Saturn 3 Read online

  TETHYS

  The long-dead, deserted third moon orbiting Saturn.

  Codename:

  SATURN 3

  A lonely chunk of ammonia ice with two sole inhabitants. A self-exiled earth-traveller and Alex, the beautiful space-born, working together at the isolated research station.

  Until Saturn beams news of an approaching alien craft with a secret cargo aboard—a cargo comprising eight feet of computerized renegade robot, a technical space-age wonder, with a deadly self-imposed mission.

  And on Saturn 3 the nightmare begins . . .

  “Bye, Captain,” the figure said, and threw the emergency handle on the outer door.

  A square of black space and stars was suddenly rushing towards James at frightening speed, and hard needles probed his ears. There was blood on his nose and chin, and droplets were spraying off in a blue-red shower as the air funnelled past and out into vacuum at high speed. Something hard and sharp stung the palm of his right hand, and he grabbed it before he had slid on past. He tried to shout, but the words were torn from his mouth; and now, as the thin cable began to slide through the flesh of his hand, he felt his one hold on safety going. He had a blurred, inverted view of the crewroom, torn papers and all the detritus of a working area swirling down towards the open door and spouting into free vacuum; then the meat was ripped from the palm of his hand in an instant of raw pain and the blackness and stars yawned and swallowed him.

  LORD GRADE

  Presents

  In Association with ELLIOTT KASTNER

  A STANLEY DONEN film

  KIRK DOUGLAS

  FARRAH FAWCETT • HARVEY KEITEL

  Director of Photography

  BILLY WILLIAMS B.S.C.

  Music by

  ELMER BERNSTEIN

  Story by

  JOHN BARRY

  Executive Producer

  MARTIN STARGER

  Screenplay by

  MARTIN AMIS

  Produced & Directed by

  STANLEY DONEN

  First published in Great Britain by Sphere Books Ltd. 1980

  Novelisation copyright © Sphere Books 1980

  Saturn Three copyright © ITC Entertainment Ltd.

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN: 0-7221-3762-1

  Printed in Great Britain by

  William Collins Sons & Co Ltd

  Glasgow

  ONE

  The base on Tethys, third moon of Saturn, was considered by most of the academics who formed the policies of the Saturn Survey Team to be the least promising of its research stations. Titan—now, that was another matter. Saturn’s first and biggest moon had promise, prestige, even an atmosphere of sorts; not that the sluggish mantle of methane and ammonia vapour was much of a reminder of the thin and acrid breathing mixture of home, but it was possible for those who worked on Saturn Six to delude themselves that their work had planetary research status. Tethys, though—Tethys was no more than a snowball, a six-hundred mile chunk of ammonia ice and grit. Even Saturn Five on Rhea was considered a better prospect than Tethys, and Rhea was generally acknowledged to be the Spacers’ graveyard.

  Those who took the Orion shuttle to the massive Saturn orbiting platform came either to make the transfer to Titan or to study the masses of data continuously radioed in from Saturn Six. In fact, so Titan-oriented had the Saturn Survey become that the orbit of the platform had been shifted to give more or less unbroken communication with the base; this was hard luck for Rhea and Tethys, where Five and Three sometimes had to endure long periods of planetary eclipse without contact or support, but as the range of experiments and the promise of Saturn Six grew no sleep was lost over the problems of the minor bases. Their workload and personnel were cut in roughly equal proportions, leaving the buried complexes as little more than perfunctory scientific outposts, dispirited watch-towers in a cold and blasted corner of the solar system.

  If an evaluation were to be made on a purely scientific basis Tethys might, in many ways, score far higher than Titan; if the purposes of the experimentation programmes were solely those set out in the survey prospectus—that is, the discovery of a means whereby the fixed nitrogen locked in the ammonia around Saturn could be processed into a viable growth medium for food organisms, and the methane provide a base for a bacterial protein culture—if these considerations were the only ones with a real importance attached to them the focus of research energy would probably have been on Saturn Three. Unfortunately such purity of purpose is rarely a feature of professional science, concerned as it so often is with an egotistical contest for the recognition of posterity; and so the extensive gas resources of Tethys were ignored in favour of the cold and difficult fogs of Titan.

  Adam wasn’t worried. Far from being a place of exile, Tethys was to him a corner of quiet sanity, a retreat from a brutal and self-obsessed society. He welcomed each successive withdrawal of contact, and breathed a quiet sigh each time the satellite’s spectacular primary interposed itself between his station antenna and the continuous harsh jargon of the broadcasting platform. The trouble with the rat race, he maintained, was that the rats had too much of an advantage. They won every time. If this isolation was the price he would have to pay to retain his humanity, he would go on paying it gladly.

  And, of course, there was Alex Alexandra, the most gracious and elegant name he’d been able to think of when he’d found she had none of her own, only the unattractive serial number that was the reference code of the space-born. At first the storybook-city name had been his own private tag, a mental label that he found himself using whenever he thought of this young stranger with whom he’d come to share his posting; but then, as the easy familiarity of close contact grew, Adam had told her of this frivolous conceit. Far from being amused, as he’d feared, she accepted the name as if it had been a personal gift, and from that point onwards their personal lives had merged to the same degree as their professional duties. Adam was wary of this, although he did nothing to resist the process—although in the best condition of a hardened spacer he was much older than she, and it depressed him to suspect that Alex’s affection might be directed towards him not because he alone could command it, but because he alone was available to receive it.

  If Alex ever gave the matter any thought, she didn’t show it. Once the initial barriers of personal distance had been crossed she demonstrated a distinct lack of inhibition in their relationship, as if she recognised his reserve and was determined to compensate for it. The night that she’d moved in with him was still fresh in Adam’s mind; there had been a knock on the sliding door to his quarters, and as a joke he’d called out “Who is it?” When he opened the door Alex was standing there in a loose shirt and holding an armload of rumpled bedding.

  “My dorm warden threw me out,” she said with an undisguisable mischief in her eyes. “Can I stay with you for a few days until I find a new place?”

  Adam’s insecurity had weathered under her attention. Now, as he accelerated the surface buggy towards the ridge that would mark the start of the last stretch of the drive home, he could feel that it was beginning to return. Their last communication from the platform had contained news of an impending visit; the message had been more eloquent in its omissions than it had been informative in its statements. He hadn’t yet told Alex about it. No doubt she would be excited by this variation in the routine of the base, and he felt a twinge of guilt for keeping this simple pleasure from her. He would tell
her as soon as he got back and had unloaded the samples from the buggy.

  The rugged vehicle chewed its way up the last few yards of broken ground and lurched over the ridge, its sprung body flexing in the middle to cope with the sudden change in the terrain. One of the rear wheels spun loose for a moment before the axle dropped and the coiled metal tires got a new bite on the sloping ice-rock. Black crystals glittered and showered slowly down in the low gravity behind the buggy as Adam increased the hydrogen burn to speed him home. Ahead stretched the tracks of innumerable expeditions like this one, ranging wide but all converging on the unimpressive hump of plated metal that was the uncovered upper level of Saturn Three. Beyond this was a low and jagged horizon only a few miles distant, a toothed black saw which cut into the awesome vista beyond; for Tethys’s airless sky was filled with the yellow belted splendour of Saturn, an angled halo of light brilliantly defining the curvature of space about the gas giant.

  The buggy skipped and bucketed down the slope, cutting fresh tracks in silence. Of course he would tell Alex. Perhaps later.

  TWO

  Captain James awoke with a start, jerked from his sleep by an inexplicable feeling of urgency. For a moment he stared, uncomprehending, into the darkness; the familiar shapes of his cabin furniture loomed in dim outline, picked out by the soft blue night-glow of the wall lighting panels. As these few details sketched themselves into his mind he began to relax, and the mild panic that he had felt upon awakening was replaced by a curiosity as to why this should be his reaction. Nerves, perhaps; his first solo drop as a full captain-handler was due to take place this shift, but then he had always prided himself on a professional coolness which rarely allowed such bursts of uncontrolled fever.

  He pushed the thin sheets back and reached for the bedside switch to bring the cabin to life. No point waiting for the preset to do it for him, now that he was already awake; as the glow of the panels increased and the coffee spigot made a welcome gurgling sound into the cup he levered himself up in the narrow bunk and half-rolled to get a look at the bedside timer.

  James blinked a couple of times, but the red-etched figures on the timer’s face didn’t alter. Surely there was some fault with the display . . . that couldn’t be right . . .

  The protestations of his reason were cut short by a shrill tone that broke in suddenly from the com point panel let into the wall above the timer. He reached out and touched the marked square that would open the channel, swinging his legs out of the bunk as he did so and lurching to his feet.

  “Captain James?” The voice from the com point managed to make the rank sound like a mild reprimand.

  “Yes. Speaking.”

  “Launch three nine two, sir. Your drop to Saturn Three, Tethys base. We’ve got a ship and we’ve got most of a cargo—all we need now is a pilot.”

  James had his locker open, was scrambling through the clothes on the rail to find his drop undersuit. “I’m on my way,” he called over his shoulder.

  “We’re at commit minus fifteen,” the crewman at launch control said. “If you don’t make it we’ll have to abort.”

  “I said I’m on my way!” Where the hell was the drop suit? He had a spare, but that didn’t carry his new rank flashes. The crewman cut the link from his end, but not before he’d let the microphone pick up a pointed sign of resignation.

  James tried to pull the spare suit out of the locker. His other clothes tangled around it and he felt a growing and uncontrollable frustration beginning to rob his movements of their usual economy. He gave a hard yank and dragged the suit free, throwing it across the bunk in an angry gesture. Two of his shirts slid from their hangers and dropped in a heap to the bottom of the locker but he ignored them, bounding the door shut and turning to move to the bathroom cubicle.

  Splashing a double handful of cold water on to his face, he told himself to be calm. Fifteen minutes was sufficient time to get to the crewroom on the platform’s outer skin and suit himself up for the drop. He’d done it often enough as second man on the shuttle, and there was no reason why the preparations for this first solo should take him any longer. What he couldn’t understand was his oversleeping; he could remember setting the room’s timer to wake him with more than an hour to spare before the drop. He was wide awake when he did it, because it had been just before Benson and Mazursky had called in to shake his hand and offer their best wishes on his completion of the course. All the lights had been on, and he was sure he hadn’t made a mistake. So why had it been left to his inner clock to snap him awake with only fifteen minutes to prepare?

  No time to worry about it now, any more than he could afford to go on digging through his locker to find his undersuit. He dropped on to the bed and started pulling on the spare; it annoyed him to have to go on his first solo with only Captain’s flashes on his shoulders, but he didn’t have much choice. The com point started to warble again as he moved to leave the room, but he ignored it—he could be polite or he could be on time, but not both.

  He slapped his breast pocket as he stepped into the curved central corridor of the officers’ quarters, reassured to feel the hard shape of his duplicate crewroom locker key under the zippered flap. He began to jog towards the central concourse and the elevators that would take him to the outer skin of the orbiting platform, and as his running moved into an even rhythm he felt his control returning. He would be in the crewroom in three minutes, four at the most. Two minutes to step into his pressure suit and slap across the self-locking seals, and a couple more to walk through to the launch bay airlock, fixing the seals on his helmet as he went . . . he’d do it with no problem.

  Don’t forget the braincase, he reminded himself as he pushed his way through a crowd of new arrivals from the Orion shuttle. You’d look a damn fool arriving at Saturn Three with a new Demigod robot and no braincase to put in it. Some of the people looked at him with undisguised interest as he stepped into the elevator and touched the square for the launch bay level; his assured haste marked him out as a professional, a man of action. He allowed himself to savour the feeling as the elevator made its fast “descent” to the outer shell of the rotating station, but was pulled out of his brief reverie of self-admiration as the doors opened and he heard his name over the utilities area public address system.

  “Captain James for launch three nine two. We are nearing abort status on this launch unless we get your presence, Captain.”

  James pulled the crewroom door open and stepped over the threshold. It was a bulkhead pressure door with a quarter-turn wheel at its centre, an essential safety measure as the crewroom was right on the outer skin and had a direct-exit door at its far end which could be blown in a launch bay emergency. At this moment, however, the ponderous steel portal was more of an obstacle than a salvation. He was being paged on the tannoy like some inexperienced space monkey, and it irritated him.

  Automatics took over and pulled the pressure door closed as James moved down the central suspension catwalk to his locker. Somebody else was at the far end of the catwalk, already suited and anonymous, and James raised a hand in half-greeting. This wasn’t a time to get involved in a conversation. The suited figure straightened a little from whatever it was he was doing, and acknowledged James’s wave.

  James palmed the narrow identifying strip of foil and held it level with the sensor on the locker as he tapped in the combination. As the door swung open he pocketed the key and reached inside for his pressure suit.

  He stepped into the legs of the suit and closed the seals, and then as they bound and locked reached deeper into the locker and brought out a tall cylinder of brushed metal. There was an indicator dial on the top and he wasted a few precious seconds in checking it; temperature variations could be fatal to nitrogen-cooled braincases. All was fine. He turned to pull on the arms and gloves of the suit.

  Something was wrong. The tailored glove didn’t slide easily on to his hand as it should; the fingers were too short and the wrist was too wide. Somewhere outside the tannoy was calling
for him again, muffled by the curving bulkhead walls but still recognisable—and he couldn’t move because suddenly his suit wouldn’t fit.

  It was Benson’s suit, that was why.

  Benson’s tag was inside the chest flap, and the flashes on the suit’s shoulders were for sub-Captain’s rank like the outdated ones on James’s own lightweight undersuit. So how did Benson’s pressure suit come to be in James’s locker? And where the hell was James’s own suit?”

  There was a crackle from the suit intercom of the figure at the end of the catwalk. James looked up at the noise, frowning in perplexity.

  “Bye, Captain,” the figure said, and threw the emergency handle on the outer door.

  A square of black space and stars was suddenly rushing towards James at frightening speed, and hard needles probed his ears. There was blood on his nose and chin, and droplets were spraying off in a blue-red shower as the air funnelled past and out into vacuum at high speed. Something hard and sharp stung the palm of his right hand, and he grabbed it before he had slid on past. It was one of the twisted wire cables which supported the catwalk and it gave him enough grip to pull him up so that he bobbed helpless in the fierce airstream. He tried to shout, but the words were torn from his mouth; and now, as the thin cable began to bite through the flesh of his hand, he felt his one hold on safety going. He had a blurred, inverted view of the crewroom, torn papers and all the odd detritus of a working area swirling down towards the open door and spouting into free vacuum, and that single suited figure pressed against the bulkhead for safety; then the meat was ripped from the palm of his hand in an instant of raw pain and the blackness and stars yawned and swallowed him.

  It had taken no more than a few seconds for the sealed crewroom to belch its atmosphere out into space. The irresistible hurricane dropped as quickly as it had begun, and the man in the suit with the newly applied handler’s flashes was able to lever himself away from the wall and turn the handle to close the outer door. As the chamber resealed itself he reached into the red box mounted on the wall beside him and re-cued the alarms that would sound a warning if the door should ever be inadvertently blown.