The Secret of Saturn’s Rings by Donald A. Wollheim Page B

have to figure where next best to leap, or else make a very wide jump on our own. The latter would cut into our fuel more heavily than we could afford. Either course would compel us to spend an awful long time on new calculations. Time is what we cannot afford.”
    So when Bruce and Jennings stepped out, suitably protected in their space clothes, it was mainly for the purpose of observing the little worldlet’s motion in space and the apparent movements of the stars and planets in the jet-black airless sky. There would be need of making astronomical observations to check their position and these could not be made without first determining the tricks of sky as seen from Apollo.
    The effect was strange. Bruce felt almost as weightless standing outside the ship as he had in deep space. The little asteroid was so tiny that his weight would be measured in ounces only. With his Earth muscles capable of carrying many pounds, he had to be extremely careful when he moved. A normal step might cause him to fly up hundreds of feet, to drift slowly down far from where he took off. He did this the first time he tried to walk, and it was an eerie experience.
    From where he floated helpless, drifting like a feather very gently downward, he could see the surface of the asteroid. It was all rocky, unrelieved by either water or air or soil. Its edges were sharp and harsh. The light of sun and stars glinted brilliantly in spots and where there were shadows, they were utterly dark.
    As he drifted down, he could see Jennings standing by the side of the space ship waving to him. The pilot was hanging on to the rocky surface with a long hook. In addition, he had tied a long rope to himself running to the ship. He was holding another end for Bruce to fasten, and had been about to give it to Bruce when the boy’s thoughtless first step had sent him into the sky.
    Bruce caught his breath and waited. Eventually, minutes later, he floated to the surface, and Jennings drifted over to him and attached the rope to a ring in the space-suit’s belt.
    “Must have gotten a real scare, eh?” said Jennings on their helmet phones.
    “Well,” said Bruce, “it was a surprise for sure.”
    “Look up,” said the pilot, pointing. Bruce gazed with him up at the sky.
    It was brilliant and wonderful and quite unusual. Instead of the blue of Earth, the sky was as black as if seen from a space ship. The stars and planets seemed also as if seen from space, but they were moving. The whole sky was slowly turning. It made Bruce quite dizzy to watch it for any length of time.
    “Apollo is revolving rather rapidly, which is not surprising in a world of this size,” said Jennings. “We’ve got to calculate just how fast and in what way it is turning, so that we can figure out just which stars we are seeing and when we can expect to spot the various bodies we will be guided by.”
    They set up automatic cameras which would snap sky pictures regularly over several hours. These would then be studied and used as the basis for Garcia’s calculations. They set up telescopes for identifying rapidly the various bodies, and in a fairly short time they had solved the basic part of their problems.
    Bruce looked about him from time to time. Because the worldlet was not spherical but almost oblong, and their position was in a rather hollo wed-out valley near the line of its axis, the effect was almost frightening. Instead of a horizon, they seemed to be camped between two incredibly tremendous mountains—for each pole of the tiny planet loomed before them like a mountain many miles high.
    As the days passed, and the routine of remapping their charts neared completion, Bruce had a couple of occasions to go exploring out to the ends of the asteroid. He discovered to his astonishment that the apparent mountains seemed to lie down as he approached them. For their effect of towering was a gravitational trick. As he walked along the