The Secret of Saturn’s Rings

by Donald A. Wollheim

  “There must be thousands and thousands of such outlying bits and chunks of rock. The closer you get, the more you will find. You’ll have to keep a careful lookout from now on. You may be able to estimate the speed of the ring-particles, but these are wilder.”

  Bruce was keyed up, on edge. He saw another approach, whirl past and vanish. Then more loomed up, a group of them, passing beneath him. Now he was beginning to near the edge of the outer ring.

  And he noticed something on his radio. He had been so intent on the new danger that he had failed to realize that Garcia’s voice was becoming obscured by humming, and that screams and squeals of static were beginning to come into the background of his reception.

  “Garcia,” he asked, “can you hear me perfectly? Are you getting static now?”

  The noises were increasing greatly. When Garcia answered, he could hear part and then had to strain for the rest. But he knew the answer. Bruce’s voice was being drowned out by the same mysterious static that had blanked out his father’s voice.

  Bruce would have liked to examine his radio apparatus, but it was built in under his control panel. Besides, the task of keeping on the jump to avoid the stray boulders and meteors that were now coming heavier and heavier left little time for that.

  Now he was over the outer edge, several hundred miles over at last and suddenly the sky was clear of flying dots.

  Apparently these loose bits hung in the same plane as the rings. Whatever the original cause, the momentum and direction forced them all into the same level. Their speeds might differ, but rise above or below the level of the rest of the ring material they could not.

  Yet the static continued. Now Bruce had time to examine his dials again. He saw now that one, which had been unmoving before was now wigwagging back and forth steadily. He looked at it and realized that it was the Geiger counter, the detector of radioactivity.

  There was radioactive substance nearby somewhere. And he realized at the same time that this was the cause of the static, of the interference with his radio.

  He explained this to Garcia, repeating and shouting, so that the squealing and screeching which his shipmate reported on the increase would not drown out his voice. Already his own ears were numb from the noise when he tried to hear Garcia. Finally, he realized that he had to do what his father had done. He yelled that he was turning the radio off, that they could no longer communicate because of the static. When he managed to hear a few snatches of Garcia’s voice acknowledging, he switched off.

  The silence was stunning at first. He had become used to the fact that for the last couple of hours his tiny space boat had been vibrating with voices and humming. Now all was silent save for the faint hissing of his air system and a clicking in his controls. The click was the Geiger counter, checking off the stray hits of radioactive particles.

  Bruce realized that one small part of his father’s theory about the rings of Saturn was correct. They were radioactive. Now the question was, were they so much so that to go into their midst would be to court death?

  He thought about this a split moment, then shrugged his shoulders. He had gone this far. There could be no turning back. Death from radioactivity did not come at once. It would take days, weeks, months. He would have time to make all the observations necessary and to report them to Earth. Besides, the ship was insulated a bit and so was the suit.

  He turned his ship and prepared to level down for a plunge into the coldly flickering flat plain that was the outermost ring.

  CHAPTER 12 Marooned Among the Moonlets

  As Bruce drew his little space boat down closer and closer to the glowing “top” of the outermost ring of Saturn, the seeming solidness gradually changed. What had appeared from far away to be almost a shining unbroken surface, became now a shifting mass, very much the same way that a diver leaping from a high board over a pool detects the tiny wavelets that move across the pool’s surface as he plunges downward—wavelets that had not been noticed from his higher perch.

  For a moment Bruce had the odd impression that he was diving into a golden sea. But this impression changed again as the sea seemed to draw apart into droplets, moving together in one great current, but still, droplets separate from each other.

  He leveled his boat out to skim above the flow, adjusted his controls so that his speed caught up with that of the current, so that the glowing droplets now slowed down until from his viewpoint in the boat they were at last standing still.

  This was an illusion, of course, because it merely meant that Bruce was now moving in the same direction they were and at the same speed. The effect was that of two trains rushing along parallel tracks together, so that the passengers could look out and converse with those on the next train—even while both trains were tearing over the ground. So it was with the various tiny shining bodies that made up the glowing stream of the rings.

  Bruce, having reached what was now to be his basic speed, wherein the particles of the ring beneath him were now apparently standing still, dropped his little boat lower and lower, closer and closer. What had been droplets became shining dots, became now masses, separated more and more from each other by space. Bruce could detect the faint disk of one of Saturn’s other moons shining through the ring, for the ring was by no means so tightly packed as to cut off all such stellar views. Stars could be seen through the mass as well.

  The closer he got, the more the ring space opened up. And now almost before he realized it he was within the ring, moving with it, part of it. Before him there hung a great wall-like cluster of objects. Most were rather spherical in shape like tiny asteroids, many were irregular in shape, some were big, some small, and many were probably no larger than meteor nuggets.

  Behind him a similar mass of objects filled the sky. On both sides and now above, other objects hung. Moving as he was at the same speed they all were, the effect was incredible for space—for the impression the mind got was that they were stationary, hanging in emptiness without support.

  For a while Bruce simply sat and watched the eerie sight. Somehow, in all the trip he had simply never turned his imagination to what it would be like in the rings. Now that he was actually here, it all seemed so unlike what he had thought. He had somehow felt that the rings would be perilous, would be madly dashing in all directions, that it would be like being on a shooting gallery with lunatics firing machine guns in all directions. But this effect of stillness was something he was mentally unprepared for.

  As he watched, he saw now that there were motions among the ring-particles. Some masses were slowly moving upward, others downward, and he noticed that a few here and there seemed to lag behind. He noticed now that two particles in front of him, one a great rocky sphere and another a small cubelike blackish chunk, were gradually drawing together. In a few seconds there was a slow bump, and just as gradually the two particles moved away from each other again.

  The orderliness of the ring was not the result of any plan or system, it was simply the end product of millions of years of bumping and colliding, whereby the speeds of all the parts had been gradually slammed and shunted into unison, absorbed into each other, the faster particles gathering in one ring, the slower in another. The process was still going on, would undoubtedly go on as long as the rings lasted.

  The sun shone through the ring and the light of Saturn shone as well and each little body was lit on one side and darkish on the other, just as if they were independent worldlets riding on their own instead of members of a vast crowd.

  The Geiger counter was reacting wildly, and Bruce knew that the source of the radioactivity was here, in the rings. He suspected that the particles themselves were radioactive, but he knew it was his duty to check further. He picked a large mass among those in front of him, slowly increased the speed of his boat and moved toward it.

  As he drew nearer, it grew larger and larger. With amazement it suddenly dawned on Bruce it was large, that it was perhaps a half-mile in diameter, bigger than many city blocks. Its size was n
ot apparent from a distance. Bruce felt a slight chill as he realized that most of these ring-particles were big. If one brushed against his boat, it would not be the nudge of a pebble; it would be the nudge of an object whose momentum and weight would smash his little boat like an eggshell, no matter how apparently slight and slow the touch came.

  The problem was one, however, that Bruce could handle. It resolved into the same thing as making a landing on a small asteroid. Bruce worked closer to the moonlet, down to its surface, which loomed up like a small world, and with scarcely a jar rolled his ship down in a groove on its side. He pressed his magnetic anchors out. The moonlet, like most cosmic material, had iron in its make-up. The little boat stuck fast.

  Bruce closed the visor of his space-suit helmet, started his airflow, and opened the cockpit panel. With pick and drill fastened to his belt, magnetic shoes in operation, Bruce stepped out. Before letting go of his boat, he fastened a nylon rope to a stanchion on the boat’s side and the other to his own suit. He dared take no chances. If something should nudge his moonlet somewhere, it might throw Bruce and his boat off.

  Standing outside the boat, on the surface of a particle in Saturn’s ring stream, Bruce looked about. Above him and on all sides, great rocks and tiny worldlets hung, apparently suspended in black space. Beneath his feet was a world, a very, very tiny one, whose horizon seemed to fall away fifty or sixty feet from where he stood. He seemed thus to be on a mountaintop whose sides would be very steep and precipitous.

  The worldlet was mainly grayish, rocky, but where he had landed his ship was a deep sharp valley, dipping down a couple dozen yards. Having approached it from above, Bruce knew that this valley was a scar, a gash caused by some collision with another ring-particle, some time in the past.

  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.

  CHAPTER 13 Strange Static

  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.