cautiously moving arms and legs to check any tendency to tumble, Henry glided above the Rings. Turning his head, he saw exhaust spurt from the collection of spherical cabins, tanks, and motors that was the spaceship; and the craft moved from his line of sight, leaving him alone.

Henry drifted above a flat surface more than sixty-six thousand kilometers wide. To his left, Ring B extended to the black circle of the Cassini Division which separated it from the less brilliant Ring A. To his right, the gleam of Ring B abruptly changed to the dimness of the Crape Ring through which the surface of Saturn was visible. Of the giant planet, forty-three thousand kilometers away, Henry saw but half a crescent marked with vague white and yellow bands and obscure spots.

Red and green lights blinked ahead. Most of the approaching ice-sweeper was shadowed and invisible against the blackness of space. Henry saw no lighted windows, but he experimentally aimed his signal torch at a dome on top of the space station.

Moving with the exact velocity of the Ring, the sweeper, a bundle of huge cylindrical tanks bound together with fragile girders, apparently grew larger. A rectangular snout, swinging from side to side and probing into the Ring, dangled below the front of the sweeper. Dancing in mutual gravitational attraction, the tiny moons constantly closed the open lane behind the snout.

Henry blinked his torch and saw its red reflection in the sweeper's observation dome, but no one answered the signal. Gaudy with lights, the station drifted past below Henry's level and nearly one hundred meters away.

Henry struggled futilely in his suit and tumbled through space. He saw the flaming arch of the Milky Way and then the immense shadow of Saturn stretching black across the Rings. Somewhere, the bright exhaust of a distant spaceship streaked across the stars.

By missing the ice-sweeper, he would continue on a spiral course down toward Saturn, until he at last fell into the methane; or, if his falling body accelerated enough, he might establish an orbit closer to the planet and revolve around it, until he died of thirst. Vicenzo and Aziz would never find him and would probably not search long.

Fire shot past Henry's gyrating figure. A thin cable followed the small rocket. Henry's flailing arms struck the cable, and his gauntleted hands gripped the strands. He pulled back the spent rocket, and the missile's magnetic head clanked against his 

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