Saturn Rukh Read Online Free Page A

work, but she put the negative thought out of her mind by concentrating on Pete’s bare back—it was a very nice muscular back and she wondered how it would feel to run long fingernails down that back and feel it twitch in response.
     
    “These are the laser filters,” said Pete, pointing to one wall. “The nitro-stabilized metastable helium clusters are only stable if there are absolutely no impurities in the cluster. Not one atom of hydrogen or any other foreign atom, not even an atom of helium-three, the lightweight version of normal helium-four. These racks of tuned lasers take the input gas flow of impure helium, which will have been extracted from the hydrogen and other stuff in Saturn’s atmosphere by front-end physical and chemical filters, and clean all the impurities out of it, leaving pure helium-four gas.” He turned a comer and led them down another corridor, which had similar racks of equipment, with slightly different arrangements of indicators and toggle switches. Most of them were dark. “These racks of tuned laser exciters take the helium-four gas stream, and apply pi pulses of laser light at just the right frequency and pulse length. The pi-pulses flip every single one of the helium atoms from its normal nonexcited state into the excited state at the same time. The stream of excited helium atoms is then merged with a beam of excited nitrogen atoms, here”—he pointed to the midsection of the illuminated unit—”tickled with another laser to induce the formation of the sixty-four-atom cluster ... and out the end comes a stream of nitrometahelium, which condenses on the walls, is collected, and sent to the fuel tanks. If you look in this window you can see some droplets. They’re pretty small, but that’s all I have to show you, since for my helium source I only have a small pressure tank of a hydrogen-helium mixture pretending it’s Saturn.”
     
    “Y’know,” said Chastity as she moved to look in the window. “I’ve used tons of meta in my career, but I’ve never actually seen the stuff.” She looked in the window at the tiny, almost spherical, metallic-looking drops collected on the far wall of the chamber. They had a silvery blue surface.
     
    “Looks like blue mercury,” she said.
     
    “Acts like mercury, but it’s a lot lighter,” said Pete. “When we’re in the cloud-tops on Saturn, the gravity will pull the droplets down the walls, where they will collect at the bottom of the chamber, then electromagnetic pumps will pump the liquid nitrometahelium into the fuel tanks.”
     
    “How come only this one unit is on?” asked Chastity, pointing to the dark units above and below the one they were looking at.
     
    “The helium exciters are real power hogs,” said Pete. “Since this stage is where the energy is put into the fuel, a lot of power is required to run each one. At Saturn we’ll have Seichi’s multi-megawatt nuclear reactor up and running, and I can run all the exciters at once. Here, I have to borrow power from the Assembly Station, so I’m checking them out one at a time. So far I’ve only found one bad one.”
     
    “Make sure you find them all,” said Chastity. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life on Saturn.”
     
    “Don’t worry,” said Pete with a wave of his hand. “I’ve designed this system so that it’s not only redundant and failsafe, but is completely repairable by a person working in a space-suit.”
     
    “You designed all of this?” asked Chastity, looking around. She was impressed.
     
    “Every bit,” said Pete with pride. “And it was assembled under my supervision. I’m now checking out each unit personally. After all, my life depends upon it working properly when we get to Saturn. If you two can get us down into Saturn safely, then I’ll give you the fuel to get us back out.”
     
    “You can’t ask more of the builder of a system than to bet his life on it,” said Rod to Chastity. “Now let me take you to see