The Secret of Saturn’s Rings (12 page)

He noticed that the scar had opened up the surface and shown up something of the inside of the worldlet. There were streaks of reddish ore, darker pockets, and in one space a curious out jutting, at the very lowest point of the scar of what seemed like shining metal.

Bruce worked his way along the scar, chipping off fragments of the various types of material, stuffing these fragments in the wide pockets of his space suit. These alone would be invaluable to the astronomers in their study of these rings.

As Bruce approached the shining outcropping, he became puzzled. It did not have the appearance of raw metal. Rather, it seemed like artificially worked stuff, like polished and hardened metal. He came up to it, stopped, mouth open in wonder.

His thoughts were right. The object was a part of a girder, the kind men use to build houses or bridges with. It was made of a hard and polished white metal, but it was part of a structure of some sort, beyond all question. He could see the holes where rivets might once have been, he could see that it was made of several pieces of worked metal, joined together in some type of welding. It jutted out from the scar, the bulk of it buried in the rock and mass. He could see now that there were scratches and linings revealed at the bottom of the scar showing other parts of building.

He stood staring, his mind a whirl of emotion. He tried to imagine what a building girder would be doing some dozens of feet underneath the surface of a rocky moonlet. He gazed at the scar for some time, remembered now various cracks and lines in the surface of this ring-chunk. A chill suddenly coursed its way down his spine.

Somewhere, at some time, a building had stood on an open plain, in sight of the sky. Or perhaps it was a bridge, or a railroad trestle. Something had happened to that plain, to the place where the building had stood. It had been torn apart, ripped out like a piece of hand grenade is tom off, and crushed like a piece of mud in a strong hand. The plain, the rock on which the building stood, had simply folded up on it, engulfed it, buried it, crushed it and covered it.

And it had taken the accidental collision with another such chunk to tear aside the hardened rocky fist and reveal the secret it held in its eternal grip.

Bruce’s mind whirled at the thought. Suddenly he felt sick, sick with the discovery he had made. He sat down by the girder, put his head in his hands.

Gradually he felt better. But he still refused to try to put the clues together. He suspected the answer, but he wanted to put off bringing it into his conscious mind until the danger of his present position was abated.

He tried to break off a piece of the girder, but it wouldn’t even scratch. That was not surprising, considering what it had apparently resisted so far. But bending down and searching along the very bottom of the deep cleft, he was able to come up with several handfuls of gravel and dust among which he spotted shiny particles that had probably been sheared off from the girder or other objects like it when the collision had occurred. These would do perfectly for analysis back on Earth, and he put these handfuls into his pocket.

He made his way back to his little space boat, deposited his samples in the storage box, unhooked his nylon rope, and got back into his control seat. Closing the panel, he took off carefully until he again floated in the midst of the current of ring-chunks.

He worked his craft slowly along, letting his speed lag so that the stream began to move slowly past him. He decided he would try and find another particle that might have further evidence of artificial construction. Many went past him, most of them seeming to be rocklike meteors, others spherical, but without anything in sight that looked promising.

Then he saw one coming along that was not spherical. It was a blackish mass, roughly cubical in shape and probably not more than a couple of hundred feet along any side. This held promising irregularities. He eased his way over to it, brought his little space boat against it, worked his way into a pocket in the blackish mass.

The magnetic anchor didn’t seem to work. Bruce wasn’t upset; in fact he was hoping to find something that would not be a typical meteor rock. This time when he opened the cockpit panel, he attached the nylon rope to his suit before getting out. Taking another such rope from the locker beneath the seat, he eased out and carefully roped the ship down, tying it bodily to the little moonlet.

He knew now he had a real find in this particular chunk. It was nonmetallic, it had the appearance of dirt frozen into great solidity. In one place, a white band proved in fact to be a streak of frozen gas. A small sample bottle in his pocket was good for that. He opened the bottle, and what air there was inside simply vanished into the near-vacuum of space. Then he chipped off bits of the frozen gas, forced the snowy chunks into the bottle, capped the bottle again. Back in the ship, when the bottle warmed up a little, that gas would melt. It would enable Earth’s chemists to determine something else about the origin of these rings.

Impressed into the black substance were shapes that looked like vegetation. He knew that any particle in these rings had probably been pounded by all the others innumerable times over countless ages. Anything recognizable would long ago have been pounded flat. But flat or not, the stuff would yield to analysis. And Bruce felt sure that what he was standing on was a chunk of forest, or plant-bearing ground, a chunk that had been torn away, folded up and crushed in the same giant fist that had shattered the place of the broken girder.

Knowing that he was holding treasures that would add to the history of the universe and to man’s understanding of existence, Bruce worked his way back to his space boat, loaded with samples. He bent over the open cockpit and started to stow his samples away.

Suddenly, without warning, there was a terrific jolt. Something seemed to strike him a thud on the back. He almost lost his balance. The ship rocked. When he regained, looked around, he saw to his horror that a small meteor-like moon-particle, not more than a foot across, had bounced into the end of his boat and bounded away into the void again.

It had shattered the engine. Bruce was stranded.

Stunned, Bruce stood and stared at the tiny round meteor the size of a basketball drifting back into the black disk-strewn sky. It was hard to believe that anything that seemed to be so light, as to bounce, was in fact hard iron or stone, whose weight was sufficient to crush the engine section of his rocket ship, shatter it as if it had been struck by a steam-driven hammer.

But there it was, the damage was done. He looked into the ship. The front half was intact, what had been struck were his tubes, his wires were wrecked, torn, his carefully tooled vents cracked, and his fuel was fizzing away in a cloud of vapor. The little boat would never be able to fly again. Bruce was now without any means to return to Mimas, to return to Earth with his invaluable information.

In the past few minutes he had come to realize that he held the answer to the problem his father had posed, the question that had brought them all the way out here against the opposition of Terraluna. lie knew the secret that Saturn’s rings held—and now he could never reveal his secret.

For it was an important one, the most important probably that men had faced in their history, one that might result in the greatest error that any intelligent species could make—their own self-destruction.

Briefly, what Bruce had come to realize, to figure out from all the bits of evidence that had been put before him, was this story:

Once, millions and millions of years ago, when Saturn was still a young planet and had not cooled off as much as it had now, it radiated sufficient extra heat from its own surface to add to that of the sun and make its nearest satellites warm enough to sustain life.

At that time, when life on Earth was limited to scaly dinosaurs and crawling lizards walking about in steaming fogbound tropical jungles, Saturn had no rings. It had an innermost satellite, a large one, large enough to hold an atmosphere. And on this moon there had been life, and among those living things, one creature had learned to use tools and to talk and to pass information to its young. This creature developed a civilization in the course of time, used metals, built cities, discovered machinery, and at last discovered the use of atomic energy.

They had reached out a bit, investigated their fellow Saturnian moons, built colonies or cities on them— such as the ruins on Mimas. They had explored and dreamed of the conquest of the universe. Perhaps they may have sent space ships as far as the savage primitive Earth, and come back to report it a dangerous and terrible place to visit.

In the course of their work, they discovered the need to dig for the atomic elements that made their cities run and factories hum, the deep-hidden heavy metals that were so vital to atomic work. And they had discovered what astronomers and geologists of Earth know, that the heaviest elements sink to the core of a planet when it is created, and that it is in the heart of a world that they must dig to find what they need.

And so the ancient Saturn moon-men invented deep-core mining. And they invented the same processes that Terraluna was now preparing to use on Earth’s moon.

They had gone ahead with their atomic blasting, had gone down into the very center of their satellite, and rocked it with the vibrations and shocks of atomic releases. The satellite was close to Saturn and its gravitational pull. It was under the stress of constant shifts in the gravity pull as it moved around its parent planet. And now the series of super-atomic blows at the center of the moon added to the strain and it was too much.

One horrible day that moon of Saturn must have been broken apart, blown up, and shattered into bits. Torn by Saturn’s pull, struck at its heart, the fragile crust cracked and smashed and was blown apart.

Some part of the moon escaped into outer space to wander forever as meteors or to fall flaming into the sun. Some fell into the soft mass of Saturn to bum briefly into ashes and gas. But a great part of the moon’s wreckage continued to travel around its parent planet, following the course that it had followed when it was one single mass. Instead of one body, however, there were now millions and millions of tiny pieces.

Some of the pieces were moving faster than others, depending on what part of the satellite they had been when the blowup occurred, others moved slower. So some circled the planet and caught up with their slower brothers.

For thousands of years great confusion must have existed—constant collisions, constant flares as particles continued to fall into the parent planet. But in the course of the endless years, gradually the odd bits were sorted out, gradually a pattern was established. By the time the lizards of Earth had lost their leadership to certain soft-skinned, two-legged creatures, and these same bipeds had learned to control nature and to build telescopes, Saturn had its rings.

That was the secret of Saturn. That was the meaning of the mines on Mimas, of the girder on the moonlet, of the crushed mass of forest land on which Bruce’s wrecked rocket boat rested. That was the meaning of the radioactivity which seemed to be present in the rings—even after these millions of years, the atomic blast’s mark was still felt.

There was no doubt in Bruce’s mind that he had all the evidence he needed to convince Earth of the danger of deep-core atomic mining. He believed that even Terraluna would accept the facts without further argument. Nobody, certainly, could want to see Luna shattered, to see Earth bombarded with its parts for years to come, to see the Earth become a ringed world —and a ruined one.

But—how could he now bring this news back? Had he made his discovery too late? It would certainly be a cosmic joke on mankind if he failed now.

Bruce wandered about the little ring-particle, thinking. Time and again he wondered about repairing the ship, but it was impossible, completely impossible. If, he thought, he could at least radio his findings back to Arpad and Garcia, then they could carry the news. It would not be in vain.

He returned to the rocket boat, closed the cockpit panel. It still seemed airtight. He started the air pump to fill the little tiny cabin. It seemed to work, and then he noticed that it was a losing proposition. There were cracks. He couldn’t quite succeed in building up any amount of pressure.

The controls were working, the radio was working. He switched it on. There was a roar of static, of radioactive interference. He moved the directional beam control. For an instant there was static silence. He suddenly became all attention.

Bruce shifted the beam slowly. Now he saw that the moonlet on which the ship rested was acting as a shield. It was not radioactive. He supposed that, because it was not iron or rock, it had long ago lost the charge from the initial explosion. When his beam was pointed at the “ground,” the interference was blanketed.

Just what good this would do him, he could not at first determine. Yet he felt that somehow it was a first step to the problem at hand. He emerged from the cabin, looked around. There was a pit in the ground nearby, a hole punched by some meteor at some time in the past. He untied the nylon ropes that anchored the little rocket boat, and then dragged the craft over to the pit. It would fit in, and he pushed it so that it floated to the bottom.

Drifting down to join it, he again tied it down, got into the cockpit. Now the craft was in a hole, open only at the top, on all sides and below was the insulated shield of the coal-like particle. He adjusted his beam to reach out directly above, and tried it.

Again there was a roar of static, but this time he was able to detect the various tones in it. He had blanketed out all but the one small sector above him. All the interference he would now get would come only as moon-particles passed by.

By carefully tuning his receiver, he was finally able to have some control over his reception. He would get momentary periods of near-silence, when for a brief instant no great mass would be passing overhead or in his way. There were instances when he knew he would be able to send a message or to hear one if by luck Mimas was in his direction when a message was coming.