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Half aand sleep was delicious He came out of it slowly and for a while, alone in his suit, he counted the stars and traced lines from one to another

At first, as the weeks flew past, it was scavenging all over again, except for the gnawing feeling that every minute meant an additional number of thousands of miles away froh to pass out of the ecliptic while h the Asteroid Belt That had used up water and had probably been unnecessary Although tens of thousands of world-lets look as thick as verraphic plate, they are nevertheless scattered so thinly through the quadrillions of cubic lomerate orbit that only the ht about a collision

Still, they passed over the Belt and soe The value was so low, so impossibly low, that it was perhaps inevitable that the notion of the "space-float" should occur to so and many, space was empty, only one ht was a natural

First, it was a particularly daring one who ventured out for fifteen minutes or so Then another who tried half an hour Eventually, before the asteroids were entirely behind, each ship regularly had its off-watch member suspended in space at the end of a cable

It was easy enough The cable, one of those intended for operations at the conclusion of their journey, was netically attached at both ends, one to the space suit to start with Then you clambered out the lock onto the ship&039;s hull and attached the other end there You paused awhile, clinging to the nets in your boots Then you neutralized those and htest muscular effort

Slowly, ever so slowly, you lifted froer mass moved an equivalently shorter distance doard You floated incredibly, weightlessly, in solid, speckled black When the ship had auntleted hand, which kept touch upon the cable, tightened its grip slightly Too tightly, and you would begin htly enough, and friction would halt you Because your motion was equivalent to that of the ship, it seeainst an i in coils that had no reason to straighten out

It was a half-ship to your eye One half was lit by the light of the feeble Sun, which was still too bright to look at directly without the heavy protection of the polarized space-suit visor The other half was black on black, invisible

Space closed in and it was like sleep Your suit arm, it renewed its air automatically, it had food and drink in special containers from which it could be sucked with a minimal motion of the head, it took care of wastes appropriately Most of all, htful euphoria of weightlessness

You never felt so well in your life The days stopped being too long, they weren&039;t long enough, and there weren&039;t enough of them

They had passed Jupiter&039;s orbit at a spot sorees frohtest object in the sky, always excepting the glohite pea that was the Sun At its brightest, soers insisted they could make out Jupiter as a tiny sphere, one side squashed out of true by the night shadow

Then over a period of additional rew until it was brighter than Jupiter It was Saturn, first as a dot of brilliance, then as an oval, glowing splotch

("Why oval?" sos, of course," and it was obvious)

Everyone space-floated at all possible ti Saturn incessantly

("Hey, you jerk, come on back in, damn it You&039;re on duty"

"Who&039;s on duty? I&039;ve got fifteen minutes ave you twenty ive two rand out anyway"

"All right, I&039; Holy howlers, what a racket over a lousy minute" But no quarrel could possibly be serious, not in space It felt too good)

Saturn grew until at last it rivaled and then surpassed the Sun The rings, set at a broad angle to their trajectory of approach, swept grandly about the planet, only a s eclipsed Then, as they approached, the span of the rings grew still wider, yet narrower as the angle of approach constantly decreased

The largersky like serene fireflies

Mario Rioz was glad he ake so that he could watch again

Saturn filled half the sky, streaked with orange, the night shadow cutting it fuzzily nearly one quarter of the way in frohtness were shadows of two of the moons To the left and behind him (he could look over his left shoulder to see, and as he did so, the rest of his body inched slightly to the right to conserve angular momentum) was the white dias At the left, they eht triple band of orange fight At the right, their beginnings were hidden in the night shadow, but showed up closer and broader They widened as they ca hazier as they approached, until, while the eye followed them, they seemed to fill the sky and lose theer fleet just inside the outer ris broke up and assuht they seemed