The Secret of Saturn’s Rings Read Online Free PDF Page B

school, save for the breath-taking depth and color. The soft greens and deep blues of field and ocean, the blinding white of the poles, all merged into each other. Over all the misty masses of clouds and humid air belts, a creeping twilight purple zone along one rim drifted slowly. Bruce stared, forgetting for the moment the bottomless gap that hung between the tiny bulk of their ship and his home world.
    “Come on, come on,” said Arpad’s voice, “no time for daydreaming, we’ve got work to do!” Bruce snapped out of it, turned, and followed Arpad along the outer surface of the ship, the magnetic gloves and shoes of his space suit sticking to the outer hull just as a fly sticks to a ceiling.
    The moon-runners were in the form of long ridges that Bruce had at first taken for part of the ship’s streamlining. Now he saw that they were really hard-metal runners, the length of the ship, which could be cranked outward from their snug contact to extend into two parallel runners just like the runners of a sled or a pair of skis. Though they would have been very heavy on Earth, here in weightlessness Bruce and Arpad were able to crank them away from the hull by hand, snap their bracing girders into place, and thus clear the ship for its lunar landing.
    When the job was done, Arpad and Bruce worked their way back to the lock, returned inside, and took off their space suits. It bad not occurred to Bruce that this ship would be landed in the way most commercial and explorer craft used, rather than in the fancy tail-jet acrobatics plus magnetic absorbers which were in use on the elaborate passenger liners. He rather looked forward to the experience. As he made his way to the front of the ship, he realized that the craft was laid out as an airplane would be, to be flown from front to back and not from top to bottom.
    Arpad announced as they entered the control room, “Runners all set, Doc. Shall we secure the gear?”
    Dr. Rhodes, Jennings, and Garcia were all present there. Rhodes and Garcia were at the calculating machines, working on their course. Jennings was in the pilot seat, watching the engines and the oncoming features of the moon.
    Over Jennings’ shoulder, Bruce saw that the white and gray features of our satellite were looming large, showing the sharp and cold barrenness familiar to telescope observers. It was a scene that disturbed him by its lack of warmth, by the intensity of its harsh shadows and dazzling white spaces. Now, without any atmosphere to blur the vision and approaching it at speeds of many miles a second, it took his breath away.
    “Yes,” Bruce’s father raised his head from his work, "you’d better see that nothing was damaged by the take-off. We shall be landing at the mining base by the Einstein Sea to take on our final fuel load. I don’t want to stay there any longer than is absolutely necessary.”
    Garcia looked up at them briefly, grunted. Jennings, at the controls, shook his head slightly as if uneasy at the prospect. Bruce noticed these reactions and, as he and Arpad went out, he glanced at his fellow spaceman in wonder.
    But for once Arpad was silent, a thoughtful look on his face. Without conversation, they went through each chamber and locker checking the contents and testing the straps and locks. As they were buckling down a box that held a small stock of weapons and ammunition, Bruce finally broke the silence:
    “Is something wrong? What’s the worry?”
    Arpad hesitated a moment. “Well, it’s going to be kind of risky to land there. After all, that is one of Terraluna’s main bases. They’ll have to fuel us, because that’s UN orders, but you can just bet they’re going to try to think up some way of making trouble for us, maybe cripple the ship. It’s going to be very risky to stay there long.”
    "‘Then why don’t we land somewhere else—say at the regular UN Commission post near Mare Crisium?” Bruce