Doctor How and the Rings of Uranus (2 page)

“I could stare at this for hours, Doc.”

“It is rather stunning, isn’t it? So much more understated than Saturn. Some of those rings are just a hundred and fifty metres thick. Don’t get me wrong – there’s some lovely detail on Saturn’s rings, but the whole thing is rather overwhelming. Uranus is beautiful in a rather understated way, don’t you think?”

“Like, I don’t want to complain or nothing, but there’s just one little fly in the ointment.”

“Really? What’s that?”

“You’ve got it tipped on its side. The rings are up-down, and so are the moons. No offence, but when you project something like this you should always have the north pole on top and the equator in the middle, so the rings would be coming out at the side. It’s the convention, innit?”

“I think you’ll find that Uranus is unique amongst the solar planets in having its axis pointing towards the sun. There’s a very good reason for that.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, really. It made it easier for us to dispose of the nuclear waste in the solar wind when we were generating the fusion power.”

“So you actually put a planet on its side just to make sure the waste could be dumped?”

“Yes. Rather ingenious, don’t you think?”

“And you don’t think there’s something wrong with just dumping nu
clear waste in our solar system?”

The Doctor sighed heavily. “We’ve been through this before. Most of what you’re made of is nuclear waste from dead stars. The sun is a fusion bomb, and it produces far more waste and radiation in a second than we did during all the years we were mining Uranus.
The entire universe is immersed in and traversed by radiation lethal to most life-forms.”

“
Okay, okay. I have no idea how much energy it must have taken to flip a planet on its side.”

“You’re absolutely right about that, Kevin. Just you think about how much effort it takes to turn a little toy gyroscope. Now, come on. We have work to do.”

“Hold your horses, Doc. Can you, like, just give me an outline of what we’re up to?”

“Of course. Uranus was ‘discovered’ by the British astronomer Herschel, in 1781. Prior to that, you folks had thought it was something other than a planet
because it behaved like a member of a boy-band who’s been kicked out for taking drugs.”

“Come again?”

“Not that bright, and seemed to behave erratically. And definitely not a star.”

“Oh, h
umour. You caught me off guard.”

“Anyway, i
n 1789 Herschel observed the ring system. For nearly two hundred years no other astronomer saw it until an airborne NASA observatory did so, almost by accident. So guess where we are?”

“Knowing you and your insistence on details, I’m gonna say we’re somewhere around 1789, just prior to Herschel observing the rings.”

“Excellent, Kevin. Now, do you see this moon here? Hang on, I’ll just let the Spectrel zoom in on this bit of the moon system and add some dotted lines to show the orbits. Ah, there we are. Between the orbits of these two little moons Portia and Rosalind, you can see there’s another small one.”

“Gotcha. It’s kinda cute. Little red thing. What’s it called?”

“Called? It’s nameless.”

“How come?”

“No one ever gave it a name.”

“Yeah, I get that, but why not?”

“I think you’ll find the clue is in the fact that the gamma ring is red, and it’s missing from our current view.
Savvy
? As you would put it in your parlance.”

“You mean you’re going to destroy a perfectly harmless moon just so that this Herschel guy can see a red ring?”

“Of course.”

“That sucks, Doc!”

“I wish you’d lose this illogical sentimentality, Kevin. Half an hour ago, Uranus meant nothing to you. Now you have some kind of bizarre emotional attachment to a minor piece of space-debris in orbit around it.”

“It’s not a minor piece of space-debris, Doc. It’s a moon belonging to a planet!”

“Kevin, the planet
doesn’t care
. It’s not even a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn. It’s what’s called an
ice
giant. It’s a lump made mostly of water and ammonia ice, with a bit of metal at its core. It doesn’t have feelings. And if it had a heart it’d have frozen by now. No one lives there. No one has lived there. No ever
will
live there.”

“The helium-3 miners did.”

“No they
didn’t
. They lived on the bit of space-debris.” The Doctor was becoming agitated.

“You’re trying to take away its rights by calling it space-debris. Call it what it is, Doc. Call it a moon.”

“For the love of God, Kevin, it is
not
a moon! It really is a piece of space-debris. It’s an old hulk of a mining ship a few millennia old, left abandoned and adrift between two moons, and causing an anachronism in your human historical record by its continued existence. Do. You. Understand?”

“Alright,” said Kevin. “Just sayin’. But, like, a ship’s got feelings too, innit?”

The Doctor groaned.

“Well it has,” insisted Kevin. “People always refer to ships
as having characters.”

“You people even refer to those lifeless death-traps you call cars as having feelings,” said the Doctor. “But they’re just bits of metal pausing on their way to the
ir inevitable demise in a scrapyard. A ship does not have feelings.”

“Your Spectrel has feelings. So do all the others.”

“Kevin, Spectrels are not ships. This is a helium-3 mining ship. The closest thing you can probably relate it to in your experience is a ruddy great big oil refinery without the flares. Does an oil refinery look like it has feelings to you, Kevin?”

“Well –”

“
Please
don’t tell me you think oil refineries have feelings, laddie.”

Kevin locked eyes with the Doctor. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “You’re right.”

“Fine. Now, can we please just get on with the job?”

“So the job is to blow up the oil refinery?”

“The helium-3 mining plant, yes.”

“Oh, okay. If you’d put it like
that
I wouldn’t have had a problem with it. You’re rubbish at selling ideas, innit?”

“So you’re ‘ready to roll’, are you?”

“Doc, you know I is
always
ready to roll. Like, is Trini coming with us?”

“Where is she?”

“Last time I saw her she was in her room, asleep. There was the remains of something quite big. And it was all very bloody. The house-bots daren’t go in.”

“
Binge-eating again. I let her out in a forest world last night, a bit like her old home world. When she wakes up she’ll morph back to her feline form and take great pleasure in licking the place clean. I see no need to disturb her peaceful repose. All we have to do is have a quick look around and then trigger the autodestruct. Should be quite a show, because there’s a special force-field to scatter it into an actual ring, rather than have it sending pieces into neighbouring moons, or Uranus itself. Don’t often get to see one of those. We might wake her up for that. I’ve checked the integrity of the atmosphere in the mining ship and it’s fine, so let’s go.”

The Doctor walked out of the Spectrel. Kevin stepped confidently through the door and stopped, just in case he bumped into the Doctor.

The Spectrel’s glass and red iron telephone box door closed behind him and he found himself in something that looked very much like the bridge of an ocean-going ship from Earth, but without the windows. Indeed, it reminded him exactly of the bridge of the starship
Enterprise
, from the original Sixties series of
Star Trek
. He had a nagging realisation that all cultures throughout the universe must go through the same cycles of discovery and then ultimate disappointment. It wasn’t that the creators of science fiction were capable only of mimicking what they saw from the world around them; it was that engineering inevitably did what engineering does – which was to be wholly practical, and normally on a tight budget.

“You’re looking disappointed, Kevin,” said the Doctor, who was already fiddling with the controls.

“To be honest, yes.”

“Nothing new there. Your continued disappointment and underwhelm is a continuous disappointment to me. Ah, for the days when my assistants would marvel at something as simple as a nail.”

“I mean, the view sucks. Like, there isn’t one. Well, unless you count the little screen on that desk over there.”

“
Please
, Kevin. You know I’m somewhat of a connoisseur of views myself. I’ve not seen this one in God knows how long. You see,” said the Doctor, concentrating on the control panel, “when you mothball something you don’t just leave it out in the wet, so to speak. Like a car, you put a cover over it. Ah, here we are.”

The Doctor flipped a switch and the entire ceiling disappeared. Kevin grabbed a chair that was bolted to the floor and clung onto it for dear life, waiting for the air to whoosh past him on the way to oblivion.

“Fooled you, eh?” The Doctor swept his hand at the hundred-and-eighty-degree view of the entire Uranus system from a point between the rings.

Kevin felt his jaw drop.
The phrase ‘panoramic view’ didn’t do it justice. The ship was in the middle of Uranus’s ring system. The pale blue planet was half in light and half in darkness, and was on the horizon of their view from the bridge. There were pastel-shaded rings between them and the planet, with a few fainter ones further out. His eyes hadn’t been deceiving him earlier – he could definitely see some larger and brighter specs within them. A couple of the larger moons were in different phases – one crescent, another full. Beyond Uranus’s system an insanity-inducing number of stars burned. He recognised the Pleiades cluster, looking like a puff of steam lit from within by bright blue neon lights. The purplish red of the Horsehead Nebula touched something deep within him. He felt small, insignificant, and utterly lost.

“That bright light over there
. Is that –”

“The sun. Yes. About a quarter of a percent of the brightness you get from Earth, so forget sunbathing. Erm, not that you’d want to with your skin colour. Sorry, insensitive of me. You can’t really see the Ea
rth, in case you were wondering. Which, of course, you were. It’s closer in and it’s just presenting a crescent to us at the moment. Yet more disappointments, eh?”

“No, man. This was worth the trip.
I mean, thanks for letting me see it.”

“
Imagine how much better it’ll look with a nice red ring, eh? D’you know, I wish I’d brought dear old Vincent van Gough here. He’d have appreciated the colours.” The Doctor thought a moment. “On second thoughts, he’d have been more a Jupiter or Saturn man – big, bold, brash, with plenty of yellow and orange. Perhaps J.M.W. Turner would be a better choice. There’s an idea…”

“Can I have a look around?”

“Be my guest. Ship’s regulations state that I have to make sure nothing’s left stirring on here before I blow it. We’ve got a couple of days before Herschel has to see the red ring, and Voyager 2 doesn’t swing past for a couple of centuries yet.”

“And, last but not least, this is the distillery,” said the Doctor. A door slid open and they stepped into a viewing gallery overlooking an impossibly large and complex series of gigantic pipes, which stretched from one end of the horizon to the other.

“
Distillery
?”

“Yes. Distillery. That’s effectively what an oil refinery is. Except that it isn’t, because you use catalytic cracking to produce smaller molecules from larger ones. Okay, let’s say it’s more like a whisky distillery. We’re distilling off helium-3 and helium-4 at different temperatures.”

“How much? I mean, how low?”

“About four degrees Kelvin, give or take.”

“So that’s like four degrees above absolute zero?”

“Yes. You need a lot of cooling power for that. Hence the massive size of the vessel. Oh, and hence it being remote from the fusion plant.”

“Where’s that?”

“Towed away years ago. Can’t leave stuff like that kicking around. Not that size, anyway.
So, back to the bridge and let’s blow this baby and get out of here.”

Kevin was glad the Doctor was navigating. He couldn’t have found his way back to the bridge through the endless series of identical corridors and lifts if his life had depended on it.

“Here we are,” said the Doctor. “Take one last look at this view. An hour from now the ship will be nothing more than dust, and will be spreading out to form a new, artificial ring.”

“It’s gonna be amazing to watch.”

“Now, since you’ve been a good chap, I shall let you do the honours. Come this way.”

The Doctor led Kevin to a corner of the bridge where there was lettering and symbols in a dozen different languages. He recognised Squill and did his best to translate.