CHAPTER X.
Under Saturn's Rings
A harp-string tenseness gripped the four women in the Venture's control-room as they peered ahead into space.
'So far, so good,' muttered old Stilicha Keene, leaning forward over the bank of firing-keys to gaze with faded eyes. 'We're past the outer League patrols. Now if we can only slip through the inner.'
'We're in their zone now,' Joan Thorn warned tautly. 'See anything in the ‘scope, Gunda?'
'Not yet,' the big Mercurian rumbled without taking her eyes from the eyepiece.
The Venture moved steadily on through the void, its rockets cut down to a low, soft purr. The aura-chart was dead. They were running blind so their own aura would not cut the aura of any vigilant patrol cruiser and give them away unnecessarily.
Saturn bulked colossal in the star-gemmed vault ahead, an enormous, yellowish sphere encircled by its immense, sweeping white rings. Even from this distance of a few million miles, the mighty rings looked quite solid. The thin black gap between the two outermost rings, Cassini's division, stood out sharp and clear. It was hard to realize that those great, solid seeming white bands were really vast swarms of tiny satellites circling the planet.
Out beyond even the huge rings marched the planet's nine brilliant moons. Titan was a bright little disk far on the other side of the spinning monster world. Tethys and Rhea shone to the left. And Iapetus, a bright white moon almost as large as Mercury, lay close ahead on the right.
'The Saturnian Navy has a big outer base on Iapetus,' warned Thorn. 'It'll be alive with cruisers now that the navies of all four League planets are concentrated here.'
'I know, but we got to run close to Iapetus if we're going to slip around to the night side of Saturn,' quavered the old Martian pirate.
'Keep at least two million miles out, to clear the auras of the base,' Thorn told her.
The Venture purred on, and the big white moon began to march slowly past on their right. The Planeteers and the old pirate were silent and strained.
Sua Av scratched her head irritably. 'Curse me if I can get used to this wig,' she muttered.
The Venusian's appearance was curiously changed. Her bald pate had been covered by a wig of short, coarse black hair, and her face and skin had been stained pale green. Joan Thorn and Gunda Welk were similarly transformed. Their faces too were now a livid green, and the Mercurian's bristling yellow hair was dyed black.
The people of Saturn, and also of Uranus and Neptune, had acquired their peculiar green complexion during the past thousand years. Their worlds, like all the others in the system, had first been colonized by pioneering Earthwomen in the 21st century, though a few centuries later all those seven colonized worlds had seceded from Earth and become independent planets. In the generations since the first colonization, environment had gradually changed the original Earth stock.
The women of Jupiter had grown into a squat, great-boned race, because of the dragging gravitation of their world. The women of Mars had acquired their red skin because of the predominance of certain metallic elements in their air and food. And similarly, the women of Saturn and Uranus and Neptune, because of a lack of certain elements on their worlds, had acquired their characteristic jaundiced green complexion.
Thorn and her two comrades had realized that disguise was vitally necessary for their daring venture on Saturn. So, during the days that the Venture had hurtled at top speed toward the far ringed world, the Planeteers had worked to make themselves look as much as possible like Saturnians.
Now the Venture was well past, Iapetus, and swinging around to the night side of Saturn in a great parabola.
'Shall we pass under the rings?' asked the old Martian pirate, turning from, the firing-keys.
Thorn nodded. 'It'll keep us in shadow by going under them. Better cling close beneath them'
Saturn filled all space before them now, looming colossal in the firmament with the tilted plane of its outer gigantic ring shadowing above them as their ship shot through it. The ring, more than thirty thousand miles in width, was brightly sunlit on its upper side because of the tilt of its plane, but here beneath it they were in shadow.
Space above them was now roofed as far as the eye could stretch by the white, gleaming, concentric rings. At this close distance they could clearly see the millions of separate satellites that made up the rings, vast circular swarms of tiny planetoids endlessly whirling. Then they were in past the rings, and only six thousand miles from the nighted surface of Saturn.
Stilicha Keene pointed a bony finger toward a misty glow of lights that lay slightly north of the equator.
'Them's the lights of Saturnopolis,' the old pirate declared.
'Run westward,' Joan Thorn ordered. 'The fungus forests are in that direction, and if we three are to pose as slith-hunters, that's where we need to land.'
The first Planeteer watched with emotion as the distant lights of Saturnopolis slid away to the left. Down there in the great capital city of Saturn, somewhere, was Lann Cain. He would likely be imprisoned in the citadel of Hasna Trask, dictator of the League—the big fortress-palace that was the very storm center of the gathering menace threatening the four inner worlds.
Thorn had had the boy in her mind every hour of the long flight out to Saturn. Again and again she had envisioned his eager white face as he had stood with her under the meteor-blazing night sky of Turkoon, telling her his dreams for the future. He had become much more to’ her, she realized deeply, than just the pirate boy who held the secret she must obtain.
The lights of Saturnopolis disappeared as the Venture throbbed westward through the night. They glimpsed the lights of another, smaller city far to the north. Then Stilicha sent the ship in a long, descending glide toward the far-stretching black wilderness that now lay beneath.
Air whistled thinly outside the walls. The ship dropped into thin mists. Then through the mists the surface rushed up toward them—a vast and endless forest of grotesque, towering growth, dimly lit by the radiance of three moons and the majestic arc of the ring.
With a prolonged flash from the keel tubes and a soft, bumping jar, the Venture landed. They were in silent darkness.
'Here's the fungus forest you wanted to be landed in,' said Stilicha doubtfully. 'It's a long way from here to Saturnopolis, though.'
'We'll get there,' Thorn told her grimly. 'It would be inviting capture to land too near the capital. By landing here and working our way toward Saturnopolis as slith-hunters, we'll be much less likely to be suspected by the secret police.'