This is the most despicable crime in a long history of the devastation of nature by greedy men! When you have eventually melted the last crystal of ice and departed with your hoard, Saturn will spin desolately alone through the night, shorn of his glorious halo that has been the solace and inspiration of man since prehistoric times!"

"Not when they never had telescopes, it wasn't very inspiring," Ranjit said. "I don't see why you're jumping on me, Joachim. I never answered your letters because there wasn't nothing to say. I just work here. You'll have to talk to the company to—"

"The Saturnine Fuel and Oxygen Company is headed by stubborn men!" Joachim said. "They refuse to consider or answer our demands! That is why I have come to appeal directly to the operators of these ice-sweepers! You must immediately stop sweeping the Rings into your tanks! You must tell your superiors that you refuse to destroy the crowning glory of the Solar System!"

Ranjit said, "They'd just hire somebody else. I don't know as we are destroying the Rings very fast. This was the first sweeper put in orbit nine years ago, and I can't tell no difference in Ring B. There's an awful lot of stuff in the Rings. Some of the balls are solid ice, but some are just ice coated, so we melt it off and throw out the core. Some don't have ice on it, so we throw it back. We don't use hydroponics on the sweepers. We get plenty of oxygen when we take off hydrogen, so we toss a lot of solid CO2 overboard, too. No, we ain't taking as much from the Rings as you think. They'll get ionic motors to working, one of these days, and it won't take hardly no fuel at all."

"Nevertheless, I believe—" Joachim tried to say.

"You've got a hard hull, anyhow," Ranjit said, "coming out here telling me to stop when you need fuel yourself. Supposing I stopped right now. How would you get away? And what would I do? I got a bad heart. About half of it's artificial. That's why I've been living under zero G for fifteen years. I can't go back to Earth. The docs say more than four-tenths G would do for me. Before I got this job, I was living in a hulk orbiting around Titan, just waiting to pass beyond. Now I got something useful to do and something to live for. I may last till I'm 120."

Henry, who had been stupidly smiling at Morna with too much intensity to follow the discussion, jerked his head around and gasped, "You, you can't stand acceleration?"

Ranjit said, "Not enough to go 

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