A Honeymoon in Space
then the _Astronef_ began to turn on her axis, and, just as the outer
envelope came into view the enormously distended bulk of the monsters
collapsed, and their fragments, seeming now like the tatters of a burst
balloon than portions of a once living creature, dropped from the body
of the _Astronef_, and floated away down into what had been their native
element.
"Difference of environment means a lot, after all," said Redgrave to
himself. "I should have called that either a lie or a miracle if I
hadn't seen it, and I'm jolly glad I sent Zaidie down below."
"Here's your coffee, Lenox," said her voice from the upper deck the next
moment, "only it doesn't seem to want to stop in the cups, and the cups
keep getting off the saucers. I suppose we're turning upside down
again."
Redgrave stepped somewhat gingerly on to the deck, for his body had so
little weight under the double attraction of Saturn and the Rings that a
very slight effort would have sent him flying up to the roof of the
deck-chamber.
"That's exactly as you please," he said, "just hold that table steady a
minute. We shall have our centre of gravity back soon. And now, as to
the main question, suppose we take a trip across the sunlit hemisphere
of Saturn to, what I suppose we should call on Earth, the South Pole. We
can get resistance from the Rings, and as we are here we may as well see
what the rest of Saturn is like. You see, if our theory is correct as to
the Rings gathering up most of the atmosphere of Saturn about its
equator, we shall get to higher latitudes where the air is thinner and
more like our own, and therefore it's quite possible that we shall find
different forms of life in it too--or if you've had enough of Saturn and
would prefer a trip to Uranus----"
"No, thanks," said Zaidie quickly. "To tell you the truth, Lenox, I've
had almost enough star-wandering for one honeymoon, and though we've
seen nice things as well as horrible things--especially those ghastly,
slimy creatures down there--I'm beginning to feel a bit homesick for
good old Mother Earth. You see, we're nearly a thousand million miles
from home, and, even with you, it makes one feel a bit lonely. I vote we
explore the rest of this hemisphere up to the pole, and then, as they
say at sea--I mean our sea--'bout ship, and try if we can find our own
old world again. After all, it _is_ more homelike than any of these,
isn't it?"
"Just take our telescope and look at it," said Redgrave, pointing
towards the Sun, with its little cluster of attendant planets. "It looks
something like one of Jupiter's little moons down there, doesn't it,
only not quite as big?"
"Yes, it does, but that doesn't matter. The fact is that it's there, and
we know what it's like, and it's _home_, if it _is_ a thousand million
miles away, and that's everything."
By this time they had passed through the outer band of clouds. The vast,
sunlit arch of the Rings towered up to the zenith, apparently spanning
the whole visible heavens. Below and in front of them lay the enormous
semicircle of the hemisphere which was turned towards the Sun, shrouded
by its many-coloured bands of clouds. The R. Force was directed strongly
against the lower ring, and the _Astronef_ descended rapidly in a
slanting direction through the cloud-bands towards the southern
temperate zone of the planet.
They passed through the second, or dark, cloud-band at the rate of about
three thousand miles an hour, aided by the repulsion against the Rings
and the attraction of the planets, and soon after lunch, the materials
of which now consented to remain on the table, they passed through the
clouds and found themselves in a new world of wonders.
On a far vaster scale, it was the Earth during that period of its
development which is called the Reptilian Age. The atmosphere was still
dense and loaded with aqueous vapour, but the waters had already been
divided from the land.
They passed over vast, marshy continents and islands, and warm seas,
above which thin clouds of steam still hung, and as they swept southward
with the propellers working at their utmost speed they caught glimpses
of giant forms rising out of the steamy waters near the land, of others
crawling slowly over it, dragging their huge bulk through a tremendous
vegetation, which they crushed down as they passed, as a sheep on Earth
might push its way through a field of standing corn.
Other and even stranger shapes, broad-winged and ungainly, fluttered
with a slow, bat-like motion through the lower strata of the atmosphere.
Every now and then during the voyage across the temperate zone the
propellers were slowed down to enable them to witness some Titanic
conflict between the gigantic denizens of land and sea and air. But
Zaidie had had enough of horrors on the Saturnian equator, and so she
was content to watch this phase of evolution working itself out (as it
had done on the Earth thousands of ages ago) from a convenient distance.
Wherefore the _Astronef_ sped on without approaching the surface nearer
than was necessary to get a clear general view.
"It'll be all very nice to see and remember and dream about afterwards,"
she said, "but I don't think I can stand any more monsters just now, at
least not at close quarters, and I'm quite sure that if those things can
live there we couldn't, any more than we could have lived on Earth a
million years or so ago. No, really I don't want to land, Lenox; let's
go on."
They went on at a speed of about a hundred miles an hour, and, as they
progressed southward, both the atmosphere and the landscape rapidly
changed. The air grew clearer and the clouds lighter. Land and sea were
more sharply divided, and both teeming with life. The seas still swarmed
with serpentine monsters of the saurian type, and the firmer lands were
peopled by huge animals, mastodons, bears, giant tapirs, mylodons,
deinotheriums, and a score of other species too strange for them to
recognise by any Earthly likeness, which roamed in great herds through
the vast twilit forests and over boundless plains covered with grey-blue
vegetation.
Here, too, they found mountains for the first time on Saturn; mountains
steep-sided, and many Earth-miles high.
As the _Astronef_ was skirting the side of one of these ranges Redgrave
allowed it to approach more closely than he had so far done to the
surface of Saturn.
"I shouldn't wonder if we found some of the higher forms of life up
here," he said. "If there is any kind of being that is going to develop
some day into the human race of Saturn it would naturally get up here."
"I should hope so," said Zaidie, "and just as far as possible out of the
reach of those unutterable horrors on the equator. That would be one of
the first signs they would show of superior intelligence. Look! I
believe there are some of them. Do you see those holes in the
mountain-side there? And there they are, something like gorillas, only
twice as big, and up the trees, too--and what trees! They must be seven
or eight hundred feet high."
"Tree-men and cave-dwellers, and ancestors of the future royal race of
Saturn, I suppose!" said Redgrave. "They don't look very nice, do they?
Still, there's no doubt about their being far superior in intelligence
to those other brutes we saw. Evidently this atmosphere is too thin for
the two-headed jelly-fishes and the saurians to breathe. These creatures
have found that out in a few hundreds of generations, and so they have
come to live up here out of the way. Vegetarians, I suppose, or perhaps
they live on smaller monkeys and other animals, just as our ancestors
did."
"Really, Lenox," said Zaidie, turning round and facing him, "I must say
that you have a most unpleasant way of alluding to one's ancestors. They
couldn't help what they were."
"Well, dear," he said, going towards her, "marvellous as the miracle
seems, I'm heretic enough to believe it possible that your ancestors
even, millions of years ago, perhaps, may have been something like
those; but then, of course, you know I'm a hopeless Darwinian."
"And, therefore, entirely horrid, as I've often said before, when you
get on subjects like these. Not, of course, that I'm ashamed of my poor
relations; and then, after all, your Darwin was quite wrong when he
talked about the descent of man--and woman. We--especially the
women--have _as_cended from that sort of thing, if there's any truth in
the story at all; though, personally, I must say I prefer dear old
Mother Eve."
"Who never had a sweeter daughter than----!" he replied, drawing her
towards him.
"Very prettily put, my Lord," she laughed, releasing herself with a
gentle twirl; "and now I'll go and get dinner ready. After all, it
doesn't matter what world one's in, one gets hungry all the same."
The dinner, which was eaten somewhere in the middle of the
fifteen-year-long day of Saturn, was a more than usually pleasant one,
because they were now nearing the turning-point of their trip into the
depths of Space, and thoughts of home and friends were already beginning
to fly back across the thousand-million-mile gulf which lay between them
and the Earth which they had left only a little more than two months
ago.
While they were at dinner the _Astronef_ rose above the mountains and
resumed her southward course. Zaidie brought the coffee up on deck as
usual after dinner, and, while Redgrave smoked his cigar and Zaidie her
cigarette, they luxuriated in the magnificent spectacle of the sunlit
side of the Rings towering up, rainbow built on rainbow, to the zenith
of their visible heavens.
"What a pity there aren't any words to describe it!" said Zaidie. "I
wonder if the descendants of the ancestors of the future human race on
Saturn will invent anything like a suitable language. I wonder how
they'll talk about those Rings millions of years hence."
"By that time there may not be any Rings," Lenox replied, blowing one of
blue smoke from his own lips. "Look at that--made in a moment and gone
in a moment--and yet on exactly the same principle, it gives one a dim
idea of the difference between time and eternity. After all it's only
another example of Kelvin's theory of vortices. Nebulae, and asteroids,
and planet-rings, and smoke-rings are really all made on the same
principle."
"My dear Lenox, if you're going to get as philosophical and as
commonplace as that, I'm going to bed. Now that I come to think of it,
I've been up about fifteen Earth-hours, so it's about time I went and
had a sleep. It's your turn to make the coffee in the morning--our
morning, I mean--and you'll wake me in time to see the South Pole of
Saturn, won't you? You're not coming yet, I suppose?"
"Not just yet, dear. I want to see a bit more of this, and then I must
go through the engines and see that they're all right and ready for that
thousand million mile homeward voyage you're talking about. You can have
a good ten hours' sleep without missing much, I think, for there doesn't
seem to be anything more interesting than our own Arctic life down
there. So good-night, little woman, and don't have too many nightmares."
"Good-night!" she said; "if you hear me shout you'll know that you're to
come and protect me from monsters. Weren't those two-headed brutes just
too horrid for words? Good-night, dear!"
CHAPTER XIX
A little before six (Earth time) on the fourth morning after they had
cleared the confines of the Saturnian System, Redgrave went as usual
into the conning-tower to examine the instruments, and to see that
everything was in order. To his intense surprise he found, on looking at
the gravitational compass, which was to the _Astronef_ what the ordinary
compass is to a ship at sea, that the vessel was a long way out of her
course.