THE SNOWBANK ORBIT
BY FRITZ LEIBER
Earth could not stop the Enemy's
remorseless advance from outer
space. Neither could the Enemy!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The pole stars of the other planets cluster around Polaris and Octans,but Uranus spins on a snobbishly different axis between Aldebaran andAntares. The Bull is her coronet and the Scorpion her footstool. Dearblowzy old bitch-planet, swollen and pale and cold, mad with yourShakespearean moons, white-mottled as death from Venerean Plague,spinning on your side like a poisoned pregnant cockroach, rollingaround the sun like a fat drunken floozie with green hair rolling onthe black floor of an infinite bar-room, what a sweet last view of theSolar System you are for a cleancut young spaceman....
Grunfeld chopped off that train of thought short. He was young andthe First Interstellar War had snatched him up and now it was goingto pitch him and twenty other Joes out of the System on a fast curvebreaking around Uranus—and so what! He shivered to get a little heatand then applied himself to the occulted star he was tracking throughProspero's bridge telescope. The star was a twentieth planetarydiameter into Uranus, the crosslines showed—a glint almost lost inpale green. That meant its light was bulleting 1600 miles deep throughthe seventh planet's thick hydrogen atmosphere, unless he were seeingthe star on a mirage trajectory—and at least its depth agreed withthe time since rim contact.
At 2000 miles he lost it. That should mean 2000 miles plus of hydrogensoup above the methane ocean, an America-wide layer of gaseous gunk forthe captain to play the mad hero in with the fleet.
Grunfeld didn't think the captain wanted to play the mad hero. Thecaptain hadn't gone space-simple in any obvious way like Croker andNess. And he wasn't, like Jackson, a telepathy-racked visionaryentranced by the Enemy. Worry and responsibility had turned thecaptain's face into a skull which floated in Grunfeld's imaginationwhen he wasn't actually seeing it, but the tired eyes deep-sunk inthe dark sockets were still cool and perhaps sane. But because of theworry the captain always wanted to have the last bit of fact bearingon the least likely maneuver, and two pieces of evidence were betterthan one. Grunfeld found the next sizable star due to occult. Five-sixminutes to rim contact. He floated back a foot from the telescope,stretching out his thin body in the plane of the ecliptic—strange howhe automatically assumed that orientation in free fall! He blinked andblinked, then rested his eyes on the same planet he'd been strainingthem on.
The pale greenish bulk of Uranus was centered in the big bridgespaceshield against the black velvet dark and bayonet-bright stars, awater-splotched and faded chartreuse tennis ball on the diamond-spikedbed of night. At eight million miles she looked half the width of Lunaseen from Earth. Her whitish equatorial bands went from bottom to top,where, Grunfeld knew, they were spinning out of sight at three miles asecond—a gelid waterfall that he imagined tugging at him with ghostlygreen gangrenous fingers and pulling him over into a hydrogen Niagara.
Half as wide as Luna. But in a day she'd overflow the port as theywhipped past her on a near miss and in another day she'd be as smallas this again, but behind them, sunward, having altered their out