Saturn Rukh Read Online Free PDF

the robot reached for a metal rod with a red streamer attached to it and pulled it out of the cylinder. Seichi looked down at the display in the center of the touchscreen console in front of him. In the console display was a lower-resolution image of the view in the holoviewport, colored in the false colors of an infrared imager. Most of the image was in black and dark grays, except for the maintenance robot, which had a dark-red body and yellow leg-joints.
     
    “Bring the reactor up to minimum level for checkout, Jeeves,” said Seichi.
     
    “How far away is that reactor?” whispered Chastity to Rod. “I don’t see any shielding!”
     
    “It doesn’t have any shielding,” said Rod. “But don’t worry, Chass, the reactor is out in a compartment in that donut-shaped module, hundreds of meters away from us.”
     
    “Oh! Right...” said Chastity, now remembering the details of the briefing she had received on the nuclear reactor power supply. “That’s far enough away for a checkout. When we get to Saturn, we’ll be hanging a kilometer below it and the hydrogen in Saturn’s atmosphere will do the shielding.”
     
    Slowly, as the three watched, the infrared image of the reactor on the touchscreen console changed color from black to gray to dark red.
     
    “Radiation level nominal, sir,” intoned the voice of Jeeves. “Generated electrical output power level within specifications.”
     
    “Start the pumps in the secondary cooling loops to the radiator,” commanded Seichi. The rolled-up array of heat-pipe radiators now took on the dark-red glow as the outside of the reactor cooled down to a gray color again.
     
    “That’s as far as we can go with live testing, Jeeves,” said Seichi. “Close it down and reinsert the safety pin.” Seichi pointedly kept his back turned and his head down, staring fixedly at the infrared image screen and not turning around to talk to them. Rod coughed nervously during the hiatus while Chastity looked up at the ceiling. That was when she saw that something was missing.
     
    “What’s happened to the emergency escape hatch?” asked Chastity, pointing upward. “There’s supposed to be a hatch here to let us out the nose in case the airlock malfunctions.”
     
    “The escape hatch in the nosecone was replaced with a tether reel,” said Rod, glad that the subject had changed. He headed for the ladder. “Let’s go outside again and I’ll show you.”
     
    At the bottom of the ladder, the two astronauts entered the airlock, shut the inner door, turned their backs on each other, and started stripping down to get into their spacesuits again.
     
    “I really goofed up there, didn’t I,” said Chastity, as she put her coveralls and underwear into her locker and reached for her cooljohns.
     
    “Considering he’s our scotty, you sure did,” said Rod, repeating her motions. “Mitsubishi contributed the crew module and reactor to the consortium, so they got to pick one of their engineers as a crewmember. Seichi was the designer for the reactor—it’s a specialized plutonium burner—and has spent the last six months getting briefed on the crew module so he can act as the ship’s engineer.”
     
    “Plutonium burner?” queried Chastity, as she hooked up the plumbing inside her suit.
     
    “According to Art, that’s one of the reasons it makes financial sense to get meta from Saturn instead of overcoming the objections of the environmental freaks and extracting it from the natural gas wells. The Earth has an excess of plutonium, Japan especially. It would make sense to burn it in reactors to provide electrical power, but the antiwar, antinuclear, and green groups have made that politically impossible. So, Space Unlimited will be given all the plutonium it needs to provide the energy that will end up in the meta—and get paid to take it!—as long as the plutonium leaves the Earth and never comes back again.”
     
    “The radioactive waste is going to end up