Three-two-one. “Okay… we’re out,” Sandy said.
“Look at my lipstick.”
“It’s fine. You gonna change blouses?”
“Yes, and I’ll get rid of the necklace and mess up my hair. This has to look as informal as possible.”
When they were ready, and she’d changed, Sandy said, again, “Anytime.”
Fiorella flashed her Number 1 smile: “Hi, kids. As I suppose most of you know by now, the third-graders at La Canada Elementary School in La Canada-Flintridge, California, and the fifth-graders at Hillside Elementary in Cottage Grove, Minnesota, have made a special request that was forwarded to us by President of the United States Amanda Sentaros… Oh, Jesus, I fucked that up… Santeros, Santeros, Santeros…”
“Yeah, and now you do need to check the lipstick,” Sandy said. “When you fix that, pick it up at, uh… special request…”
“Okay.” She fixed the lipstick. “How’s that?”
“Good. Do it anytime.”
“…Cottage Grove, Minnesota, made a special request that was forwarded to President of the United States Amanda Santeros. The kids asked for a tour of Saturn’s rings, and that’s what we’re going to give you guys, right now.”
Santeros spoke to Crow and Fang-Castro in one block of verbiage, because of the time elapse in the transmission back and forth:
“I’m fully aware of the dangers of trying to get into the alien object too quickly. That has been repeatedly pressed upon me by my scientific advisers, to the point of being tiresome. I leave to you the tactical details of doing that, but would remind you that we’ve lost a lot of time. A lot of time—and our Chinese friends and allies are coming in fast. We still don’t know exactly what they are doing, but do not underestimate the dangers here. We are pressing the Chinese government for details of what they expect from us, if anything, but they are being remarkably reticent. Mr. Crow is aware of the many scenarios we have been discussing, and can provide the command with details of these discussions, but I say again: you must move as quickly as possible, now, and you must take great care in any approach from the Chinese. With the time lag we have in the broadcasts, we may not be able to provide timely advice, or provide… timely discussion with the Chinese… over any difficult situations you may encounter. We’re counting on you to act in the best interests of the United States….”
When she was done, Fang-Castro said, “Oh, boy.”
“Yes,” Crow said. “That was a very complicated way of saying, ‘If you screw it up, you’re on your own.’”
The trip from Earth to Saturn had been the fastest done by any human-built craft, ever—so fast that collision with even a brick-sized object would have been a disaster. But space was remarkably empty, even of sand-sized objects.
Saturn’s ring system was another matter. The rings were only tens of meters thick, but that space was filled with icy objects of all different sizes. If the Nixon crossed the densest rings it would inevitably be struck multiple times by hail-sized and larger—much larger—ice balls moving at many kilometers per second relative to the ship.
Their goal, the alien mystery, orbited Saturn within the translucent C Ring’s Maxwell Gap. The Nixon could safely orbit within that region, twenty-seven thousand kilometers above Saturn’s cloud tops, if it could get there.
The Maxwell Gap was near the innermost edge of the huge ring system. Between the gap and deep space was a fifty-thousand-kilometer disk of icy projectiles. If the Nixon tried to come into Saturn on a straightforward equatorial path in the plane of the rings, it would be sliced in two by a twenty-meter-thick buzz saw of ring-particle impacts before it got one percent of the way in.
Instead, the ship approached on a vector that was tilted at thirty degrees to the ring plane, decelerating the whole way on an inward spiral, reminiscent of the one that had taken them out of Earth orbit.
It was a week’s work for the VASIMRs to slow the ship enough to bring it into a circular orbit that threaded the Maxwell Gap; along that spiral trajectory the ship had to cross the ring plane many times. Each ring encounter lasted only a few milliseconds, but they were potentially lethal ones.
Fortunately, Saturn’s rings weren’t uniform. They were divided into thousands of ringlets and lesser gaps, like grooves on a giant celestial record. The inbound trajectory wasn’t a simple smooth spiral. The deceleration was carefully modulated and timed so that each ring crossing would pass through one of those myriad smaller gaps that subdivided the ring system.
Ship’s navigation had carried the burden of responsibility for this segment of the flight. This was not the usual preset deep space trajectory, determined well in advance of the flight. From far off, Saturn’s rings appeared stable and fixed, but those ringlets performed a constant and chaotic dance with gravity. Gaps would shift kilometers inward or outward. Sometimes they disappeared entirely. Changes could happen in weeks, sometimes days; it was impossible to plan out a precise trajectory far in advance of the Nixon’s arrival at Saturn.
So the nav crew actually had to “fly” the ship in, working with a constant stream of communication between the astronomers, Navigation, and Engineering. Navigation would say where they hoped to take the ship, the astronomers would tell them what gaps were close to their desired path, Navigation would calculate a course correction, and Engineering would execute it or tell them it wasn’t feasible and they’d better look for a different gap.
It was nerve-racking. Haggard didn’t begin to describe the flight crew’s appearance by week’s end.
The majority of the ship’s complement, who weren’t involved in the life-and-death decisions, had an entirely different experience. They were entranced. Saturn, ten times the size of the earth, was a beautiful object to behold. When the Nixon made its first pass by Saturn, outside the F Ring, the flattened disk of Saturn, all by itself, spanned a fifty-degree field of view and the rings, the most gorgeous planetary system known to humanity, filled the sky.
People couldn’t get enough of the spectacle. The Commons was always packed to capacity. Anyone whose duties didn’t require them to be elsewhere crowded to see the amazing sight that swept past the window. They marveled at the huge pearly-white arcs of the rings and the perpetually fascinating colors of Saturn’s cloud bands striped with tawny hues of oranges, ochers, tans, salmons, more different and delicate colors than most of the crew had names for.
The ring crossings were even more popular, if that were possible. Approaching from the sunlit side, the rings grew ever bigger in the window until they occupied the entire view. Unbelievably detailed and striated, rings became ringlets, ringlets parsed into sub-ringlets, ever-finer textures that grew and grew and then suddenly they were through the ring and looking at empty space. Half a rotation of the living modules, and the rings came back into view, sometimes glowing with ghostly pale backlighting from the sun. Where Saturn’s shadows fell across the rings, they were visible only as dark sweeping silhouettes that blocked out the distant stars.
The flight crew’s anxiety never managed to infect the spectators. Intellectually, the spectators knew that ring crossings were one of the riskiest parts of the mission. They just didn’t feel it. They’d survived a close pass by the sun, a crippling accident at the orbit of Jupiter that had killed one of their own and nearly ruined the mission, months in space far beyond the reach of the rest of humanity, and here they were. Deep in their emotional cores, they knew nothing would go wrong.