The Secret of Saturn’s Rings

by Donald A. Wollheim

  “Oh sure,” said Arpad, idly picking among the pebbles and sandy stuff that littered the bare rock floor. He picked up a rock, hefted it, tossed it aside. He idly reached for others, examining them. They seemed to be average pebbles, stony, some with traces of iron or rust.

  Bruce noted his records of the radio conversations, noted the time, marked the time for the next watch. He put down his pencil and watched Arpad.

  The young spacehand had picked up another small rock, was turning it over idly, “Someone lose a knife handle?” said Arpad idly.

  Garcia shook his head, not paying much attention. Bruce narrowed his eyes. “What’s that? Let’s see it?” He reached down and took the object from Arpad’s hand.

  It was a knife handle, rather small, very worn, but a little odd. “Where’d you find this?” Bruce said excitedly. Garcia swung around then, startled.

  “Why, right here, in the dirt on the floor,” said Arpad.

  “This is nothing we lost,” said Bruce in mounting excitement. ‘“This is something that was here all along!”

  Garcia jumped up, looked at the object. Now Arpad took the fever, gathered around to look also. “Say, this is a strange object. It’s certainly nothing that we ever brought along,” Garcia said.

  It wasn’t a very remarkable thing, just a plain handle, made of some grayish material like a hard plastic, but clearly artificially constructed, with a couple of drilled holes in the end designed to hold a blade. When they examined it closer, they noticed a couple of odd geometric markings that seemed to be lightly impressed in one side of the object.

  “This thing was made by some sort of intelligent life—something or someone here on Mimas before us!” Garcia said, expressing the thoughts that held them all.

  “But,” was Bruce’s addition, “that means that once Mimas was inhabited!”

  “Or else visited from somewhere else in the universe!” answered Garcia.

  “Why don’t we look around, maybe we’ll find more!” Bruce said.

  Garcia nodded. “You two go outside and scout around this area. See if you can pick up anything more. This is really important!”

  Arpad and Bruce hurried out of the tent. Together they walked slowly around the plain in which their space ship stood. They would pause every so often, get down on hands and knees and sift through the loose rocks and sandy spots. For a while they found nothing more, until Bruce had worked his way to the area in which their ship had first come down, where their runners had carved a path.

  He saw now that some of the larger rocks were strangely angular. Pushing some around, he noticed more. Calling Arpad, they explored the area thoroughly. There were many such angular rocks, and now in several spots they noticed that one or two such were still perched on top of others. Bruce found a little piece of reddish stuff, plastic of some sort, probably part of a machine, though he couldn’t place it.

  Arpad turned up some bits of broken material which looked like splinters of a smashed vase or pot.

  When they came back to Garcia, and sat around and discussed their findings, they knew they had come across one of the most amazing discoveries in interplanetary history. Clearly there had once been a city standing in this plain on Mimas. A city that had crumbled into ruin and dust probably hundreds of thousands of years ago—and a city that defied all the logic of life.

  Garcia explained this, “How could life survive here? There could never have been enough air here, even when this satellite was new and still hot from its creation. My guess is that this city was a colony planted from somewhere else. But where and who could it have been that was here so many lost ages ago—back before there were even men on Earth, in the era when the dinosaur and the lizard were the highest forms of life back home?”

  For a moment their discoveries had erased their thoughts of the missing engineer. But now it was Bruce's turn to take over the radio watch, and instantly their worries returned. The radio had been silent for three hours now.

  For the next twenty-four measured hours, one of them kept the watch, while the other two continued the exploration of the mysterious ruins. They no longer forgot their problem. As each hour passed, deeper and deeper dread filled Bruce’s heart. Arpad was silent, lost in thought, and Garcia would make efforts at being cheery, but nobody responded.

  The mapping of the city continued. There was very little substantial material left. The ages that had passed, even in the eternal quiet and preservation of airlessness, had reduced everything to near dust. They found a few more objects, bits of junk, pieces of broken jars, the sort of odd junk one might find on the fringes of an old trash heap. Everything they found was made of the same sort of plastic substance. In one or two cases there were fragments of rust that blew away at the touch. It was Garcia’s theory that by accident this one plastic substance the ancient inhabitants had used was the nearest to permanence. It alone had survived the passage of the millions of years.

  Of the nature of the builders, there was no hint. The knife handle, though smaller than a man would build, might have fitted a midget’s palm, but that was the only clue.

  Finally, after they had finished a meal together in the ship, and gone back to the tent in their space suits for a turn at the radio, they sat around in discussion.

  The radio was still dead. Garcia looked at the two young hands, his face very grim. We’ve got to decide what to do now. Our time is running out, we’ve but a few dozen more hours before we will have to leave— or else we will never leave during our lifetimes. Dr. Rhodes may still be alive; he has food and air for another day, a little more if he is careful. But we can’t afford to wait. We must decide now.”

  Bruce said quietly, “We have the other space boat. I think we should use it to go after my father’s boat.

  Maybe we can see him. Maybe we can get in touch with him from closer to the rings.”

  Arpad said, “That’s a wide risk. It would be like finding a needle in a haystack. It would leave us minus still another man—and without any reserve space boat if something should happen.”

  Garcia nodded. “It’s out of the question. We dare not risk it. If Dr. Rhodes couldn’t make the trip, then I don’t think any of us are capable of making it.”

  Bruce argued again. But Garcia, after listening, shook his head. “We have to act like good soldiers, Bruce. Your father gave specific orders when he left. We were not to wait more than two days. Our time is almost up. We were then to leave without him. Our obligation to him is to obey his instructions. Our discoveries here on Mimas will be his memorial. When we tell Earth about them, they will send other expeditions to examine them.”

  “Meanwhile,” Bruce pleaded, “Terraluna will go ahead with its Luna deep-core mining and my father’s warning will be ignored. We are risking all humanity now.”

  Garcia turned to Arpad. “It’s up to you then, to cast the deciding vote.” Bruce looked at Arpad.

  The young spacehand looked away, got up, his back to them, and stared through the transparent wall of the tent to great Saturn in the sky. Finally he spoke without facing them, “Garcia is right. We can’t risk it.” Bruce realized that his friend had had a hard decision. He choked down a last effort at protest. Garcia put a hand on his shoulder. “Brace up. We’ve got another day to wait. Your father may return before then.”

  Bruce and the navigator returned to the ship, Bruce to put things in order for a take-off, Garcia to calculate their course. Bruce went about his duties mechanically, his mind preoccupied with an idea of his own.

  What was his true duty? he wondered. His father's life notwithstanding, the fact was that the life of all Earth was at stake if the Rhodes’ calculations were correct. That, he felt, was more important than any one individual’s life. If necessary, only two men could take their ship back to Earth. If he could go himself to the rings, could manage to radio back some proof of his father’s theories, then nothing else would matter.

  He was due for his turn at the radio tent next. Then would be the time. So thinking
, he went about certain tasks of his own.

  Arpad came back from the tent, took off his space suit, announced his intention to take a short nap. Bruce left for the tent to take over the radio watch, carrying a bundle with him. Fortunately nobody noticed.

  Pausing at the tent for a moment to confirm that there was no response, he slipped outside and around the other side out of view of the ship. Then he made his way quickly to where the second space boat stood on its wheels, nose pointed at the sky.

  Hastily, Bruce deposited the bundle of sandwiches and the metal bottle of oxygen he had brought with him. He knew he had filled the little rocket’s tank when it was first set up. He checked its controls, then switched on its radio, and found it operating.

  Then, drawing a breath, he eased himself into the control seat, closed the glassine panel and made the little rocket boat airtight.

  From his cramped position in the nose of the little craft, he could see the glowing golden surface of Saturn, and almost in his direction, the white line of the rings’ edge. He switched on the ignition, opened the throttle, watched the gauges indicate that his atomic fuel was flowing into the combustion tubes of the jets. He set his automatic governor, and glancing around once again at the still rocky plain and the low jagged mountains of Mimas, set his teeth, and pulled down the take-off lever.

  There was a jolt that threw Bruce back against the cushions of the seat. He felt pressure against his body, and saw the mountainous edge of the plain suddenly draw near. He grasped the controls, pulled back, and the little rocket boat soared over the mountains, soared directly upward into the golden, glistening, spinning glare of Saturn.

  He glanced for a split second behind him. The ship was already a miniature on a table-top moonscape. He fancied he saw a figure jump from the door, a tiny antlike figure, but then he turned his eyes back to the unknown rendezvous he had made with a lost father and a cosmic secret.

  CHAPTER 11 Look Before You Leap!

  Bruce buckled down to the job of getting to the rings. It was a thirty-one-thousand-mile leap, not at all simple even by the standards of his day. In an atmosphere the job would have been impossible in his limited time. But in the void of interplanetary space, where there was no air to slow down and to create frictional heat, the problem came down to one of speed.

  The theoretical speed of the tiny space boat was without any limit. As long as its rockets blasted, just so long it would increase its speed. If it could carry as much fuel as a giant space ship, it could go as fast. Therefore, in practice the question was one of determining how much fuel could be used for how long.

  The little boat carried a full load. The atomic fuel was hundreds of times more powerful than any of the chemical fuels of the dawn of rocketry back in the twentieth century. So this problem did not bother Bruce too much. He had power to spare for the work he planned to do.

  If he coasted at a thousand miles an hour, he would cross the space in thirty-one hours. At two thousand, in half that time. But half that time would still be too long. At five thousand an hour, it would be roughly six hours. That also left little time for him. So he applied his jets as fast as his wide-open throttle would permit.

  Bruce watched the dials before him on his small control panel. It was amazing how rapidly the speed grew. He felt the constant weight of his body as the tiny craft thrust forward at the top of a wide beam of blasting disintegrating material—a beam that left a swath of red and yellow behind him that stretched for half a mile before fading to invisibility. It took perhaps twenty minutes before the tiny rocket had reached the speed of twelve thousand miles an hour. He increased it still a bit more, then turned his engines off. The ship did not slow down, but, as happens in empty space, simply continued at that speed.

  As Bruce watched, he noticed that his speed was slowly increasing, very faintly. This, he recognized, was the pull of Saturn, for he was plunging directly toward it. In the proper time, he would adjust his speed. He had about three hours to make his destination, the outer rings of Saturn.

  He looked around him now, taking stock of his little boat. The rocket space boat was actually about the size of a small motorboat on Earth. The vessel was all enclosed, and the only living space was the cramped seat at the very nose, where the controls were. Just behind Bruce, underneath the leather-cushioned back of this driver’s seat, was a small space for storage, in which he had put his food. Some purification was supplied by the air system, though this would not operate with the perfection of the big ships. On those craft, the air was completely purified and reoxygenated. In this small boat, which was never intended for other than short trips, it would keep the air breathable for two or three days, although it would become quite stuffy early. After that, the air would rapidly get worse, and fill with poisonous gases and fumes.

  A Geiger counter and other devices for detection and analysis of space substances was part of the built-in machinery and registered on dials on the control board. Behind the air-purification valves were the engine, the tanks, the tubes, the mixing chambers, the electric system, and so on. This machinery, in fact, took up most of the tiny crafts space.

  There was no room for space suits. The driver was meant to be wearing one—and Bruce was. He remembered this now, and checking the air system of the boat, unscrewed the front plate of his helmet so that he breathed the ship’s air.

  Before Bruce, the great mass of Saturn was now occupying the entire sky. He gazed down at its fuming, whirling surface, watching in fascination the changes going on. He could see how the edges of the various colored gas belts mixed with each other, clashed, and formed little whirlpools and storms, as each continent-wide belt moved around the planet at a different speed. There was a feeling of great turmoil, of excitement and unrest. And, above all, of something that instilled fear at the thought of plunging into it.

  He seemed to be falling directly into this mass, into what would seem a boiling kettle of poisonous colors. Yet he knew that the temperature of these outer gas belts was probably far lower than anything he could bear. Perhaps, near the center of this monster planet, warmth existed. But before anything the size of his ship would ever get that far, it would be burned to a cinder by the friction of the fall.

  A wide black band across one-half of the planet reminded him of the rings. That would be the shadow they were casting. And he focused again on the white line that marked their rim, edgewise to him.

  It was already markedly wider. It was glistening and gleaming and sparkling, and slowly widening out. He knew it would be all too soon when he would reach that mysterious feature, that wonder of the whole solar system.

  He mentally estimated where he would make his entry into the rings. He knew that the outermost rings revolved once around Saturn every one hundred and thirty-seven hours. His father had known this and had entered the ring at a point when it was first coming into sight around the edge of the planet. In calculating the speed of the ring and the time that had passed, Bruce figured he had to make his entry at a point where his father would now be if he had stayed at the original entry spot.

  This was now about a third of the way beyond his fathers point, but very nearly in line with Bruce’s present direction. He directed his craft as close as he could to that spot in the ring. He adjusted his gyroscopic controls and blasted a bit to rise up above the rings as his father had done.

  Now he relaxed and waited. He switched on his beam radio, adjusted it back to Mimas. Almost instantly he heard Garcia’s voice:

  “Mimas calling Bruce Rhodes. Mimas calling Bruce Rhodes. Will you call us? Will you call us?”

  He hesitated a minute, then switched on his own answering radio beam: “Hello, Garcia. This is Bruce. Everything is O.K. I am on my way to the same point where Father disappeared.”

  Garcia replied instantly. “Come back, Bruce! Don’t throw your life away! We have too little time. Come back while you can.”

  Bruce replied quietly that he would not. “If I don’t return in time, go home without me. Don’t
try to persuade me. But let me know. Have you heard anything from my father?”

  Garcia didn’t argue. “Not a word. We haven’t been able to locate him. Keep in touch with us at all times.” “O.K.,” said the boy, “I’ll not sign off.”

  They kept up a running conversation from then on. Bruce described the course he was taking, described the appearance of space from where he was.

  He began to approach the rings. The edge of the other belt was now visibly wide and he could see that the sparkling was apparently caused by the fact that it was not solid as it appeared from distance, but that it was composed of innumerable little flickering dots. All these dots seemed to be racing along in unison, some turning as they went and evidently many irregular in shape. It was these irregularities that reflected the sunlight as they turned and produced the sparkling effect.

  He elevated his ship and began to turn it to move alongside the belt at a speed close to that of the moving mass. As he rose above it, it widened out more and more until it seemed to him that a vast glowing yellow field stretched out for hundreds of miles of space, almost a plateau, a plain of seeming smoothness.

  Then suddenly he noticed a small round dot apparently between him and the ring. Rapidly it came closer, then suddenly seemed to loom before him, a huge mass of white-lit stone plunging toward him. He touched the control of his boat, and it shot forward and the strange mass passed rapidly and silently behind him and vanished.

  Bruce was alarmed. What was that? A meteor? A part of the ring? He talked it over with Garcia.

  Garcia explained that it must have been a lone particle of a ring, one of the billions of such particles that made up the whirling halo around Saturn, but one that had not yet lost enough speed to travel in the mass. It was erratic, faster than most, therefore traveling along just outside the rings by itself.