Well, it would take him a long time to fall a hundred and twenty thousand miles. More time than he thought he’d need.
He began, first through one panel and then another to scan the sky. It shouldn’t be too hard to find Saturn. Out here in space, with no atmosphere to blunt vision, the stars were monstrous compared to the way they looked from Earth. Even on Earth rare people, with gifted eyesight, were said at times to be able to distinguish the rings of Saturn. From here, in space, normal eyesight ought to do it easily.
And he wouldn’t have to search the entire sky, even though he didn’t know Saturn’s present position. He knew enough of elementary astronomy to recognize the plane of the ecliptic and Saturn would be in that plane.
He’d have to look along a line, not throughout the whole sky. Of course, if Saturn were on the other side of the Sun, he’d have to try from there. But from here the Sun was a fiery ball in a black sky and occulted only a small fraction of the line of the ecliptic.
It took him a minute to get his bearings because there were so many more stars here than he was used to seeing. They didn’t twinkle, they glowed like luminous diamonds on a piece of black velvet. But he found the Dipper and then the belt of Orion and, after that, it was easy to locate the constellations of the zodiac.
He followed it around, carefully, studying each celestial object near the imaginary line. He got a little thrill out of seeing a reddish disk that must be Mars, a reddish disk with faint crackly lines on it.
He followed the line through about thirty degrees and there it was. The rings weren’t quite edge-on but they were unmistakable. And there was only one object in the whole sky that had rings.
He put the pointer on it and reached for the manual of instructions, in which there was a table of orbital distances. Yes, there it was—Saturn,. 886,779,000. It was in the same general direction from the sun as Earth was and that made it easy to figure.
Knock off the 93,000.000-odd miles of Earth’s distance from the sun, and Saturn was 793-odd million miles away from him. And, if he overguessed, it wouldn’t matter as long as he had his repulsor set. He set the dials at 800,000,000 miles, and the repulsor to stop him a thousand miles away from Saturn, checked the pointer again and pressed the button.
The beauty of the ringed planet—and its tremendous size from only a thousand miles away—made him catch his breath. He hadn’t realized how close a thousand miles was to a planet nearly 74,000 miles in diameter, about nine times the diameter of the Earth. It was a full minute before he could look away from it and start searching the sky for the Earth fleet, the war fleet.
He didn’t rind it—it found him. A voice startled him by saying, «Do not move.» It was a physical, actual voice, not one inside his head as Mekky’s voice had been. This wasn’t Mekky. The voice said, «What are you doing here? Pleasure craft are forbidden outside the orbit of Mars.»
He located it this time while the voice was speaking. It came out of a tiny speaker set into the instrument panel. He hadn’t noticed it before. Alongside it was what looked like a pick-up mike.
Keith said, «I want to see Mekky. It’s important.» While he spoke he looked out through the vision panels and saw them—halt a dozen oblong objects that globed him in at close range, occulting big chunks of the sky. He couldn’t guess how big they were without knowing their distance nor their distance without knowing their size.
The voice said sternly, «Under no circumstances are civilians or occupants of civilian craft allowed to approach the fleet. You will be escorted back to Earth and turned over to the authorities for punishment. Do not attempt to touch your controls. Your ship is pinned. Have you a space-suit on?»
«No,» said Keith. «But this is important. Does Mekky know I’m here? I must see him.»
«Mekky knows you are here, He ordered us to englobe and capture you. Put on a space-suit so you can let the air out of your ship and open the lock. One of us will enter and take over operation of your ship.»
«All right,» Keith said, desperately, «but does Mekky—»
The voice was different this time. It spoke both ways at once, strangely, inside his head and through the speaker on the instrument panel. It was Mekky’s voice. It said, «Keith Winton, I told you not to come here.»
Keith answered aloud. If the voice had come through the radio too, then Mekky was dealing the others in on the conversation and he might as well.
He said, «I had to come now or never, Mekky. The plans went wrong. I was being hunted down as a spy and you’re the only one who knows I’m not. I wouldn’t have lived a day longer on Earth.»
«What is that to me? What is one life beside the defense of a solar system?»
«That’s why,» said Keith, trying to sound confident. «You know, from having studied my surface thoughts, that I’m from another universe. You’ve got a lot of things here in the way of science that we can’t touch there. Space-travel and—and you, yourself. But how do you know we haven’t got some things you’ve missed?
«You’re in a jam here. You’re afraid of the next Arc attack. How do you know, without searching deeply into my mind, that you won’t find something there that may be worth a lot more than the little time you’d have to give me?»
A calm but youthful voice said, «Maybe he’s got something there, Mekky. Why not bring him over to the fleet? What have we got to lose?» It was a youthful yet deep voice—there were authority and confidence in it.
Keith had never heard it before but he knew somehow that it must be Dopelle’s voice—Dopelle, with whom Betty Hadley, his Betty Hadley, was so hopelessly in love. The great Dopelle who held this universe—except for the Arcturians—in the palm of his hand. The mighty Dopelle. «Damn him,» Keith thought.
Mekky’s voice again said, «All right. Bring him to the fleet. To the flagship.» There was dull knocking on the outside of the airlock. Keith unstrapped himself quickly from the pilot’s seat. He said, «Just a minute. Getting a space-suit on.»
It was thick and awkward to handle but there wasn’t anything difficult about putting it on. The helmet clicked automatically into place against the neck-ring. He opened the valve in the airlock that would let the air inside the ship outside. He heard it hiss. When it quit hissing in a few seconds he opened the airlock.
A man wearing a space-suit bigger and more cumbersome than his came in. Without speaking he sat down in the pilot’s seat and began to work the vernier controls. He stood up again and motioned to the airlock. Keith nodded and opened it; they were up against, almost touching, the side of a big ship. From so close, he couldn’t tell how big it was.
An airlock stood open and Keith stepped across into the closed compartment to which it led. Of course, he realized, a ship this size couldn’t exhaust all its air merely to let someone in at the airlocks. There’d be an intermediate chamber.
The outer door swung shut. Air hissed. The inner door swung open. A tall, very handsome young man with black hair and flashing black eyes stood there, just inside the inner door.
He stepped forward quickly and helped Keith take off the helmet. He said, «I’m Dopelle, and you’re this Winton or Winston Mekky told me about. Hurry up and get that suit off.» His voice was courageous, but worried. «We’re in a jam. I hope you’ve got something we can use. Otherwise—»
Slipping out of the space-suit, Keith looked around him. The ship was big all right—the room he was in must be the main chamber. It was a hundred feet long by thirty or thirty-five wide. There were a lot of men in it, mostly working down at the far end of the room in what looked like a completely equipped experimental laboratory.