Aziz ripped the radio from Henry's spacesuit and carefully resealed the
panel. "Dis'll be the weldin' of ya, kid," Aziz said, crinkling his
round, sallow face in an attempt to smile. "Yer name'll be in ever'
yap--in our orbit, dat is."
"But what--" Henry tried to say.
"No doubt at all," Vicenzo agreed, cleverly shorting Henry's drive tube.
"I don't--" Henry said.
"Vicenzo figured it right, kid," Aziz said. He gestured with powerful
arms too long for his short body. "Ya'll hit dat ole sweeper square on
the bulb. Vicenzo's a streak."
"I'm a genius," Vicenzo admitted. He smoothed the black bangs covering
his forehead to the eyebrows, and he fingered the pointed sideburns
reaching to his chin. "You jump into space, Henry, and then we'll
increase velocity and sink into the Rings."
Aziz begged, "Do us a blazer, kid. We won't go far. Too low on fuel."
He lowered the helmet over Henry's bushy, blond hair and ruddy face and
clamped it shut.
Vicenzo and Aziz left Henry in the airvalve and closed the inner door.
When the valve emptied to vacuum, Henry reluctantly lowered the outer
door and stepped to the magnetized platform.
Henry stood twenty meters above Ring B of the Rings of Saturn. Below
him, balls of ice, metal, rock, and assorted cosmic debris flowed
slowly past with stars occasionally visible between the whirling
particles. To either side, the billions of tiny moons blended with
distance to form a solid, glaring white band. Henry bent his knees and
dived into space.
Holding his body stiff with a practiced rigidity, and 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 spacesuit. The lifeline
reeled him toward the station.
A hairless, brown, deeply wrinkled face watched Henry from a small
window beside an open airvalve. The cable pulled Henry to the muzzle of
a rocket launcher. He jerked the magnetic head loose and shut himself
into the valve. He slid the inner door open and, weakly kicking his
legs, floated on his back into the sweeper.
An old man, the owner of the wrinkled face, stopped Henry from drifting
into the far wall of the cramped compartment. The old man wore shorts
and a sleeveless shirt, and his shrunken limbs seemed to have no
muscles. He drew Henry down to the magnetized deck and removed the
space helmet.
"You're just a boy!" the man wheezed in a cracked voice. "Where'd you
come from, boy?"
Henry, watching through half-closed eyes, almost said that he was
twenty years old. Then he remembered to mutter, "Water."
The old man said, "How'd you get out here? There's been no ships in
days. What are you doing here all by yourself? I almost missed you.
You'd been on a bad course if I had. Just happened to see your torch
twirling around out there. Ain't many people can come that close with a
life rocket and not hit a fellow. For a second, I thought the rocket
was going to bust you. Of course, being skillful the way I am, it
didn't seem likely, but I--"
"Water," Henry moaned.
"Water? Why sure. How long you been drifting, boy? Must be mighty
thirsty. What's your name? I'm Ranjit. I've never got used to people
not telling their last names. Of course, even when I was your age, most
people called each other by their first names. I can't hardly remember
what my last name is. You might not think it to look at me, but I'm 107
years old. Here, let's get you out of that suit and see what kind of
shape you're in."
Horizontal and vertical wrinkles formed ragged crosshatching on
Ranjit's forehead. His nose and ears were large and grotesque with age.
He unsealed the spacesuit at the waist and, holding Henry against the
deck with one hand, pulled off the top section.
"Water!" Henry gasped. Peeping secretly, he saw that the teletype, near
the airvalve, was dismantled, with the parts tied in bunches floating
over the empty case. He located the radio above an aluminum desk in the
far corner. He could see no visular set anywhere.
Ranjit dragged off the lower section of the suit, leaving Henry
resplendent in orange knickers and red blouse. "How do you feel?"
Ranjit asked. "What ship are you from? I don't see how they could just
leave you. I'd better report this. They must be looking for you. Funny
I haven't heard about it. Of course, the teletype's out of whack. I'm
fixing it. I'm handy that way, fixing things. The heater broke down the
other day, but I've got it going good now. I've started melting ice
again. The tanks were about empty after that last ship fueled up. The
_Asteroid Ann_, it was, or was it the _Mimas Mae_? They've both been by
lately, but--"
"Water!" Henry pleaded. He had to do something to make Ranjit leave the
compartment. He tried to listen for sounds that would locate the other
crew members. Holding his handsome blond head in his hands, he sat up.
The movement lifted his body from the deck, leaving his metal-soled
shoes attached, so that he sat in mid-air.
"Water?" said Ranjit. "If there's one thing I've got, it's water. Let
me see, there must be a flask someplace." He rummaged in the netting
that covered two opposite walls of the compartment and secured an
incredible clutter of weightless tools, books, food cases, clothing,
oxygen tanks, spacesuit parts, wire, tubing, and other items. Still
talking, Ranjit vanished through an opening almost concealed by the
net.
* * * * *
Henry leaped to the radio. He whipped a pair of insulated snips from
his pocket and cut through the electric cord in four places. He thrust
the severed pieces behind the desk and stood listening. Somewhere,
Ranjit continued talking, but Henry heard no answering voices. The only
other sounds were the whine of electric motors and the throb of pumps.
Henry pulled out a screwdriver and paused as he noticed a sign above
the desk. The sign said:
AAAAAAA CCCCC D EEEEE
G H IIIIH LLLL MM NNNNNNNNN
OO PP Q RR S TTTTT UUUUU
Shaking his head, Henry released the clamps, turned the radio, pried
off the back, and stabbed and slashed at the interior with the
screwdriver. He replaced the back and returned to his position on the
deck just in time.
"--really should," Ranjit continued, walking through the door. "You're
lucky I saw you at all. Of course, I'm watchful all the time. Would you
believe I've been right here on this sweeper for nine years? Here's
some water, boy."
Henry squirted water from the flexible flask into his mouth. Ranjit
said, "You ain't as thirsty as I thought you was. How come you wasn't
calling for help?"
"No radio," Henry mumbled. "The drive tube wouldn't work either."
"What were you doing in a bunged-up suit like that? You'll never
live to be as old as me if you take such chances. If this station
had visular, I'd have picked you up in that, but the company said I
wouldn't have no use for it."
"Where is everybody?" Henry asked, pushing himself unsteadily to his
feet.
"Everybody who? Are you hungry? How long since you had anything to
eat? There's nobody here but me. Karoly and Wilbur both passed beyond,
Wilbur just two weeks ago. He was only 94 too. The company's sending
some help, they say. I don't see how they expect one man to run an
ice-sweeper, even if he is handy like me. This is a dangerous job,
although you might not think so. Do you realize, young fellow, we're
whizzing around Saturn once every nine hours, four minutes, and twelve
seconds? That's an orbital velocity of nineteen point eight kilometers
per second! We've got to go that fast to stay in this orbit."
"There's no one else here but you?" Henry said.
"Think what would happen if something slowed us down!" Ranjit
exclaimed. "We'd start falling toward Saturn and finally crash!
Meteors are scarce out here, but what if a spaceship came around
retrograde and smashed this station head-on? There ain't a thing I can
do if it starts falling. Part of it's a ship, but the company took the
motor out. All I've got is the flywheel steering gear. The control
room's right up there above my bunk."
Ranjit pointed to a sandwich bunk hoisted against the pipes and
conduits that crisscrossed the ceiling in abstract patterns. He
said, "I can spin this sweeper like a top, if I want to, but I can't
accelerate it." He squinted through the small window beside the
airvalve. "Speaking of spaceships," he rambled, "there's one out there
now. Wonder who it is? There's not a thing on the schedule. Looks like
they would've called in."
Moving to the radio, the old man fumbled with knobs and switches
and pounded on the cabinet with his fist. "This radio's deader than
a asteroid!" he yelled. "First the teletype and now the radio. I'm
supposed to report all ships to Titan, but how can I with no equipment?
Maybe that's your ship come hunting you. What did you say your name is?"
"Henry," said Henry.
"Henry, huh? My name's Ranjit. I better get up to the big valve. That
ship'll be clinching in a minute."
"What does that sign mean?" said Henry, seizing the old man's bony
wrist.
"Sign? Oh, there over the desk? I just put that there to confuse
people. It's a puzzle that spells out something in an old-time
language, Latin maybe. Christian Huygens published that way back in
1655. He used a puzzle while he was checking some more. He was the
first man to figure out what was around Saturn. It means something
like, 'There's a flat ring that's inclined to the ecliptic that circles
the planet without touching it.' Well, let go of me. I've got to see
about that ship."
"Just stay here and be calm, Ranjit," Henry said.
"What?"
"Be good, and you won't get hurt."
"Get hurt? What are you talking about, Henry? That's no way to talk to
a fellow that saved your life. If it hadn't been for me, you'd still be
falling. You were slower than the sweeper. I saved your life!"
Henry blushed in sudden shame and released Ranjit's arm. "Why, why,
I--I guess you did!" he stammered.
Henry lived in an era that had been preceded by wars which destroyed
more than half the people of Earth. It was a time of rigidly
controlled population, highly specialized training, and constantly
increasing life expectancy. Each human life was considered a distinct
and invaluable thing. Since the end of the final war, the Crime
War, seventy years before, murder had become an obscene and almost
meaningless word, and natural death was rarely mentioned. Saving
another person's life was considered the most magnificent act that
anyone could perform, and almost the only way to become a public hero,
since actors, entertainers, policemen, and officials were thought to be
no better than anyone else.
"I'm--I'm sorry," Henry said, blushing until he perspired. "I'm all
mixed up."
"That's all right, Henry. You were out there a long time."
Something struck twice against the hull of the ice-sweeper. "There's a
clumsy pilot!" Ranjit yelled. "I better go see what he's trying to do."
"Wait," Henry said, grabbing the old man's arm again. "I--" He stopped
speaking and frowned in confusion. When he considered recent events,
he realized that Vicenzo and Aziz, by their inexpert maneuvering, had
almost caused him to pass beyond. All of Henry's education, haphazard
as it had been, emphasized the belief that a person who caused another
to pass beyond could only be regarded with loathing. A person who
saved a life must be treated with eternal gratitude and veneration by
the beneficiary.
Ranjit said, "Let's go, Henry! What are you up to? I've had a feeling
you ain't exactly zeroed."
"I--I think I should tell you," Henry said.
"Listen. Somebody coming aboard," Ranjit said, jerking his arm from
Henry's relaxed grip and facing the doorway in the netting. Henry
waited for Vicenzo and Aziz to enter the compartment.