Even so, however, it was requiring a force-ray of great power to hold our rushing flier out from the huge planet. Though lesser than Jupiter's, its pull upon us was great, nevertheless. And now that we were passing the huge world so closely, it seemed to us with its vast rings and great family of whirling moons to be of universe-size itself, so mighty did it loom beside us. The great rings, of small thickness compared to their huge width and circle, were edge-on to us now, a million miles to the left, and we could see that they were in reality but vast swarms of countless meteors, great and small, whirling at great speed about Saturn and forming by their division three rings, the innermost a darker one. Yet despite their strange appearance and colossal size, it was not the great rings that held our interest so much in that moment as the cloud-hidden surface of Saturn itself. For even as in passing Mars and Jupiter, we were gripped with desire to veer in toward the planet and explore the strange wonders that might exist upon it, or upon its greater moons. But none suggested that thought now. All four of us knew that only the growing green spot of light, that was distant Neptune ahead, must be our goal.
As the flier raced on, almost passing the huge planet now, Randall uttered a swift exclamation, pointing ahead and to the left a little. At the same moment, though, I had seen the thing that had caught his eye—a small dark point growing with lightning swiftness as it rushed toward us; a great dark meteor, perhaps five hundred feet in diameter, rushing toward our flier, whirling far out from Saturn's rings in the same direction as those rings! Instantly, upon seeing it, I had turned more power into the ray that held us out from Saturn, and as we were pushed sidewise in the next moment by that increased power, the big meteor had flashed past us far to the left! And a moment later, I had caught sight of two similar meteors, one smaller than the other, rushing toward us in the same direction from ahead. But these I had seen soon enough to avoid collision.
It was evident that, as Whitely had suggested, we were encountering some of the stray meteors that might be expected to whirl here far out from the meteor-swarms of the great rings. And as we watched tensely now for more meteors, it was with something of awe that we gazed toward the huge rings, that we knew to be rushing swarms of countless similar meteors. It was well, as Marlin had said, that we were not called upon to penetrate through or around those great rings, since in their awful whirling swarms of meteors no craft would be able to live even for a moment. But our space-flier was passing the midmost point of those rings; already huge Saturn was beginning to drop a little behind us; and we breathed more freely. And, ironically enough, it was at that very moment of our relief that catastrophe came upon us. There was a wild shout from Marlin, and simultaneously I saw a huge round dark mass looming dead ahead and whirling toward us. Just as I snapped open the control-levers, that great dark meteor's mass had struck our onrushing flier with a tremendous stunning shock!
For an instant, as the flier reeled and spun there crazily in the gulf of space, it seemed the end to me, but in a moment more I realized that the great faceted walls had not been penetrated, for the air in the flier was unchanged. Had those walls been pierced, the result would have been the instant freezing to death of all of us. But that death had not as yet come upon us, and as I struggled forward in my chair I saw that the space-flier was still whirling crazily around from the shock and that the throbbing of its great generators had ceased. Beside me Marlin and Whitely and Randall were coming back to realization of their surroundings after that colossal shock, Whitely bearing a nasty cut upon his temple. And as Marlin sprang to the flier's side-window, gazed obliquely from it, he uttered an exclamation.
"That meteor just grazed us!" he exclaimed. "If you hadn't jerked the controls over at the last moment, Hunt, it would have hit us head-on! As it is, it smashed through the flier's outer wall, but didn't pierce the inner wall!"
"But the generators!" cried Whitely, who had been fumbling at their switches. "They've stopped! When the meteor crashed through the outer wall it must have broken some of our generator-connections between the two walls!"
"And the flier's falling!" I cried in turn. "It's falling toward Saturn now, with its force-rays dead—we're falling into the great rings!"
For as I glanced outward I had seen that was what was happening. The halting of the generators by the breaking of their connections between the flier's double walls had halted also the force-rays that had been pushing us out toward Neptune and that had been holding us out from Saturn's pull. With the halting of those rays the pull of the mighty planet had at once gripped our space-flier and now we were moving at swiftly-accelerating speed toward that planet's mighty bulk, toward the great rings but a million miles to our left! Were falling helplessly, faster and faster each moment, toward those mighty rings, toward their vast swarms of whirling meteors in which our space-flier and all within it could meet only an annihilating death!