The Ring bonanza

Seemingly, there had once been life, and civilization, on the destroyed moon. Fossil bones, once buried within the moon's crust, now floated within the ring debris--and bits of machinery of some vanished and unknown race. There was no oxygen or moisture in space to rust them and thus the metal remained perfectly preserved through eons of time.

Timkin looked musingly at the bones, as he shoved them to his ship. They made up part of the skeleton of an ancient creature that possibly resembled an earthly tiger. The Saturn Archeological Museum would pay five SS-dollars for this--Solar System Dollars, the standard currency. Not too bad.

Finally, Timkin got the bit of machinery. It consisted of a broken portion of a huge cogged wheel with dangling wires and bits of other enigmatic mechanical devices. Timkin wondered just how advanced the people had been who once inhabited the first moon. That was something even the experts didn't know with the few poor clues they had collected.

For a moment, Timkin's imagination wandered. He pictured life on the first moon, before the debacle. Towering cities--humming wheels--busy, industrious people. Then, abruptly, their world cracking apart, into a billion bits. And now only this remained ... the rings of Saturn.

As Timkin brought the broken wheel to his ship he took one last look around and saw another museum item. It had circled in slow gyrations and come into view from the back of his ship. Timkin got that too, perhaps the most intriguing find of the lot, for it was a stone with mysterious "writing" on it. The museum had quite a collection of such stones, evidently parts of temples or buildings.

Seemingly the people of the first moon had inscribed most of their stone walls with their writings. But these writings had never been translated. They were a riddle that baffled the best archeological minds of the System.

He also put this carved stone in the hold.

"Huh," he grunted. "I'm just a scavenger for the museum, that's what I am."

Timkin looked over the things crammed in his hold, gleaned from the rings for a month. Their total value would possibly pay for the trip with a few SS-dollars to spare. Yet one find of gold or precious stone and he would dump the whole mess out and be far the richer.

Growling to himself, Timkin took off his vac-suit and went to the controls. He debated. He still had food and fuel enough for three days before he had to return to the Titan docks. What should he do?

"I'm going to the Crêpe Ring," he finally told himself. "I had no luck in Rings A and B, so why not try C just to play it out to the finish?"

Timkin had started, a month ago, at the outer ring--Ring A. This portion of the rings had an outer diameter of 171,000 miles and extended inward toward Saturn for 11,100 miles.

Then there was a separation of 2,200 miles between rings A and B named Cassini's Division when first seen through earthly telescopes centuries ago.

Ring B was 145,000 miles, outer diameter, and some 18,000 miles wide. Another space of 1000 miles and then came Ring C or the Crêpe Ring, 11,000 miles wide. So had the rings of Saturn distributed themselves, under the laws of gravitation, when the first moon exploded ages before. The first moon had not been large, for the total mass of all the rings was estimated at no more than one-quarter of earth's moon.

Timkin urged his old rattletrap Jetabout up from the plane of the rings till he had a clear path before him and then jetted straight toward mighty Saturn, which hung in the sky like a bloated, vari-colored marble.

He crossed the narrow empty space between Rings B and C and finally cruised over the outer edges of the Crêpe Ring. Saturn was only 17,000 miles distant and Timkin could feel the faint tug of its powerful gravitation.

"Now," Timkin said between set teeth, "let's see if I have any luck. I've got three days to nose around through the Crêpe Ring, searching. I know there's gold or diamonds ahead ... if I can just stumble on them."

As he slowly cruised above the Crêpe Ring, with his binoculars to his eyes, Timkin munched a sandwich and now and then took a swig of coffee. In all their explorations of other worlds earthmen had never found any beverage better than time-honored coffee, though the Martians tried hard to sell a green-tinted product called tukka.

Timkin's hand gave a little jerk, and his binoculars wavered. Watching him one would have thought he had spied something exciting--like gold. But it was something else, almost equally as startling....

"Another Jetabout!" Timkin murmured. "Gave me a start, seeing it so suddenly."

It was a rare event when two wandering Jetabouts happened to cross paths in the vast area of the rings, almost like two explorers in the heart of Africa meeting each other. Timkin grinned humorlessly.

"Another chump!" he thought. "He wouldn't have a bonanza, or he'd be streaking back for Titan. He's cruising and looking for something like me."