Sual Av scratched his head irritably. “Curse me if I can get used to this wig,” he muttered.
The Venusian's appearance was curiously changed. His bald pate had been covered by a wig of short, coarse black hair, and his face and skin had been stained pale green. John Thorn and Gunner 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 Earthmen 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 men of Jupiter had grown into a squat, great-boned race, because of the dragging gravitation of their world. The men of Mars had acquired their red skin because of the predominance of certain metallic elements in their air and food. And similarly, the men 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 his 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.