Randall nodded, his gaze shifting from the steady green spark of Neptune far ahead to the growing yellow disk of Saturn. "I'll try to keep her straight," he said, grinning, "though I'm beginning to wish that, if there's to be trouble, it had come back on Mars or Jupiter."
I smiled a little as I swung back from the control-panel along the flier's inside wall. I went from handhold to handhold with the pressure of its acceleration still upon me, until I had thrown myself into my metal bunk to fall almost instantly asleep, and to dream nightmare dreams of rushing on through endless space toward a goal that ever receded from us. And in the hours that followed, in the next three days that our space-flier shot on and on with Saturn growing ever greater ahead, the nightmare quality of my experience persisted. It seemed impossible, at times, that we four were in reality doing that which men had never done before; that we were flinging ourselves out into the great void, out through the solar system toward the planet that was its last outpost. We were watching and eating and sleeping, indeed, like men in a dream, so strange and utterly unreal seemed to us this unending rush through unending space.
But though we slept, and ate, and watched at the control-panel like men in a dream, there were times in those hours when realization of our position, of our great mission, came sharply home to us. Those were the times that Marlin trained his instruments upon the sun, which had by then dwindled to a tiny blazing disk behind us. And with those instruments Marlin found that the sun was still spinning ever faster and faster, its rotatory period decreasing still by the same amount each day, its day of division and doom steadily approaching. And with his own recorders Whitely found that the colossal force-ray from Neptune still was stabbing toward the sun, still turning it faster and faster toward its doom and that of its universe. That great force-ray, we found, was stabbing toward the sun on a line between our flier's course and Saturn, but was on a somewhat higher level, so that in reality the great ray did not lie between our flier and Saturn but above both.
The consciousness we had of that great ray's existence and the knowledge we had of the doom it was loosing upon the peoples of our world served to prevent the dream-like lassitude of our conditions from overpowering us, and we were further awakened by the swift expansion of Saturn, ahead, as our flier neared it. For by then the great faceted ball of our flier was hurtling on through the void at five million miles an hour, slowly approaching the limits of its speed as our mighty rear force-ray drove us forward with tremendous power. And at that speed, in the next three days, Saturn loomed larger and larger ahead, until we saw at last that upon the fourth day's beginning we would pass the mighty planet. And at that our interest rose to excitement, because we would pass closer by Saturn than any of the planets in our straight flight out to Neptune, passing it indeed by no more than a million miles. So that as the last hours of those three days passed, we observed the big, yellow-glowing disk of Saturn ahead with intense interest.
And a strange sight indeed was great Saturn as it loomed greater before us and to the left, for strangest of all the sun's planets to the eye is this one. Greatest of all the planets save for mighty Jupiter, its huge sphere seemed even greater than Jupiter by reason of the colossal rings that encircled it, and by its nine greater moons that revolved about it. A solar system in itself seemed Saturn, indeed, its huge rings tilted somewhat, those great rings themselves tens of thousands of miles in width and thousands of miles from the planet they encircled. We could see, as we drew nearer toward the great planet, that those rings were in fact what had long been known by Earth's astronomers—gigantic flat swarms of meteorites and meteoric material revolving about the great planet at immense speed. Of the surface of Saturn, though, no more could be seen than of that of Jupiter, since like Jupiter the great planet was wreathed in colossal cloud-belts.
Marlin shook his head as he gazed toward the great ring-girdled planet, almost filling the heavens beside us. "It is well for us that Saturn is not our goal," he said. "Those titanic meteoric masses that are the rings—to blunder into them would mean instant annihilation."
Whitely nodded. "As it is," he said, "there must be many meteors in this region about Saturn—many that have broken loose from the rings or are flying toward those rings."
"Let's hope that you're wrong on that, at least," I told him. "We'll soon be passing within a million miles of those rings, and I want to meet no meteorites—not after our experience with the asteroids."
By then, indeed, we had drawn almost level with Saturn, its huge sphere and colossal rings almost directly to the left, the edge of those rings, but a half-hundred miles or less in thickness, being a scant million miles or more from our racing space-flier. The great maze of the planet's nine greater moons seemed crowded now upon its other side from us, Titan, largest of those moons shining brilliantly as a small white disk near the huge yellow bulk of Saturn and its colossal rings. Before then indeed, I had been forced to shoot out from the flier's side a force-ray toward Saturn, to counteract the great planet's pull upon us, but though it loomed beside us now almost as immense as great Jupiter itself, its recorded pull upon us was many times less. This was due, I knew, to the comparatively small mass of Saturn, since though of immense size and possessing a vast atmosphere, it is known to be the least dense of all the planets, being of less than 0.7 the density of water.