A Honeymoon in Space

  CHAPTER XVII

  The relative position of the two giants of the Solar System at themoment when the _Astronef_ left the surface of Ganymede, was such thatshe had to make a journey of rather more than 340,000,000 miles beforeshe passed within the confines of the Saturnine System.

  At first her speed, as shown by the observations which Redgrave tookwith the instruments which Professor Rennick had designed for thepurpose, was comparatively slow. This was due to the tremendous pull ofJupiter and its four moons on the fabric of the vessel. The backwarddrag rapidly decreased as the pull of Saturn and his system began toovermaster that of Jupiter.

  It so happened, too, that Uranus, the next outer planet of the SolarSystem, 1,700,000,000 miles away from the Sun, was approaching itsconjunction with Saturn, and so assisted in producing a constantacceleration of speed.

  Jupiter and his satellites dropped behind, sinking, as it seemed to thewanderers, down into the bottomless gulf of Space, but still forming byfar the most brilliant and splendid object in the skies. The far-distantSun, which, seen from the Saturnian System, has only about a nineteenthof the superficial extent which it presents to the Earth, dwindled awayrapidly until it began to look like a huge planet, with the Earth,Venus, Mars, and Mercury as satellites. Beyond the orbit of Saturn,Uranus, with his eight moons, was shining with the lustre of a star ofthe first magnitude, and far above and beyond him again hung the paledisc of Neptune, the Outer Guard of the Solar System, separated from theSun by a gulf of more than 2,750,000,000 miles.

  When two-thirds of the distance between Jupiter and Saturn had beentraversed, Ringed Orb lay beneath them like a vast globe surrounded byan enormous circular ocean of many-coloured fire, divided, as it were,by circular shores of shade and darkness. On the side opposite to them agigantic conical shadow extended beyond the confines of the ocean oflight. It was the shadow of half the globe of Saturn cast by the Sunacross his rings. Three little dark spots were also travelling acrossthe surface of the rings. They were the shadows of Mimas, Enceladus, andTethys, the three inner satellites. Japetus, the most distant, whichrevolves at a distance ten times greater than that of the Moon from theEarth, was rising to their left above the edge of the rings, a pale,yellow, little disc shining feebly against the black background ofSpace. The rest of the eight satellites were hidden behind the enormousbulk of the planet and the infinitely vaster area of the rings.

  Day after day Zaidie and her husband had been exhausting thepossibilities of the English language in attempting to describe to eachother the multiplying marvels of the wondrous scene which they wereapproaching at a speed of more than a hundred miles a second, and atlength Zaidie, after nearly an hour's absolute silence, during whichthey sat with eyes fastened to their telescopes, looked up and said:

  "It's no use, Lenox, all the fine words that we've been trying to thinkof have just been wasted. The angels may have a language that you coulddescribe that in, but we haven't. If it wouldn't be something likeblasphemy I should drop down to the commonplace, and call Saturn acelestial spinning-top, with bands of light and shadow instead ofcolours all round it."

  "Not at all a bad simile either," laughed Redgrave, as he got up fromhis chair with a yawn and a stretch of his long limbs, "still, it's aswell that you said celestial, for, after all, that's about the best wordwe've found yet. Certainly the Ringed World is the most nearly heavenlything we've seen so far.

  "But," he went on, "I think it's about time we were stopping thisheadlong fall of ours. Do you see how the landscape is spreading outround us? That means that we are dropping pretty fast. Whereabouts wouldyou like to land? At present we're heading straight for Saturn's northpole."

  "I think I'd rather see what the rings are like first," said Zaidie;"couldn't we go across them?"

  "Certainly we can," he replied, "only we'll have to be a bit careful."

  "Careful, what of--collisions? Are you thinking of Proctor's hypothesisthat the rings are formed of multitudes of tiny satellites?"

  "Yes, but I should go a little farther than that, I should say that hisrings and his eight satellites are to Saturn what the planets generallyand the ring of the Asteroides are to the Sun, and if that is thecase--I mean if we find the rings made up of myriads of tiny bodiesflying round with Saturn--it might get a bit risky.

  "You see the outside ring is a bit over 160,000 miles across, and itrevolves in less than eleven hours. In other words we might find thering a sort of celestial maelstrom, and if we once got into the whirl,and Saturn exerted his full pull on us, we might become a satellite,too, and go on swinging round with the rest for a good bit of eternity."

  "Very well then," she said, "of course we don't want to do anything ofthat sort, but there's something else I think we could do," she went on,taking up a copy of Proctor's "Saturn and its System," which she hadbeen reading just after breakfast. "You see those rings are, alltogether, about 10,000 miles broad; there's a gap of about 1,700 milesbetween the big dark one and the middle bright one, and it's nearly10,000 miles from the edge of the bright ring to the surface of Saturn.Now why shouldn't we get in between the inner ring and the planet? IfProctor was right and the rings are made of tiny satellites and thereare myriads of them, of course they'll pull up while Saturn pulls down.In fact Flammarion says somewhere that along Saturn's equator there isno weight at all."

  "Quite possible," replied Redgrave, "and, if you like, we'll go andprove it. Of course, if the _Astronef_ weighs absolutely nothing betweenSaturn and the rings, we can easily get away. The only thing that Iobject to is getting into this 170,000-mile vortex, being whizzed roundwith Saturn every ten and a half hours, and sauntering round the Sun at21,000 miles an hour."

  "Don't!" she said. "Really it isn't good to think about these things,situated as we are. Fancy, in a single year of Saturn there are nearly25,000 Earth-days. Why, we should each of us be about thirty years olderwhen we got round, even if we lived, which, of course, we shouldn't. Bythe way, how long could we live for, if the worst came to the worst?"

  "Given water, about one Earth-year at the outside;" "but, of course, weshall be home long before that."

  "If we don't become one of the satellites of Saturn," she replied, "orget dragged away by something into the outer depths of Space."

  Meanwhile the downward speed of the _Astronef_ had been considerablychecked. The vast circle of the rings seemed to suddenly expand, andsoon it covered the whole floor of the Vault of Space.

  As she dropped towards what might be called the limit of the northerntropic of Saturn, the spectacle presented by the rings became everyminute more and more marvellous--purple and silver, black and gold,dotted with myriads of brilliant points of many-coloured light, theystretched upwards like vast rainbows into the Saturnian sky as the_Astronef's_ position changed with regard to the horizon of the planet.The nearer they approached the surface, the nearer the gigantic arch ofthe many-coloured rings approached the zenith. Sun and stars sank downbehind it, for now they were dropping through the fifteen-year-longtwilight that reigns over that portion of the globe of Saturn which,during half of his year of thirty terrestrial years, is turned away fromthe Sun.

  The further they fell towards the rings the more certain it became thatthe theory of the great English astronomer was the correct one. Seenthrough the telescopes at a distance of only thirty or forty thousandmiles, it became perfectly plain that the outer or darker ring as seenfrom the Earth was composed of myriads of tiny bodies so far separatedfrom each other that the rayless blackness of Space could be seenthrough them.

  "It's quite evident," said Redgrave, after a long look through histelescope, "that those are rings of what we should call meteorites onEarth, atoms of matter which Saturn threw off into Space after thesatellites were formed."

  "And I shouldn't wonder, if you will excuse my interrupting you," saidZaidie, "if the moons themselves have been made up of a lot of thesethings going together when they were only gas, or nebula, or somethingof that sort. In fact, when Saturn was a good deal younger than
he isnow, he may have had a lot more rings and no moons, and now theseaerolites, or whatever they are, can't come together and make moons,because they've got too solid."

  Meanwhile the _Astronef_ was rapidly approaching that portion ofSaturn's surface which was illuminated by the rays of the Sun, streamingunder the lower arch of the inner ring.

  As they passed under it the whole scene suddenly changed. The ringsvanished. Overhead was an arch of brilliant light a hundred miles thick,spanning the whole of the visible heavens. Below lay the sunlit surfaceof Saturn divided into light and dark bands of enormous breadth.

  The band immediately below them was of a brilliant silver-grey, verymuch like the central zone of Jupiter. North of this on the one sidestretched the long shadow of the rings, and southward other bands ofalternating white and gold and deep purple succeeded each other tillthey were lost in the curvature of the vast planet. The poles were ofcourse invisible since the _Astronef_ was now too near the surface; buton their approach they had seen unmistakable evidence of snow and ice.

  As soon as they were exactly under the Ring-arch, Redgrave shut off theR. Force, and, somewhat to their astonishment, the _Astronef_ began torevolve slowly on its axis, giving them the idea that the SaturnianSystem was revolving round them. The arch seemed to sink beneath theirfeet while the belts of the planet rose above them.

  "What on earth is the matter?" said Zaidie. "Everything has gone upsidedown."

  "Which shows," replied Redgrave, "that as soon as the _Astronef_ becameneutral the rings pulled harder than the planet, I suppose because we'reso near to them, and, instead of falling on to Saturn, we shall have topush up at him."

  "Oh yes, I see that," said Zaidie, "but after all it does look a littlebit bewildering, doesn't it, to be on your feet one minute and on yourhead the next?"

  "It is, rather; but you ought to be getting accustomed to that sort ofthing now. In a few minutes neither you, nor I, nor anything else willhave any weight. We shall be just between the attraction of the ringsand Saturn, so you'd better go and sit down, for if you were to give abit of an extra spring in walking you might be knocking that pretty headof yours against the roof," said Redgrave, as he went to turn the R.Force on to the edge of the rings.

  A vast sea of silver cloud seemed now to descend upon them. Then theyentered it, and for nearly half an hour the _Astronef_ was totallyenveloped in a sea of pearl-grey luminous mist.

  "Atmosphere!" said Redgrave, as he went to the conning-tower andsignalled to Murgatroyd to start the propellers. They continued to riseand the mist began to drift past them in patches, showing that thepropellers were driving them ahead.

  They now rose swiftly towards the surface of the planet. The cloud-wrackgot thinner and thinner, and presently they found themselves floating ina clear atmosphere between two seas of cloud, the one above them beingmuch less dense than the one below.

  "I believe we shall see Saturn on the other side of that," said Zaidie,looking up at it. "Oh dear, there we are going round again."

  "Reaching the point of neutral attraction," said Redgrave; "once moreyou'd better sit down in case of accidents."

  Instead of dropping into her deck-chair as she would have done on Earth,she took hold of the arms and pulled herself into it, saying:

  "Really, it seems rather absurd to have to do this sort of thing. Fancyhaving to hold yourself into a chair. I suppose I hardly weigh anythingat all now."

  "Not much," said Redgrave, stooping down and taking hold of the end ofthe chair with both hands. Without any apparent effort he raised herabout five feet from the floor, and held her there while the _Astronef_made another revolution. For a moment he let go, and she and the chairfloated between the roof and the floor of the deck-chamber. Then hepulled the chair away from under her, and as the floor of the vesselonce more turned towards Saturn, he took hold of her hands and broughther to her feet on deck again.

  _Without any apparent effort he raised her about fivefeet from the floor._]

  "I ought to have had a photograph of you like that!" he laughed. "Iwonder what they'd think of it at home?"

  "If you had taken one I should certainly have broken the negative. Thevery idea--a photograph of me standing on nothing! Besides, they'd neverbelieve it on Earth."

  "We might have got old Andrew to make an affidavit as to the truecircumstances," he began.

  "Don't talk nonsense, Lenox! Look! there's something much moreinteresting. There's Saturn at last. Now I wonder if we shall find anysort of life there--and shall we be able to breathe the air?"

  "I hardly think so," he said, as the _Astronef_ dropped slowly throughthe thin cloud-veil. "You know spectrum analysis has proved that thereis a gas in Saturn's atmosphere which we know nothing about, and,however good it may be for the Saturnians, it's not very likely that itwould agree with us, so I think we'd better be content with our own.Besides, the atmosphere is so enormously dense that even if we couldbreathe it it might squash us up. You see we're only accustomed tofifteen pounds on the square inch, and it may be hundreds of poundshere."

  "Well," said Zaidie, "I haven't got any particular desire to beflattened out, or squeezed dry like an orange. It's not at all a niceidea, is it? But look, Lenox," she went on, pointing downwards, "surelythis isn't air at all, or at least it's something between air and water.Aren't those things swimming about in it--something like fish in thesea? They can't be clouds, and they aren't either fish or birds. Theydon't fly or float. Well, this is certainly more wonderful than anythingelse we've seen, though it doesn't look very pleasant. They're notnice-looking, are they? I wonder if they are at all dangerous!"

  While she was saying this Zaidie had gone to her telescope, and wassweeping the surface of Saturn, which was now about a hundred milesdistant. Her husband was doing the same. In fact, for the time beingthey were all eyes, for they were looking on a stranger sight than manor woman had ever seen before.

  Underneath the inner cloud-veil the atmosphere of Saturn appeared tothem somewhat as the lower depths of the ocean would appear to a diver,granted that he was able to see for hundreds of miles about him. Itscolour was a pale greenish yellow. The outside thermometers showed thatthe temperature was a hundred and seventy-five Fahrenheit. In fact, theinterior of the _Astronef_ was getting uncomfortably like a Turkishbath, and Redgrave took the opportunity of at once freshening andcooling the air by releasing a little oxygen from the cylinders.

  From what they could see of the surface of Saturn it seemed to be a deadlevel, greyish brown in colour, and not divided into oceans andcontinents. In fact there were no signs whatever of water within rangeof their telescopes. There was nothing that looked like cities, or anyhuman habitations, but the ground, as they got nearer to it, seemed tobe covered with a very dense vegetable growth, not unlike gigantic formsof seaweed, and of somewhat the same colour. In fact, as Zaidieremarked, the surface of Saturn was not at all unlike what the floors ofthe ocean of the Earth might be if they were laid bare.

  It was evident that the life of this portion of Saturn was not what, forwant of a more exact word, might be called terrestrial. Its inhabitants,however they were constituted, floated about in the depths of thissemi-gaseous ocean as the denizens of earthly seas did in theterrestrial oceans. Already their telescopes enabled them to make outenormous moving shapes, black and grey-brown and pale red, swimmingabout, evidently by their own volition, rising and falling and oftensinking down on to the gigantic vegetation which covered the surface,possibly for the purpose of feeding. But it was also evident that theyresembled the inhabitants of earthly oceans in another respect, since itwas easy to see that they preyed upon each other.

  "I don't like the look of those creatures at all," said Zaidie, when the_Astronef_ had come to a stop and was floating about ten miles above thesurface. "They're altogether too uncanny. They look to me something likejelly-fish about the size of whales, only they have eyes and mouths. Didyou ever see such awful-looking eyes, bigger than soup-plates and asbright as a cat's. I suppose that's because
of the dim light. And thenasty wormy sort of way they swim, or fly, or whatever it is. Lenox, Idon't know what the rest of Saturn may be like, but I certainly don'tlike this part. It's quite too creepy and unearthly for my taste. Lookat the horrors fighting and eating each other. That's the only bit ofearthly character they've got about them; the big ones eating the littleones. I hope they won't take the _Astronef_ for something nice to eat."

  "They'd find her a pretty tough morsel if they did," laughed Redgrave,"but still we may as well get some steering way on her in case ofaccident."