Saturn Rukh Read online

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  Saturn Rukh

  Robert L. Forward

  No copyright 2014 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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  1

  BILLION FOR THE JOB

  GOT A JOB FOR YOU. PAYS A BILLION.

  The message blinked at the top of the screen three times, then disappeared. Rod Morgan smiled. He had been hearing rumors about a quasi-multigovernment, quasi-commercial consortium that was raising capital to sponsor a risky trip to Saturn. He closed down his game of WARPWORLD, and switched to net-mail to read the rest of the message. He’d guessed right, it was from the consortium. The job must really be risky for them to be offering a billion dollars. Although the penny was no longer legal tender, a billion dollars was still a large fortune.

  Rod read the message. They were asking him to be commander of the mission. That didn’t surprise him, for after all, he was the best space pilot in the business. Without hesitation, he typed his reply.

  JOB ACCEPTED, WHO ELSE IS ON MY CREW?

  The reply soon made its way back over the ether and optical fibers of the SolNet. There were five names listed. Two— Seichi Takeo and Pete Stewart—were unfamiliar, while the other three were well known to Rod, since they were also involved in the project to build a resort on Mars. Sandra Green and Daniel Horning were stationed on Mars. Horning was one of the three medical doctors on Mars, and the best, besides being an excellent waste-handling engineer—an essential member of the engineering team on long crewed missions. Sandra was a biologist, part of the scientific team instructed to look for native Martian lifeforms. She was also the emergency medical technician for the small science group at Boreal Base. Fortunately for the consortium funding the Mars resort, but unfortunately for the scientists, it now looked like there weren’t any native lifeforms on Mars. As a result, there hadn’t been any major clamor by the greenie organization, the Peaceful Planet Protectors, against the further development of Mars.

  The last of the three names, Chastity Blaze, was well known to Rod. He and she were part of the TransPlanet SpaceLines team that piloted freighters back and forth to Mars. Rod had finished his latest run two weeks ago and was taking a well-deserved vacation on the beaches in San Diego, working on his tan, while Chastity should be starting on her run home about now. If she was going to be part of his crew, this expedition was going to be fun as well as profitable. Rod closed his portable, being careful not to get any sand on it, put it away in its carry-bag, then ran down the beach and dove into the waves.

  ~ * ~

  Fifteen minutes later, the same message appeared on a touchscreen console in a large cargo spacecraft just leaving on a high-speed trajectory from Mars.

  GOT A JOB FOR YOU. PAYS A BILLION.

  At first, Chastity thought it was someone’s idea of a joke, so she searched carefully through the compressed linking-data at the end of the message for the address of the sender. It was [email protected]—Art Dooley, president of Space Unlimited. Although Art probably didn’t have a billion dollars himself, he knew where it could be found, so perhaps the message wasn’t a hacker prank after all. The efficient, short-nailed fingers of Chastity’s right hand flickered over the soft touchscreen and soon her reply was on its way back over the SolNet.

  TELL ME MORE.

  The Earth was on the opposite side of the Sun from Mars, so it would take the message over fifteen minutes to get to its destination. Then, it would take another fifteen minutes to get back. This gave Chastity plenty of time to think while she waited for the reply, for now that she had her ship under way, there was little for her to do. Pushing her bracelets up her left arm to get them out of the way, she returned to her work on the little finger of her left hand. The long nail had been wiped clean and Chastity was carefully painting on it the flag of Australia, with glued-on diamond chips for the stars. It would complete her collection of fingernail star-flags that she would wear on her left hand for a week before switching to another theme for next week. Each fingernail took a long time, but she had nothing but time now.

  Chastity and her crew of two, copilot and scotty, were deadheading a Boeing-Mitsubishi freighter back from Mars after delivering a cargo of precision 3-D mechfabs, chemsyns, and specialized computer chips. There were plenty of raw materials on Mars, so instead of hauling food, fuel, habitats, and construction machines, she brought the specialized hardware that would allow the builders there to fabricate those necessities out of the Martian atmosphere and soil. All sorts of machines— including gigantic water well derricks, personal computers, bulldozers, Martian airplanes, and ballistic hoppers—were fabricated at Olympia Base using the precision mechfabs, with only the intricate computer chips—the brains of the machines—being imported from Earth.

  While it was the precision mechfabs that made the machines, it was the chemsyns that made the fuel and food that kept the machines and humans fed. Chastity had even enjoyed a chemsyn-fabricated steak during her last evening on Mars. The artificial steak had been so tasty she had found herself reluctant to leave the mess hall table, wanting to order another rather than go off dancing with the muscular hunk that had been her date that evening.

  The thought of her last date reminded Chastity that the only time she had met Art Dooley in person was also on a date. It was eight years ago. She was finishing her Ph.D. in astronautical engineering at MIT and Art was in his final year at Harvard Law School—specializing in space law. He had invited her to be his guest at an exclusive reception before the main banquet at the annual meeting of the International Astronautical Federation, which was being held in Boston that year. At that time in her life, she still wore long nails and multiple rings on both hands. She remembered that she had put on her best red-sequined strapless evening gown for the occasion. As the youngest and tallest woman there, she had attracted a lot of attention, and when the tuxedoed IAF brass found that the statuesque black-haired violet-eyed beauty could hold her own in engineering discussions, they had remembered her. She had impressed a lot of important people that night, including the Boeing-Mitsubishi CEO. That contact had resulted in a job as a spacecraft test pilot, which in turn led to her present job with TransPlanet—as she became a pilot of the ships she had tested.

  She remembered that Art had been very supportive of her that night, making sure that she was introduced to the right people, then stepping back deferentially and listening, while letting her control the conversation. Strangely, he never asked her out again. Now, eight years later, here was this mysterious message from him.

  It was at a similar IAF meeting five years earlier that the real space age had started. In an obscure paper entitled “The Properties of NHe64*”, an optoatomic cluster-molecule chemist named George Phillips from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, had described to the aerospace engineers the structure and energetics of nitro-stabilized metastable helium, now called nitrometahelium by the atomic scientists, but “meta” by the aerospace engineers.

  Meta was a strange molecule, with a structure somewhere between that of a buckyball and a bunch of grapes. At the core of a meta cluster was a single atom of excited nitrogen, surrounded by sixty-four helium atoms, each atom with one of its electrons raised into a more energetic metastable state. Metastable helium had always been easy to form—just pass some high-voltage electricity through helium gas. Large numbers of metastable helium atoms existed in every neon sign and the helium-neon lasers in grocery store checkout stands. It had long been known that if metastable helium could be stored, it would make a superb rocket fuel, since it contained more energy per kilogram than any other material known. If left to itself, a metastable helium atom would have a lifetime of two and a half hours, but if you crowded the atoms together in a fuel tank, the lifetime
dropped to a fraction of a second, making the stuff useless as a rocket fuel.

  Phillips had found that if you made a merged beam of helium and nitrogen atoms, and excited the atoms into their metastable states with lasers, the metastable helium atoms would cluster around the nitrogen atoms. The cluster constructed of sixty-four metastable helium atoms surrounding a single excited nitrogen atom turned out to be exceptionally stable. In some strange, still not understood way, the single nitrogen atom completely stabilized the excited helium atoms. The meta clusters were readily condensed into a liquid. Best of all, the liquid meta could be handled and stored over a wide range of temperatures without danger of explosion. Even the occasional cosmic ray couldn’t trigger a chain reaction. When the meta was heated beyond twenty-two hundred K, however, the clusters disintegrated. Milliseconds later, the sixty-four helium atoms from the cluster would release their energy, creating a reddish-purple plasma of ionized helium gas along with the occasional nitrogen atom.

  Specialized “magnoshielded” rocket engines had to be built to cope with the energetic new fuel, but fortunately, meta also had a high heat capacity, so it could be used to cool the exhaust nozzle before being “burned” in the reaction chamber. It wasn’t long before the propulsion engineers had produced a rocket engine that got nearly all of the energy stored in the meta clusters turned into kinetic energy in the rocket exhaust. The exhaust velocities attained thirty kilometers per second, more than six times what could be obtained with the best rocket fuel up to that time, liquid hydrogen burned with liquid oxygen.

  Now, instead of an Earth-to-orbit launch vehicle consisting mostly of fuel tank, the new MACDAC heavy lifters were mostly payload, with the meta fuel weighing only one-third the dry vehicle mass. Even Chastity’s Boeing-Mitsubishi interplanetary freighter only required a fuel load equal to the vehicle mass, yet it still made the half-AU opposition run to Mars in less than two months. With that much propulsion margin to play with, any company that could build an airplane could build a launch vehicle or an interplanetary rocket. There were now three space hotels in Earth orbit and a resort on Luna. Soon, there would be a resort on Mars catering to the super-wealthy clientele that wanted to climb the tallest mountain in the solar system—Olympus Mons. Unlike Chastity’s slow freighter, the new Mars cruise liners for these customers would make the trip in ten days.

  ~ * ~

  Three weeks later, Chastity walked into Art’s office. When Art saw her, he felt a pang in his heart. The only word that properly describes her is “magnificent,“ he thought to himself. She had dark-black curly hair, violet eyes, a sculpted strong-jawed face, and the body of a decathlon gold medalist. Art noticed that only her left hand still had the long, fantastically painted nails and the multitude of rings and bracelets. Her right hand was now bare and short-nailed, ready for its job at the delicate throttle controls of an interplanetary rocket ship.

  Seeing the long, artistically painted nails took Art back to the time he had first seen them. It was eight years ago and he had been looking for a wife. He had approached that task with the thoroughness with which he had approached all the other tasks in his life. He was almost finished with law school—at the top of his class, of course. It was time for him to move on to the next phase of his life’s plan. He knew he had good genes and he felt that the world deserved to have them passed on. He had set out to find a woman whose genetic abilities would complement his; someone with mathematical and analytic skills that would go with his social and artistic abilities, someone tall to compensate for his short stature, and someone who was willing to bear four children. Chastity had been only one of the many women Art had sought out and dated. But, on his first date with Chastity, it had been quickly obvious from their initial discussions that her primary goal in life was to fly spacecraft—-and the radiation hazards of spaceflight and pregnancy don’t mix—so instead of pursuing her further, he had introduced her around to his father’s engineering friends at the reception and she had taken it from there.

  Art had finally found a wife—a top-rank computer programmer—and he and Blanche were now expecting their fourth child while Blanche easily kept up with her career over the SolNet. He had remained faithful to Blanche all this time, but now he found himself wondering how it would feel to have long fingernails slowly scratching their way lightly down his bare back....

  “Hello, Chastity,” said Art. “You’re looking magnificent, as usual.”

  “What’s this about a billion-dollar job?” asked Chastity, getting to the point.

  “The job will take two-and-a-half years—thirty months—to accomplish. It’s risky, and might cost you your life, so we feel that an appropriate payment for the task is a billion dollars.”

  “It must be awfully risky if you’re willing to pay a billion dollars,” said Chastity cautiously. “Is it legal? ... and who is the ‘we’ that you mentioned?”

  “I represent a consortium. It includes the governments of many of the spacefaring nations, so the job is definitely legal. It also includes most of the aerospace manufacturers, space transportation companies, and space resort owners. The long-term objective of the consortium is to ensure an ample future supply of low-cost meta. Future growth in the space business depends upon the availability of large amounts of meta at a reasonable price.”

  “I was beginning to worry about that myself,” said Chastity.

  Without waiting for an invitation, she made herself comfortable in a large chair. “Helium is a pretty scarce element on this planet and I throw a few hundred tons of it away into space every time I light the candle on my freighter.”

  “You aren’t the only one that’s worried,” said Art, perching on the end of his desk. “The ‘Save Our Helium League’ is now holding ‘SOHL-saving’ demonstrations at Kagoshima and Baikonur as well as Canaveral. We’re used to handling kooks in America, but the demonstrations are causing political problems in the other countries.”

  “Don’t the demonstrators have a point?” asked Chastity.

  “Not really,” said Art. “We pump hundreds of millions of tons of natural gas per year from the wells in Texas and the other western states, and depending on the field, as much as seven percent of the gas is helium. With the increased demand for helium to make meta, the gas producers have been adding more helium skimmers to the higher-concentration wells, so we have plenty of helium, even if the SOHL-savers don’t think so. But we still have to turn that helium into meta and haul the meta up into space, which takes more meta to get it there. The consortium is looking at a way of generating an essentially unlimited supply of meta in space.”

  Chastity looked puzzled, her violet eyes seeming to turn darker under her glossy black eyebrows as she tried to figure out what Art meant. “Helium was named after the Sun, because that’s where the first spectroscopic evidence for it was found,” she said. “But you can’t be meaning to capture the helium in the solar wind, or mine it on Luna. Except for the Sun, where are you going to find significant quantities of helium in space?”

  “Saturn.”

  “Of course!” said Chastity, annoyed with herself for forgetting about the outer planets. “Although Jupiter’s closer ... What are you planning to use? Scoop-ships? It would be fun to fly one of those.”

  “Scoop-ships would scoop mostly hydrogen, with only a few percent of helium,” replied Art. “Nope, what we are planning on doing is taking a meta factory down into Saturn’s atmosphere and floating it there under a raft of balloons. The meta factory will separate out the helium and turn it into meta. Meta-fueled cargo ships will then haul the meta back to the inner solar system. This first mission will establish the feasibility of the concept by having a ship take a pilot-plant version of a meta factory down into Saturn and having the plant make enough fuel for the ship to make its way back. That’s why we’ve chosen Saturn instead of Jupiter; the gravity well of Saturn isn’t as deep, and besides, the gee level in the upper atmosphere is only one Earth gravity, while on Jupiter it’s t
wo-and-a-half gees. You’ll find living on Saturn almost like living on Earth.”

  “I haven’t said I’d take the job,” warned Chastity. “Besides, I already have a job ... with TransPlanet.”

  “TransPlanet is a member of the consortium. The CEO of TransPlanet was the one who recommended you for the pilot slot on the mission.”

  “Pilot!” said Chastity, annoyed. “Who’s commander?”

  “Rod Morgan,” said Art. “He’s already accepted the job.”

  “Oh...” said Chastity, having to admit to herself that Rod was older and more experienced than she was.

  “Why don’t I have him come in and join us?” said Art, pushing a buzzer. “He’s been working with the ship’s engineers for the last three weeks while you’ve been on your way in. He can better answer any technical questions you might have, while I can answer the business and financial ones.”

  The door opened and Rod Morgan strode in, dressed in the tailored spaceman’s jumpsuit and soft boots outfit affected by those who piloted TransPlanet ships. He was handsome and blond, with the same height and almost the same muscular build as Chastity, except her chest-circumference measurement involved different lumps from his. When people saw them together at TransPlanet functions, they often remarked what a cute couple they would make ... and they had coupled occasionally.