The Magellan swung up a couple of hundred miles above the Sun-tappers' plateau. Haines and his crew loaded the bulky H-bomb into the main launcher in the tail of the ship. Then the Magellan aimed itself at the target, and the rocket-driven bomb roared out.
Down it sped, zeroing in on the wall of the station. There was a blinding flash, a glare as brilliant as that of the Sun itself, as it hit square on the mark. This time Burl watched through carefully shielded viewscreens. The scene was obscured by a wide-flung cloud of white—tens of thousands of cubic feet of satellite rock turned instantaneously into dust particles. After the dust cleared away, they saw only a gaping crater where the plateau had been—a volcanic hole, miles wide and glowing red, from which spread vast, deep cracks throughout the entire visible hemisphere of the moon.
The men on the Magellan were awed and silent. The thought occurred to each of them, beyond his capacity to deny it: what if this had happened on Earth?
"Of course," said Ferrati slowly, "the low gravity of Iapetus accounts for the greater extent of the disaster. If this had been Bikini or...." But under the glares of the rest of the crew, his sentence trailed off weakly.
Lockhart turned away from the viewer. "Mr. Oberfield," he said, unexpectedly formal and official, "you may chart our course for Uranus."
"Aye, aye, sir," said that usually dour personage, with alacrity.
With forced smiles, the rest of the crew drifted away to their duties. The Magellan pulled away from Saturn, heading out again toward the limits of the solar system, but it was several days before everyone had quite managed to dismiss the vision of the H-bomb from his mind.
Chapter 15.
Ice Cold on Oberon
Nevertheless, from that point on, a different spirit seemed to animate everyone aboard the Magellan. There was the feeling that they had closed with the enemy and found themselves not wanting. There was the feeling that they possessed powers not inferior to those of their unknown enemies. The thought had been haunting them all along that they were in the position of a backward people facing an advanced invader—something like the problem of the Aztecs when faced with the gunpowder and armor of the conquistadors.