“How are we doing?” he thought to ask once while chasing a particularly elusive piece of metal.
“Very well,” his father replied. “Better than I had hoped for. It seems that this Saturn engine must have some tricks to it that we haven't discovered yet because we are making better speed than I had estimated.”
Bruce finally caught the metal, tossed it out. “That's good,” he said, “but won’t that interfere with your calculations on getting to Hidalgo?”
“Ha!” retorted his father dryly. “What calculations? When did I ever have a chance to make any?”
“Huh!” Bruce was momentarily astonished. “But how are we traveling then? How will you get to our asteroid?”
His father said, “We’ll go by rule of thumb and by sight direction. Since we have fuel to spare—all our fuel being a gift, sort of, from Terraluna—we can afford to waste as much as we want taking a more indirect course, taking a longer trip. This business of carefully calculating the shortest and quickest route to a planet is all because of having to save fuel and time. If you had endless fuel and all the time in the world, you could go anywhere in space without calculations.”
“Well, we certainly don’t have all the time in the world,” Bruce remarked. “As a matter of fact, I’m getting hungry.”
“Sorry,” said his father. “I don’t know what we can do about it in this ship. No airlock we can lock ourselves in and snatch a bite. Maybe we can rig an air bubble around us with some tent cloth, if we have any.”
“I think there's some among the spare rope,” said Bruce, and found it. After a little trouble and some tricky acrobatics, Bruce managed to get enough of a covering about his helmet and hands so that he could snap open his helmet and pop a bite into his mouth, as well as snatch a drink from his canteen.
Working back to his father, he was able to repeat the process. “Thanks,” his dad said when the tricky process was over. “I was wondering if we ourselves could hold out.”
By this time the ship was free of Saturn's moon system. And by this time also the ship was pretty much of a skeleton craft. Bruce could glance in any direction and see the stars shining unopposed. The ringed planet was always in sight, its moons attending it.
More and more the loose bits of the ship fell apart. As they progressed, Bruce wondered what would be left by the time they reached Hidalgo.
One fuel tank was now empty, and he cut this adrift. “Any sign of Hidalgo?” he asked.
“Not yet,” said his father, his eyes roving around the stars before the ship. “Look for a thin crescent showing up among the stars in that direction,” he waved a hand and pointed.
Another section of the side plates swung outward silently and fell away into space as Bruce looked. Checking the damage, Bruce finally again stared off.
His eyes were tired, and he was tired from the constant vigilance and work. He didn’t think he had been able to catch a moment's rest since the take-off. The unshielded vibration of the gyro and the blasting tubes were another steady strain.
He stared anxiously at the black star-strewn sky. Now he thought he saw the tiny crescent his father had mentioned. “Imagination,” he murmured to himself, and turned his eyes away, and then back. The crescent was still there. He called to his father and Dr. Rhodes confirmed it.
“It’s Hidalgo,” he said. “Maybe we could call Garcia on that radio Jennings gave us?”
Bruce looked for the radio, but then he saw another bolt floating along and went for it. “No time, Dad,” he said, and swung down for the new bit of wreckage.
He kept busy as the next hour passed. Finally he paused and glanced down. The bulk of the little asteroid was already filling the sky, and he saw that his father was angling down to circle the little world for a landing. He made his way to the nose and sat by his father.
“Can you see the ship?” he asked, and almost immediately answered himself, by pointing and yelling, “There it is!” Sure enough, the tiny metal gleam of their UN ship could be seen resting near the canyon that Bruce and Arpad had discovered. He thought he caught a glimpse of a figure standing near it, but it may have been a trick of his imagination.
Bruce looked around as their golden ship circled for a landing. It would probably be a crashing, skidding stop, he realized.
The craft was now a mere skeleton. A long central beam, at one end the blunted golden nose, at the center a revolving wheel, at the end a cluster of tanks and diamond tubes and flaring jets. Two men in space suits clinging to loose ropes and bits of thin spidery girders moving among the open airless interior.
“What a shock this will be to Arpad,” Bruce thought, as his father brought the spooky framework space ship down closer and closer and finally set it to rest with remarkable softness and skill. The jets shut off, the gyrowheel stopped, and Bruce and his dad flopped off onto the surface of Hidalgo. A moment later the central tube of the ancient ship bent slowly down and the whole mass collapsed in a heap of gold and diamond parts.
Bruce and his father sat there by the pile of glittering junk and laughed as the figures of Garcia and Arpad Benz came lumbering up, waving their hands in excited greeting.
The Secret of Saturn’s Rings Page 16
