Read Doctor How and the Rings of Uranus for Free Online

catch your helium-3 bug, Doc.”
    “Oh, you’ll come round to appreciating it.”
    “I still don’t get what it has to do with the rings of Uranus.”
    “Someone made a little slip. There’s a chunk of mining equipment up there we were supposed to have removed or destroyed. Under the terms of the galactic agreement covering your solar system, nuclear fusion is forbidden technology, so it can’t be left lying around.”
    “Tell that to the sun.”
    “ Except the sun, smartipants. But I’m glad you at least understand that nuclear fusion is what powers it. As the specialist in charge of technology conveyance, I have to take care of it.”
    “And, like what exactly will that entail?”
    “A bit of interplanetary exploration, Kevin. You’ve been harping on enough about wanting to go off-world, so now’s the time.”
    “The moon of a gas giant. The cold-assed back-end of my solar system. I read somewhere that Uranus is even colder than Neptune, even though it’s closer in.”
    “Well you’d better wrap up warm then, hadn’t you?”
    Kevin rolled his eyes. “Like, I was expecting you’d be able to help me with that, Doc. Although there are a lot of spaced-out people in South London, the spacesuit is not yet the sartorial choice of the mind-blown. And the two-hundred quid you occasionally throw me for new threads won’t stretch no further than Brixton market, never mind the Kennedy Space Center. You get me?”
    “I’m sure the house-bots will kit you out appropriately at my expense as usual. However, I anticipate that we shall be spending much of our time indoors as we decommission the mining equipment.” The Doctor adjusted some dials on the console.
    “That sounds fun,” said Kevin, returning to Particle Physics for Dummies . “Wake me up when we’re there.”
    “We’re there ,” said the Doctor. “Care to join me?”
    “Woah, Doctor. Can I not see a projection of all this stuff before I step outside? You know I hate going into situations without at least some idea of the bigger picture.”
    “Of course,” said the Doctor. A three-foot diameter projection of the planet Uranus appeared in front of the Doctor’s control console. The Spectrel’s cabin lights dimmed.
    “Aw, man… That’s beautiful .”
    Uranus was a pale, luminescent blue, with banded rings of different hues, and only the faintest hint of cloud formations visible in its atmosphere. The tiny moon system blinked into existence; a few larger moons, and a couple of dozen tiny specs of light. The bands of the atmosphere ran from left to right from Kevin’s point of view, and the plane of the orbits of the moons was up-down, but he decided not to say anything about it.
    “That’s Titania,” said the Doctor, pointing at the largest of the moons. “Much smaller than your own moon. The other big ones are Miranda, Umbriel, Ariel and Oberon.
    Oberon, the outermost of the larger moons was close to Kevin. The cratered detail of its grey surface transfixed him.
    “That big crater you see is a couple of hundred kilometres across,” said the Doctor. “ See the things that look like bright rays coming out of it? The surface is all dusty and dirty, so when anything hits the surface, the brighter sub-surface material – ice in this instance – gets blown out and causes that. Sometimes you have planets where there’s perhaps a red substrate, and you get a rather stunning effect, like patterned wallpaper. Except that it tends to exterminate all higher life-forms. Can’t have it all, eh?”
    A couple of seconds later the complex ring system was added to the projection and Kevin gasped in wonder at the detail. If he looked hard at the rings he thought he could make out individual specs. He could see why the Spectrel had turned each projection on separately – the smaller inner moons were almost lost.
    “I could stare at this for hours, Doc.”
    “It is rather stunning, isn’t it? So much more understated than Saturn. Some of those