Read Online Saturn Rukh by Robert L. Forward - Free Book Online

console up against the ceiling and turned herself around in the tube so that her head was hanging over the “foot” of the bed where she could see out of the large slanted viewport window. The viewport was facing rearward and she looked “down” at the rapidly disappearing Earth-Luna system. They had passed the orbit of the moon only four hours after takeoff. They were now nearly eight hours into their journey and the Earth-Luna system was beginning to take on the familiar aspect that she had become used to on Mars. The two globes of the double planet were in half-moon phase because of their takeoff direction.
     
    When she was a child, she had thought the Earth was flat, and made of “earth,” while the Moon was a bright globe made of silver. Now, as a space traveler, she knew the Earth to be a globe covered with water and clouds, with an occasional splotch of “earth,” while Luna was a globe covered with gray dust. When she looked at them both from a distance, especially during her travels to Mars, she also began to realize that the globes of Earth and Luna were not the typical “big planet with tiny moons” system typified by Mars, Jupiter, and the outer planets. Because Luna was comparable in size to its primary, the two really were more of a “double-planet” system, or perhaps a “mother-child” system.
     
    The glaring orb of the Sun started to intrude through her viewport, so she found the window controls and rotated the viewport so that it was facing in the direction they were going. Ahead of them was Saturn, racing along in its orbit to meet them at the designated rendezvous point a year later. Sandra reached up into the tight corner formed by one end of the elliptical viewport window and the pointed end of the habitat, and pulled down the binocular viewer on the end of its pantograph arm. Setting the biviewer for “visual” and “motion compensation,” she raised it to her eyes.
     
    “There are strange lifeforms there…” she whispered to herself as the brilliant globe-and-halo swam into her ken. “And I’m going to see them...”
     
    Reentry probes dropped into Saturn over the past decade had sent back a few poorly resolved pictures of floating and flying lifeforms swimming in the thick air beneath the clouds of Saturn—”saganlife” some called them.
     
    When the first lifeform pictures were returned, the scientific community had exploded with excitement. Even Sandra had been sure the discovery of life elsewhere in the solar system would reactivate the scientific exploration of the outer planets, leading to the establishment of crewed stations around each of the major planets and on the surface of the major moons. But when the politicians began to reckon the cost, and the scientists could promise nothing in return but better biological insight, no intelligent advanced technological species that would have new or different technological know-how that would pay back the massive investment that would be needed, then the dreams of crewed deep space stations evaporated, and the scientists had to be satisfied with the funding for a few more reentry probes.
     
    Now, because of the needs of commerce, not the needs of science, there were going to be crewed space stations on and around at least one of the outer planets. There was room and need for a biologist on the first of those, and Sandra had been the lucky one chosen. She would be the first biologist to study these new lifeforms firsthand. With any luck, and the fishing nets she had arranged to have stored in the ship supplies, she would hopefully obtain a few specimens to bring back. She could hardly wait to get there....
     
    “For the first time, someone will be able to stay long enough to do a thorough job of finding and describing these air creatures.” She, being the biologist who would find and describe them, would also have the privilege of naming all the new species that she found. “It’ll be like starting over in the garden