RING WORLD

The woman smiled at Holly. “Galileo felt just the way you do. The doggone rings disappeared on him.”

“What do you mean?” Holly asked, looking back and forth from the pink disk of the planet to the round, owl-eyed face of the woman, half hidden in the shadows of the dimly lit observation blister.

The woman smiled, a little sadly, Holly thought. She said, “Galileo was the first to see that Saturn had something strange about it, back in 1609, 1610, somewhere in there. His dinky little telescope couldn’t resolve the rings; all he saw was what looked like a pair of stars hovering on either side of Saturn’s disk.”

“And they disappeared?” Holly asked.

“Ah-yup. He laid off observing Saturn for a while, and when he looked again — around 1612 or so, this was — the rings were gone.”

“What happened to them?”

“They didn’t go anyplace. They were still there. But every fifteen years or so Saturn’s tilt comes around to a position where the rings are edge-on to an observer on Earth. They’re so doggone thin they seem to disappear. You can’t see them in low-power telescopes. Not even in some pretty darn big ’scopes, really.”

“So we’re looking at them edge-on right now?” Gaeta asked. “That’s right. Poor Galileo. He didn’t know what was going down. Must have driven him half-crazy.”

Holly stared at the disk of Saturn, as if she could make the rings reappear if she just tried hard enough.

“You can see ’em in the ’scopes over at the astronomy blister,” the woman said. She seemed on the verge of saying more, but stopped herself.

“Are you an astronomer?” Holly asked.

“Sort of. Nadia Wunderly’s my name.” She put out her hand, fingers splayed and thumb sticking straight up. Holly took it and introduced herself and Gaeta. Wunderly shook hands with him, too, her expression serious, as if meeting people was a chore that had to be done correctly.

“What do you mean, you’re sort of an astronomer?” Gaeta asked.

Wunderly’s face became even more somber. “I’m with the Planetary Sciences team,” she explained, “but they’re mostly astrobiologists. They’re all hotted up about Titan.”

“You’re not?”

“Naw. I’m interested in Saturn’s rings. I’m really a physicist by training; a fluid dynamicist.”

Within an hour they were all in Holly’s apartment, munching leftovers from her refrigerator while Wunderly explained that Saturn’s rings could be thought of as a fluid, with each individual chunk of ice in the rings acting as a particle in that dynamic, ever-changing fluid.

“So the ice flakes are speeding around Saturn like they’re on a race track,” Wunderly was saying, making a wobbly circle with the spear of celery she held in one hand, “and banging into one another like people jostling in the New Tokyo subway trains.”

“All the time?” Gaeta asked.

“All the time,” Wunderly replied, then crunched off a bite of celery.

Holly was on the other side of the counter that partitioned off the kitchen, waiting for the microwave to defrost a packaged dinner. “And they have these little moons going around, too?”

“Ay-yup. Sheepdogs. The moons keep the rings from spreading out and mixing into one another.”

Gaeta, sprawled over the living room sofa with a bowl of chips resting on his flat stomach, seemed deep in thought.

“Then there’s the spokes, too,” Wunderly went on. “Magnetic field levitates the smaller ice flakes.” She waved her free hand up and down like a snake’s sinuous undulations.

“Everything’s bumping into everything else,” Holly said, just as the microwave finally pinged.

“And not all of the particles are little flakes, either. Some of ’em are big as houses. The moons, of course, are a few kilometers across.”

“Sounds confusing,” Holly said, carrying the steaming-hot dinner tray into the living room. She put it down on the coffee table in front of Wunderly.

“Sounds dangerous,” said Gaeta, hauling himself up to a sitting position.

“It’s only dangerous if you stick your nose in,” Wunderly said. “I just want to study the rings from a safe distance.”

“Nobody’s been there, huh?” he asked.

“To the rings? We’ve sent automated probes to Saturn, starting with the old Cassini spacecraft darn near a century ago.”

Gaeta was sitting up straight now, his eyes kindled with growing excitement. “Any of them go through the rings? I mean, from one side to the other, top to bottom?”

Wunderly was poking at the dinner tray with the stub of her celery stalk. “Through the ring plane, you mean?”

“Yeah, right.”

Holly sat down beside Gaeta on the sofa.

“They’ve sent probes through the gaps between the rings, of course. But not through a ring itself. That’d be too danged dangerous. The probe would be beaten up, abraded. It’d be like going through a meat grinder.”

Holly said, “Manny, you’re not thinking of doing that, are you?”

He turned to her, grinning. “It’d make a helluva stunt, chiquita.”

“Stunt?” Wunderly looked puzzled.

“That’s what I do for a living,” Gaeta explained. “I go where no one has gone before. The more dangerous, the better.”

“Within reason,” Holly said.

He laughed.

Recognition dawned on Wunderly’s face. “You’re the guy who scaled Mt. Olympus! On Mars. I saw the vid.”

“That was me. And I skiboarded halfway down the slope, too,” Gaeta said, with pride in his voice.

“Yes, but you can’t go skydiving through Saturn’s rings.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll get killed.”

“There’s always an element of risk in a stunt. That’s what makes people watch.”

Holly said, “They pay money to see if you get killed.”

He laughed. “Like the Roman gladiators. Only I don’t hafta kill anybody. I just risk my own neck.”

Wunderly said, “Not in the rings. It’s suicide.”

“Is it?” Gaeta mused. “Maybe not.”

Holly wanted to stop him before he got to like the idea too much. “Manny—”

“I mean, Wilmot and the science guys don’t want me going down to Titan. Maybe the rings would be a better stunt. Nothing else like them in the whole solar system.”

“All the big planets have rings, don’t they?” Holly said. “Jupiter and Uranus and Neptune.”

“Yeah, but they’re just puny little ones. Pobrecitos.”

“The real question is,” said Wunderly, her eyes beginning to sparkle, “how come Saturn has such a terrific set of rings while the other giant planets just have those dinky little ones?”

Gaeta looked at Holly, then back to Wunderly. He shrugged.

Wunderly resumed, “I mean, you’d think that the bigger a planet is, the bigger its ring system would be. Right? Then how come Saturn’s is bigger than Jupiter’s? And those rings are dynamic, they don’t just sit there. Particles are falling into the planet all the time, new particles abraded off the moons. Why is Saturn’s system so big? Are we just lucky enough to see Saturn at precisely the right time when its ring system is big and active? I don’t believe in luck. Something’s different about Saturn. Something important.”

“So what is it?” Holly asked. “What makes Saturn so special?”

“GOK,” said Wunderly.

“What?” Holly and Gaeta asked in unison.

“God Only Knows,” Wunderly replied, with a grin. “But I intend to find out.”

Wunderly talked about the rings for more than an hour, growing more excited with each word. When Gaeta asked about flying through the rings, Wunderly stressed the danger. “It’s impossible, I tell you,” she said. “You’ll get yourself killed.” Which only made Gaeta more excited about the stunt.

Finally she left, but not before Gaeta got her to promise that she would let him see all the vids and other data she had amassed. He told her he would bring his chief technician to take a look, too.

Holly saw Wunderly to the door, and when she closed and turned back to Gaeta, she realized they were alone and he was grinning from ear to ear. Don’t get involved with him, she warned herself. He’s going to get himself killed, sooner or later. Prob’ly sooner.