks, would last a lifetime. The algae even provided a food reserve in case their more orthodox concentrates ran out.

It was the presence of the third man that made for the only real discomfort. As Bigman had pointed out, The Shooting Starr was built for two. Its unusual concentration of power, speed, and armaments was made possible partly by the unusual economy of its living quarters. So turns had to be taken in sleeping on a quilt in the pilot room.

Lucky pointed out that any discomfort was made up for by the fact that four-hour watches at the controls could now be set up rather than the usual six-hour watches.

To which Bigman replied hotly, "Sure, and when I'm trying to sleep on this doggone blanket and Fat-face Wess is at the controls, he keeps flashing every signal light right in my face."

"Twice each watch," said Wess patiently, "I check the various emergency signals to make sure they're in order. That's protocol."

"And," said Bigman, "he keeps whistling through his teeth. Listen, Lucky, if he gives me one more chorus of 'My Sweet Aphrodite of Venus'-just once more-I'll up and break off his arms halfway between shoulder and elbow, then beat him to death with the stumps."

Lucky said gravely, "Wess, please refrain from whistling refrains. If Bigman is forced to chastise you, he will get blood all over the pilot room."

Bigman said nothing, but the next time he was at the controls, with Wess asleep on the blanket and snoring musically, he managed somehow to step on the fingers of Wess's outstretched hand as he made for the pilot's stool.

"Sands of Mars," he said, holding up both hands, palms forward, and rolling his eyes at the other's sudden, tigerish yell. "I did think I felt something under my heavy Martian boots. My, my, Wess, was it your little thumbikins?"

"You better stay awake from now on," yelled Wess in furious agony. "Because if you go to sleep while I'm in the control room, you Martian sand rat, I'll squash you like a bug."

"I'm so frightened," said Bigman, going into a paroxysm of mock weeping that brought Lucky wearily out of his bunk.

"Listen," he said, "the next one of you two who wakes me trails the Shooter in his suit at the end of a cable for the rest of the trip."

But when Saturn and its rings came into near view, they were all in the pilot room, watching. Even as seen in the usual manner, from an equatorial view, Saturn was the most beautiful sight in the Solar System, and from a polar view…

"If I recall correctly," said Lucky, "even Hogg's exploratory voyage touched this system only at Japetus and Titan, so that he saw only an equatorial view of Saturn. Unless the Sirians have done differently, we're the first human beings ever to see Saturn this close from this direction."

As with Jupiter, the soft yellow glow of Saturn's "surface" was really the reflected sunlight from the upper layers of a turbulent atmosphere a thousand miles or more in depth. And, as with Jupiter, the atmospheric disturbances showed up as zones of varying colors. But the zones were not the stripes they appeared to be from the usual equatorial view. Instead, they formed concentric circles of soft brown, lighter yellow, and pastel green about the Saturnian pole as a center.

But even that faded to nothing compared to the rings. At their present distance, the rings stretched over an arc of twenty-five degrees, fifty times the width of Earth's full Moon. The inner edge of the rings was separated from the planet by a space of forty-five minutes of arc in which there was room to hold an object the size of the full Moon loosely enough to allow it to rattle.

The rings circled Saturn, touching it nowhere from the viewpoint of The Shooting Starr. They were visible for about three fifths of their circle, the rest being cut off sharply by Saturn's shadow. About three fourths of the way toward the outer edge of the ring was the black separation known as "Cassini's division." It was about fifteen minutes wide, a thick ribbon of blackness, dividing the rings into two paths of brightness of unequal width. Within the inner lip of the rings was a scattering of sparkle that shimmered but did not form a continuous whiteness. This was the so-called "crepe ring."

The total area exposed by the rings was more than eight times as great as that of the globe of Saturn. Furthermore, the rings themselves were obviously brighter, area for area, than Saturn itself, so that on the whole at least ninety per cent of the light reaching them from the planet came from its rings. The total light reaching them was about one hundred times that of Earth's full Moon.

Even Jupiter as seen from that startling nearness of Io was somehow nothing like this. When Bigman finally spoke, it was hi a whisper.

He said, "Lucky, how come the rings are so bright? It makes Saturn itself look dim. Is that an optical illusion?"

"No," said Lucky, "if s real. Both Saturn and the rings get the same amount of light from the Sun, but they don't reflect the same amount. What we're seeing from Saturn is the light reflected from an atmosphere made up of hydrogen and helium, mainly, plus some methane. That reflects about sixty-three per cent of the light that hits it. The rings, however, are mostly solid chunks of ice, and they send back a minimum of eighty per cent, which makes them that much brighter. Looking at the rings is like looking at a field of snow."

Wess mourned, "And we've got to find one snow-flake in the field of snow.

"But a dark snowflake," said Bigman excitedly. "Listen, Lucky, if all the ring particles are ice and we're looking for a capsule that's metal… "

"Polished aluminum," said Lucky, "will reflect even more light than will ice. It will be just as shiny."

"Well, then"-Bigman looked despairingly at the rings half a million miles away, yet so tremendous in area even at that distance- "this thing is hopeless."

"We'll see," said Lucky noncommittally.

Bigman sat at the controls, adjusting orbit in short, quiet bursts of the ion drive. The Agrav controls had been connected so that The Shooting Starr was far more maneuverable in this volume of space, so close to the mass of Saturn, than any Sirian ship could possibly be.

Lucky was at the mass detector, the delicate probe of which scoured space for any matter, fixing its position by measuring its response to the gravitational force of the ship, if it were small, or the effect of its gravitational force upon the ship, if it were large.

Wess had just awakened and entered the pilot room, and all was silence and tension as the ship sank toward Saturn. Bigman watched Lucky's face out of the corner of his eye. Lucky had grown more and more abstracted as Saturn came near, abstracted and uncommunicative. Bigman had witnessed this before. Lucky was uncertain; he was gambling on poor odds, and he would not talk of it.

Wess said, "I don't think you have to be sweating over the mass detector so, Lucky. There'll be no ships up here. It's when we get down to the rings that we'll find the ships. Plenty of them, probably. The Sirians will be looking for the capsule too."

"I agree with that," said Lucky, "as far as it goes."

"Maybe," said Bigman gloomily, "those cobbers have found the capsule already."

"Even that's possible," admitted Lucky.

They were turning now, beginning to edge along the circle of Saturn's globe, maintaining an eight-thousand-mile distance from its surface. The far half of the rings (or at least the portion that was in the sunlight) melted into Saturn as its inner edge was hidden by the giant planetary bulge.

In the case of the half rings on the near side of the planet, the inner "crepe ring" became more noticeable.

Bigman said, "You know, I don't make out any end to that inside ring."

Wess said, "There isn't any end, probably. The innermost part of the main rings is only six thousand miles above Saturn's apparent surface, and Saturn's atmosphere may stretch out that far."

"Six thousand miles!"

"Just in wisps, but enough to supply friction for the nearest bits of gravel and make them circle a bit closer to Saturn. Those that move in closer form the crepe ring. Only the closer they move, the more friction there is, so that they must move still closer. There are probably particles all the way down to Saturn, with some burning up as they hit the thicker layer of the atmosphere."

Bigman said, "Then the rings aren't going to last forever."

"Probably not. But they'll last millions of years. Long enough for us." He added somberly, "Too long."

Lucky interrupted, "I'm leaving the ship, gentlemen."

"Sands of Mars, Lucky. What for?" Bigman cried.

"I want an outside look," Lucky answered curtly. He was pulling on his space suit.

Bigman glanced quickly at the automatic record of the mass detector. No ships in space. There were occasional jogs, but nothing important. They were only the kind of drifting meteorites that were picked up anywhere in the Solar System.

Lucky said, "Take over at the mass detector, Wess. Let it take a round-the-clock sweep." Lucky put his helmet on and clicked it into place. He checked the gauges on his chest, the oxygen pressure, and moved toward the air lock. His voice now emerged from the small radio receiver on the control board. "I'll be using a magnetic cable, so make no sudden power thrusts."

"With you out there? Think I'm crazy?" said Bigman.

Lucky came into view at one of the ports, the magnetic cable snaking behind him in coils that, in the absence of gravity, did not form a smooth curve.

A small hand reactor in his gauntleted fist shot out its small jet stream, which became faintly visible in the weak sunlight as a cloud of tiny ice particles that dispersed and vanished. Lucky, by the law of action and reaction, moved in the opposite direction.

Bigman said, "Do you suppose something's wrong with the ship?"

"If there is," said Wess, "it doesn't show up anywhere on the control board."

"Then what's the big lug doing?"

"I don't know."

But Bigman shot a suspicious glare at the Council man, then turned again to watch Lucky. "If you think," he muttered, "because I'm not a Councilman… "

Wess said, "Maybe he just wanted to get outside range of your voice for a few minutes, Bigman."

The mass detector, on automatic sweep control, was moving methodically across the volume about them, square degree by square degree, the screen blanking out into pure white whenever it edged too far in the direction of Saturn itself.

Bigman scowled and lacked heart to respond to Wess's thrust. "I wish something would happen," he said.

And something did.

Wess, eyes returning to the mass detector, caught a suspicious pip on the recorder. He fixed the instrument on it hurriedly, brought up the auxiliary energy detectors, and followed it for two minutes.

Bigman said excitedly, "It's a ship, Wess."

"Looks like it," said Wess reluctantly. Mass alone might have meant a large meteorite, but there was a blast of energy being emitted from that direction that could come only from the micro-pile engines of a ship; the energy was of the right type and in the right quantities. It was as identifiable as a fingerprint. One could even detect the slight differences from the energy pattern produced by Terrestrial ships and identify this object unmistakably as a Sirian ship.

Bigman said, "It's heading for us."

"Not directly. Probably it doesn't dare take chances with Saturn's gravitational field. Still it's edging closer, and in about an hour it will be in position to lay down a barrage against us…What in space are you so pleased about, you Martian farm boy?"

"Isn't it obvious, you lump of fat? This explains why Lucky's out there. He knew the ship was coming and he's laying a trap for it."

"How in space could he tell a ship was coming?" demanded Wess in astonishment. "There was no indication on the mass detector till ten minutes ago. It wasn't even focused in the proper direction."

"Don't worry about Lucky. He has a way of knowing." Bigman was grinning.

Wess shrugged, moved to the control panel, and called into the transmitter, "Lucky! Do you hear me?"

"Sure I hear you, Wess. What's up?"

"There's a Sirian ship in mass-detection range."

"How close?"

"Under two hundred thousand and getting closer."

Bigman, watching out the port, noticed the flash of Lucky's hand reactor, and ice crystals swirled away from the ship. Lucky was returning.

"I'm coming in," he said.

Bigman spoke at once, as soon as the helmet was' lifted off Lucky's head to reveal his brown shock of hair and his clear brown eyes. Bigman said, "You knew that ship was coming, didn't you, Lucky?"

"No, Bigman. I had no idea. In fact, I don't understand how they discovered us so quickly. It's asking too much of coincidence to suppose they just happened to be looking in this direction."

Bigman tried to mask his chagrin. "Well, then, do we blast him out of space, Lucky?"

"Let's not go through the political dangers of attack again, Bigman. Besides, we have a mission here that's more important than playing shooting games with other ships."

"I know," said Bigman impatiently. "There's the capsule we've got to find, but… "

He shook his head. A capsule was a capsule and he understood its importance. But then, a good fight was a good fight, and Lucky's political reasoning about the dangers of aggression did not appeal to him if it meant ducking a fight. He muttered, "What do I do then? Stay on course?"

"And accelerate. Make for the rings."

"If we do," said Bigman, "they'll just take out after us."

"All right. We'll race."

Bigman drew back the control rod slowly, and the proton disintegrations in the micro-pile increased to top fury. The ship hurtled along the bulging curve of Saturn.

At once the reception disk was alive with the impingement of radio waves.

"Shall we go into active reception, Lucky?" asked Wess.

"No, we know what they'll say. Surrender or be magnetically grappled."

"Well?"

"Our only chance is to run."