Saturn Rukh Read Free Page B

list…” replied Art firmly. He then broke out his most ingratiating smile and tried again. “But Rod and I would both like you to be part of this mission.”
     
    Chastity thought for a long time. She didn’t like it, but she couldn’t complain too much. For the rest of her life she could live like a multimillionaire on just the interest from a billion dollars.
     
    “Okay,” she finally said. She turned and looked at Rod. “Let’s go up and look at the ship.”
     
    ~ * ~
     
    The vehicle for the Saturn mission was being put together at the Boeing-Mitsubishi Assembly Station in LEO. After the trip up in the crew shuttle, Rod and Chastity put on spacesuits and went out on a Jet-Do, Rod at the controls and Chastity sitting behind him. They approached the crew capsule at the front of the ship. The capsule was in the shape of a cone seven meters high and seven meters wide at the base—like a gigantic Apollo capsule. There were three small view-windows toward the top of the cone, six larger ones in the middle, and an airlock door on one side near the bottom.
     
    “Looks like a standard Boeing-Mitsubishi crew capsule,” said Chastity as they approached. “Holds six—three in comfort. That’s going to be pretty close quarters for a thirty-month mission.”
     
    “I don’t mind if you don’t mind,” said Rod.
     
    Chastity squeezed her thighs tighter against him. “I’ll be fun the first few months,” she agreed. “But by eighteen months I’ll bet you’ll be tired of having me around all the time.”
     
    “Never!” said Rod.
     
    “Well, I may be tired of you!” she replied, giving him a punch in the ribs.
     
    As they approached closer, she asked, “What’s its name?”
     
    “I’ve named her Sexdent,” replied Rod. “After the trident that the god Saturn carries, only I changed it to ‘sexdent’ ‘cause there are six of us, and when our habitats are installed in its side, the capsule has six ‘teeth.’ “
     
    “You ninny!” Chastity shouted, giving him another punch in the ribs. “It’s Neptune that carries a trident. You’ve got your gods and planets mixed up.”
     
    “Oh, well,” said Rod. “At least the name has a nice nautical flavor ... sexdent...sextant…”
     
    Sexdent sat on a fuel tank module that continued the conical shape, so that the combined cone was eleven meters high and eleven meters wide at the base. At the base of the fuel tank module was an engine module with twelve large rocket nozzles spaced evenly around its base. This squat conical rocket ship was sitting on a large squat cylindrical fuel tank thirteen meters in diameter and eleven meters tall.
     
    “The stack doesn’t have the right proportions,” said Chastity. “When we go on a normal mission to Luna or Mars, the conical crew capsule up front is followed by a stack of cargo or passenger modules, with the fuel modules and the engine module at the end, all the same diameter as the crew capsule. Of course, for this mission there’ll be no cargo or passengers, but these certainly aren’t standard Boeing-Mitsubishi fuel modules. They’re too wide—and what’s that donut-shaped thing floating over there at the end of that tether?”
     
    “Since meta is so powerful, only a single fuel module and engine module stage is needed for a round-trip mission to the surface of Luna or Mars,” said Rod. “For this mission, even though we have no cargo or passengers, we’re going to need six stages. So things are built and stacked differently. The whole stack weighs a little over two thousand tons wet, most of it in the first two stages. At the base is the booster stage, with a fifty-ton tank and engine module, which holds a thousand tons of meta to get us up to speed. Sitting on that is the rendezvous stage, with a twenty-five-ton tank and engine module containing five hundred tons of meta to stop us at Saturn. Sitting on top of the rendezvous stage is the cone-shaped portion that we’ll use to carry