Read Ebook: Outside Saturn by Gilbert Robert E Kluga Richard Illustrator

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Ebook has 205 lines and 10458 words, and 5 pages

Release date: October 5, 2023

Original publication: New York, NY: Royal Publications, Inc, 1957

OUTSIDE SATURN

Illustrated by RICHARD KLUGA

Gangsters were out of date, and the ice-sweeper was an unlikely thing to steal. But Vicenzo was a streak, so what else could Henry do?

Aziz ripped the radio from Henry's spacesuit and carefully resealed the panel. "Dis'll be the weldin' of ya, kid," Aziz said, crinkling his round, sallow face in an attempt to smile. "Yer name'll be in ever' yap--in our orbit, dat is."

"But what--" Henry tried to say.

"No doubt at all," Vicenzo agreed, cleverly shorting Henry's drive tube.

"I don't--" Henry said.

"Vicenzo figured it right, kid," Aziz said. He gestured with powerful arms too long for his short body. "Ya'll hit dat ole sweeper square on the bulb. Vicenzo's a streak."

"I'm a genius," Vicenzo admitted. He smoothed the black bangs covering his forehead to the eyebrows, and he fingered the pointed sideburns reaching to his chin. "You jump into space, Henry, and then we'll increase velocity and sink into the Rings."

Aziz begged, "Do us a blazer, kid. We won't go far. Too low on fuel." He lowered the helmet over Henry's bushy, blond hair and ruddy face and clamped it shut.

Vicenzo and Aziz left Henry in the airvalve and closed the inner door. When the valve emptied to vacuum, Henry reluctantly lowered the outer door and stepped to the magnetized platform.

Henry stood twenty meters above Ring B of the Rings of Saturn. Below him, balls of ice, metal, rock, and assorted cosmic debris flowed slowly past with stars occasionally visible between the whirling particles. To either side, the billions of tiny moons blended with distance to form a solid, glaring white band. Henry bent his knees and dived into space.

Holding his body stiff with a practiced rigidity, and cautiously moving arms and legs to check any tendency to tumble, Henry glided above the Rings. Turning his head, he saw exhaust spurt from the collection of spherical cabins, tanks, and motors that was the spaceship; and the craft moved from his line of sight, leaving him alone.

Henry drifted above a flat surface more than sixty-six thousand kilometers wide. To his left, Ring B extended to the black circle of the Cassini Division which separated it from the less brilliant Ring A. To his right, the gleam of Ring B abruptly changed to the dimness of the Crape Ring through which the surface of Saturn was visible. Of the giant planet, forty-three thousand kilometers away, Henry saw but half a crescent marked with vague white and yellow bands and obscure spots.

Red and green lights blinked ahead. Most of the approaching ice-sweeper was shadowed and invisible against the blackness of space. Henry saw no lighted windows, but he experimentally aimed his signal torch at a dome on top of the space station.

Moving with the exact velocity of the Ring, the sweeper, a bundle of huge cylindrical tanks bound together with fragile girders, apparently grew larger. A rectangular snout, swinging from side to side and probing into the Ring, dangled below the front of the sweeper. Dancing in mutual gravitational attraction, the tiny moons constantly closed the open lane behind the snout.

Henry blinked his torch and saw its red reflection in the sweeper's observation dome, but no one answered the signal. Gaudy with lights, the station drifted past below Henry's level and nearly one hundred meters away.

Henry struggled futilely in his suit and tumbled through space. He saw the flaming arch of the Milky Way and then the immense shadow of Saturn stretching black across the Rings. Somewhere, the bright exhaust of a distant spaceship streaked across the stars.

Fire shot past Henry's gyrating figure. A thin cable followed the small rocket. Henry's flailing arms struck the cable, and his gauntleted hands gripped the strands. He pulled back the spent rocket, and the missile's magnetic head clanked against his spacesuit. The lifeline reeled him toward the station.

A hairless, brown, deeply wrinkled face watched Henry from a small window beside an open airvalve. The cable pulled Henry to the muzzle of a rocket launcher. He jerked the magnetic head loose and shut himself into the valve. He slid the inner door open and, weakly kicking his legs, floated on his back into the sweeper.

An old man, the owner of the wrinkled face, stopped Henry from drifting into the far wall of the cramped compartment. The old man wore shorts and a sleeveless shirt, and his shrunken limbs seemed to have no muscles. He drew Henry down to the magnetized deck and removed the space helmet.

"You're just a boy!" the man wheezed in a cracked voice. "Where'd you come from, boy?"

Henry, watching through half-closed eyes, almost said that he was twenty years old. Then he remembered to mutter, "Water."

The old man said, "How'd you get out here? There's been no ships in days. What are you doing here all by yourself? I almost missed you. You'd been on a bad course if I had. Just happened to see your torch twirling around out there. Ain't many people can come that close with a life rocket and not hit a fellow. For a second, I thought the rocket was going to bust you. Of course, being skillful the way I am, it didn't seem likely, but I--"

"Water," Henry moaned.

"Water? Why sure. How long you been drifting, boy? Must be mighty thirsty. What's your name? I'm Ranjit. I've never got used to people not telling their last names. Of course, even when I was your age, most people called each other by their first names. I can't hardly remember what my last name is. You might not think it to look at me, but I'm 107 years old. Here, let's get you out of that suit and see what kind of shape you're in."

Horizontal and vertical wrinkles formed ragged crosshatching on Ranjit's forehead. His nose and ears were large and grotesque with age. He unsealed the spacesuit at the waist and, holding Henry against the deck with one hand, pulled off the top section.

"Water!" Henry gasped. Peeping secretly, he saw that the teletype, near the airvalve, was dismantled, with the parts tied in bunches floating over the empty case. He located the radio above an aluminum desk in the far corner. He could see no visular set anywhere.

"Water!" Henry pleaded. He had to do something to make Ranjit leave the compartment. He tried to listen for sounds that would locate the other crew members. Holding his handsome blond head in his hands, he sat up. The movement lifted his body from the deck, leaving his metal-soled shoes attached, so that he sat in mid-air.

"Water?" said Ranjit. "If there's one thing I've got, it's water. Let me see, there must be a flask someplace." He rummaged in the netting that covered two opposite walls of the compartment and secured an incredible clutter of weightless tools, books, food cases, clothing, oxygen tanks, spacesuit parts, wire, tubing, and other items. Still talking, Ranjit vanished through an opening almost concealed by the net.

Henry leaped to the radio. He whipped a pair of insulated snips from his pocket and cut through the electric cord in four places. He thrust the severed pieces behind the desk and stood listening. Somewhere, Ranjit continued talking, but Henry heard no answering voices. The only other sounds were the whine of electric motors and the throb of pumps. Henry pulled out a screwdriver and paused as he noticed a sign above the desk. The sign said:

Shaking his head, Henry released the clamps, turned the radio, pried off the back, and stabbed and slashed at the interior with the screwdriver. He replaced the back and returned to his position on the deck just in time.

"--really should," Ranjit continued, walking through the door. "You're lucky I saw you at all. Of course, I'm watchful all the time. Would you believe I've been right here on this sweeper for nine years? Here's some water, boy."

Henry squirted water from the flexible flask into his mouth. Ranjit said, "You ain't as thirsty as I thought you was. How come you wasn't calling for help?"

"No radio," Henry mumbled. "The drive tube wouldn't work either."

"What were you doing in a bunged-up suit like that? You'll never live to be as old as me if you take such chances. If this station had visular, I'd have picked you up in that, but the company said I wouldn't have no use for it."

"Where is everybody?" Henry asked, pushing himself unsteadily to his feet.

"Everybody who? Are you hungry? How long since you had anything to eat? There's nobody here but me. Karoly and Wilbur both passed beyond, Wilbur just two weeks ago. He was only 94 too. The company's sending some help, they say. I don't see how they expect one man to run an ice-sweeper, even if he is handy like me. This is a dangerous job, although you might not think so. Do you realize, young fellow, we're whizzing around Saturn once every nine hours, four minutes, and twelve seconds? That's an orbital velocity of nineteen point eight kilometers per second! We've got to go that fast to stay in this orbit."

"There's no one else here but you?" Henry said.

"Think what would happen if something slowed us down!" Ranjit exclaimed. "We'd start falling toward Saturn and finally crash! Meteors are scarce out here, but what if a spaceship came around retrograde and smashed this station head-on? There ain't a thing I can do if it starts falling. Part of it's a ship, but the company took the motor out. All I've got is the flywheel steering gear. The control room's right up there above my bunk."

Ranjit pointed to a sandwich bunk hoisted against the pipes and conduits that crisscrossed the ceiling in abstract patterns. He said, "I can spin this sweeper like a top, if I want to, but I can't accelerate it." He squinted through the small window beside the airvalve. "Speaking of spaceships," he rambled, "there's one out there now. Wonder who it is? There's not a thing on the schedule. Looks like they would've called in."

Moving to the radio, the old man fumbled with knobs and switches and pounded on the cabinet with his fist. "This radio's deader than a asteroid!" he yelled. "First the teletype and now the radio. I'm supposed to report all ships to Titan, but how can I with no equipment? Maybe that's your ship come hunting you. What did you say your name is?"

"Henry," said Henry.

"Henry, huh? My name's Ranjit. I better get up to the big valve. That ship'll be clinching in a minute."

"What does that sign mean?" said Henry, seizing the old man's bony wrist.

"Sign? Oh, there over the desk? I just put that there to confuse people. It's a puzzle that spells out something in an old-time language, Latin maybe. Christian Huygens published that way back in 1655. He used a puzzle while he was checking some more. He was the first man to figure out what was around Saturn. It means something like, 'There's a flat ring that's inclined to the ecliptic that circles the planet without touching it.' Well, let go of me. I've got to see about that ship."

"Just stay here and be calm, Ranjit," Henry said.

"What?"

"Be good, and you won't get hurt."

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