Saturn Rukh

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Saturn Rukh

Robert L. Forward

No copyright 
 2014 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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1

BILLION FOR THE JOB

GOT A JOB FOR YOU. PAYS A BILLION.

The message blinked at the top of the screen three times, then disappeared. Rod Morgan smiled. He had been hearing rumors about a quasi-multigovernment, quasi-commercial consortium that was raising capital to sponsor a risky trip to Saturn. He closed down his game of WARPWORLD, and switched to net-mail to read the rest of the message. He’d guessed right, it was from the consortium. The job must really be risky for them to be offering a billion dollars. Although the penny was no longer legal tender, a billion dollars was still a large fortune.

Rod read the message. They were asking him to be commander of the mission. That didn’t surprise him, for after all, he
was
the best space pilot in the business. Without hesitation, he typed his reply.

JOB ACCEPTED, WHO ELSE IS ON MY CREW?

The reply soon made its way back over the ether and optical fibers of the SolNet. There were five names listed. Two— Seichi Takeo and Pete Stewart—were unfamiliar, while the other three were well known to Rod, since they were also involved in the project to build a resort on Mars. Sandra Green and Daniel Horning were stationed on Mars. Horning was one of the three medical doctors on Mars, and the best, besides being an excellent waste-handling engineer—an essential member of the engineering team on long crewed missions. Sandra was a biologist, part of the scientific team instructed to look for native Martian lifeforms. She was also the emergency medical technician for the small science group at Boreal Base. Fortunately for the consortium funding the Mars resort, but unfortunately for the scientists, it now looked like there
weren’t
any native lifeforms on Mars. As a result, there hadn’t been any major clamor by the greenie organization, the Peaceful Planet Protectors, against the further development of Mars.

The last of the three names, Chastity Blaze, was well known to Rod. He and she were part of the TransPlanet SpaceLines team that piloted freighters back and forth to Mars. Rod had finished his latest run two weeks ago and was taking a well-deserved vacation on the beaches in San Diego, working on his tan, while Chastity should be starting on her run home about now. If she was going to be part of his crew, this expedition was going to be fun as well as profitable. Rod closed his portable, being careful not to get any sand on it, put it away in its carry-bag, then ran down the beach and dove into the waves.

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Fifteen minutes later, the same message appeared on a touchscreen console in a large cargo spacecraft just leaving on a high-speed trajectory from Mars.

GOT A JOB FOR YOU. PAYS A BILLION.

At first, Chastity thought it was someone’s idea of a joke, so she searched carefully through the compressed linking-data at the end of the message for the address of the sender. It was [email protected]—Art Dooley, president of Space Unlimited. Although Art probably didn’t have a billion dollars himself, he knew where it could be found, so perhaps the message wasn’t a hacker prank after all. The efficient, short-nailed fingers of Chastity’s right hand flickered over the soft touchscreen and soon her reply was on its way back over the SolNet.

TELL ME MORE.

The Earth was on the opposite side of the Sun from Mars, so it would take the message over fifteen minutes to get to its destination. Then, it would take another fifteen minutes to get back. This gave Chastity plenty of time to think while she waited for the reply, for now that she had her ship under way, there was little for her to do. Pushing her bracelets up her left arm to get them out of the way, she returned to her work on the little finger of her left hand. The long nail had been wiped clean and Chastity was carefully painting on it the flag of Australia, with glued-on diamond chips for the stars. It would complete her collection of fingernail star-flags that she would wear on her left hand for a week before switching to another theme for next week. Each fingernail took a long time, but she had nothing but time now.

Chastity and her crew of two, copilot and scotty, were deadheading a Boeing-Mitsubishi freighter back from Mars after delivering a cargo of precision 3-D mechfabs, chemsyns, and specialized computer chips. There were plenty of raw materials on Mars, so instead of hauling food, fuel, habitats, and construction machines, she brought the specialized hardware that would allow the builders there to fabricate those necessities out of the Martian atmosphere and soil. All sorts of machines— including gigantic water well derricks, personal computers, bulldozers, Martian airplanes, and ballistic hoppers—were fabricated at Olympia Base using the precision mechfabs, with only the intricate computer chips—the brains of the machines—being imported from Earth.

While it was the precision mechfabs that made the machines, it was the chemsyns that made the fuel and food that kept the machines and humans fed. Chastity had even enjoyed a chemsyn-fabricated steak during her last evening on Mars. The artificial steak had been so tasty she had found herself reluctant to leave the mess hall table, wanting to order another rather than go off dancing with the muscular hunk that had been her date that evening.

The thought of her last date reminded Chastity that the only time she had met Art Dooley in person was also on a date. It was eight years ago. She was finishing her Ph.D. in astronautical engineering at MIT and Art was in his final year at Harvard Law School—specializing in space law. He had invited her to be his guest at an exclusive reception before the main banquet at the annual meeting of the International Astronautical Federation, which was being held in Boston that year. At that time in her life, she still wore long nails and multiple rings on both hands. She remembered that she had put on her best red-sequined strapless evening gown for the occasion. As the youngest and tallest woman there, she had attracted a lot of attention, and when the tuxedoed IAF brass found that the statuesque black-haired violet-eyed beauty could hold her own in engineering discussions, they had remembered her. She had impressed a lot of important people that night, including the Boeing-Mitsubishi CEO. That contact had resulted in a job as a spacecraft test pilot, which in turn led to her present job with TransPlanet—as she became a pilot of the ships she had tested.

She remembered that Art had been very supportive of her that night, making sure that she was introduced to the right people, then stepping back deferentially and listening, while letting her control the conversation. Strangely, he never asked her out again. Now, eight years later, here was this mysterious message from him.

It was at a similar IAF meeting five years earlier that the
real
space age had started. In an obscure paper entitled “The Properties of NHe
₆₄
*”, an optoatomic cluster-molecule chemist named George Phillips from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, had described to the aerospace engineers the structure and energetics of nitro-stabilized metastable helium, now called nitrometahelium by the atomic scientists, but “meta” by the aerospace engineers.

Meta was a strange molecule, with a structure somewhere between that of a buckyball and a bunch of grapes. At the core of a meta cluster was a single atom of excited nitrogen, surrounded by sixty-four helium atoms, each atom with one of its electrons raised into a more energetic metastable state. Metastable helium had always been easy to form—just pass some high-voltage electricity through helium gas. Large numbers of metastable helium atoms existed in every neon sign and the helium-neon lasers in grocery store checkout stands. It had long been known that if metastable helium could be stored, it would make a superb rocket fuel, since it contained more energy per kilogram than any other material known. If left to itself, a metastable helium atom would have a lifetime of two and a half hours, but if you crowded the atoms together in a fuel tank, the lifetime dropped to a fraction of a second, making the stuff useless as a rocket fuel.

Phillips had found that if you made a merged beam of helium and nitrogen atoms, and excited the atoms into their metastable states with lasers, the metastable helium atoms would cluster around the nitrogen atoms. The cluster constructed of sixty-four metastable helium atoms surrounding a single excited nitrogen atom turned out to be exceptionally stable. In some strange, still not understood way, the single nitrogen atom completely stabilized the excited helium atoms. The meta clusters were readily condensed into a liquid. Best of all, the liquid meta could be handled and stored over a wide range of temperatures without danger of explosion. Even the occasional cosmic ray couldn’t trigger a chain reaction. When the meta was heated beyond twenty-two hundred K, however, the clusters disintegrated. Milliseconds later, the sixty-four helium atoms from the cluster would release their energy, creating a reddish-purple plasma of ionized helium gas along with the occasional nitrogen atom.