Most of all he liked to watch the rings. At the left, they emerged from behind Saturn, a tight, bright triple band of orange light. At the right, their beginnings were hidden in the night shadow, but showed up closer and broader. They widened as they came, like the flare of a horn, growing hazier as they approached, until, while the eye followed them, they seemed to fill the sky and lose themselves.
From the position of the Scavenger fleet just inside the outer rim of the outermost ring, the rings broke up and assumed their true identity as a phenomenal cluster of solid fragments rather than the tight, solid band of light they seemed.
Below him, or rather in the direction his feet pointed, some twenty miles away, was one of the ring fragments. It looked like a large, irregular splotch, marring the symmetry of space, three quarters in brightness and the night shadow cutting it like a knife. Other fragments were farther off, sparkling like Stardust, dimmer and thicker, until, as you followed them down, they became rings once more.
The fragments were motionless, but that was only because the ships had taken up an orbit about Saturn equivalent to that of the outer edge of the rings.
The day before, Rioz reflected, he had been on that nearest fragment, working along with more than a score of others to mold it into the desired shape. Tomorrow he would be at it again.
Today—today he was space-floating.
“Mario?” The voice that broke upon his earphones was questioning.
Momentarily Rioz was flooded with annoyance. Damn it, he wasn’t in the mood for company.
“Speaking,” he said.
“I thought I had your ship spotted. How are you?”
“Fine. That you, Ted?”
“That’s right,” said Long.
“Anything wrong on the fragment?”
“Nothing. I’m out here floating.”
“You?”
“It gets me, too, occasionally. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Nice,” agreed Rioz.
“You know, I’ve read Earth books—”
“Grounder books, you mean.” Rioz yawned and found it difficult under the circumstances to use the expression with the proper amount of resentment.
“—and sometimes I read descriptions of people lying on grass,” continued Long. “You know that green stuff like thin, long pieces of paper they have all over the ground down there, and they look up at the blue sky with clouds in it. Did you ever see any films of that?”
“Sure. It didn’t attract me. It looked cold.”
“I suppose it isn’t, though. After all, Earth is quite close to the Sun, and they say their atmosphere is thick enough to hold the heat. I must admit that personally I would hate to be caught under open sky with nothing on but clothes. Still, I imagine they like it.”
“Grounders are nuts!”
“They talk about the trees, big brown stalks, and the winds, air movements, you know.”
“You mean drafts. They can keep that, too.”
“It doesn’t matter. The point is they describe it beautifully, almost passionately. Many times I’ve wondered, ‘What’s it really like? Will I ever feel it or is this something only Earthmen can possibly feel?’ I’ve felt so often that I was missing something vital. Now I know what it must be like. It’s this. Complete peace in the middle of a beauty-drenched universe.”
Rioz said, “They wouldn’t like it. The Grounders, I mean. They’re so used to their own lousy little world they wouldn’t appreciate what it’s like to float and look down on Saturn.” He flipped his body slightly and began swaying back and forth about his center of mass, slowly, soothingly.
Long said, “Yes, I think so too. They’re slaves to their planet. Even if they come to Mars, it will only be their children that are free. There’ll be starships someday; great, huge things that can carry thousands of people and maintain their self-contained equilibrium for decades, maybe centuries. Mankind will spread through the whole Galaxy. But people will have to live their lives out on shipboard until new methods of interstellar travel are developed, so it will be Martians, not planet-bound Earthmen, who will colonize the Universe. That’s inevitable. It’s got to be. It’s the Martian way.”
But Rioz made no answer. He had dropped off to sleep again, rocking and swaying gently, half a million miles above Saturn.
7
The work shift of the ring fragment was the tail of the coin. The weightlessness, peace, and privacy of the space-float gave place to something that had neither peace nor privacy. Even the weightlessness, which continued, became more a purgatory than a paradise under the new conditions.
Try to manipulate an ordinarily non-portable heat projector. It could be lifted despite the fact that it was six feet high and wide and almost solid metal, since it weighed only a fraction of an ounce. But its inertia was exactly what it had always been, which meant that if it wasn’t moved into position very slowly, it would just keep on going, taking you with it. Then you would have to hike the pseudo-grav field of your suit and come down with a jar.
Keralski had hiked the field a little too high and he came down a little too roughly, with the projector coming down with him at a dangerous angle. His crushed ankle had been the first casualty of the expedition.
Rioz was swearing fluently and nearly continuously. He continued to have the impulse to drag the back of his hand across his forehead in order to wipe away the accumulating sweat. The few times that he had succumbed to the impulse, metal had met silicone with a clash that rang loudly inside his suit, but served no useful purpose. The desiccators within the suit were sucking at maximum and, of course, recovering the water and restoring ion-exchanged liquid, containing a careful proportion of salt, into the appropriate receptacle.
Rioz yelled, “Damn it, Dick, wait till I give the word, will you?”
And Swenson’s voice rang in his ears, “Well, how long am I supposed to sit here?”
“Till I say,” replied Rioz.
He strengthened pseudo-grav and lifted the projector a bit. He released pseudo-grav, insuring that the projector would stay in place for minutes even if he withdrew support altogether. He kicked the cable out of the way (it stretched beyond the close “horizon” to a power source that was out of sight) and touched the release.
The material of which the fragment was composed bubbled and vanished under its touch. A section of the lip of the tremendous cavity he had already carved into its substance melted away and a roughness in its contour had disappeared.
“Try it now,” called Rioz.
Swenson was in the ship that was hovering nearly over Rioz’s head.
Swenson called, “All clear?”
“I told you to go ahead.”
It was a feeble flicker of steam that issued from one of the ship’s forward vents. The ship drifted down toward the ring fragment. Another flicker adjusted a tendency to drift sidewise. It came down straight.
A third flicker to the rear slowed it to a feather rate.
Rioz watched tensely. “Keep her coming. You’ll make it. You’ll make it.”
The rear of the ship entered the hole, nearly filling it. The bellying walls came closer and closer to its rim. There was a grinding vibration as the ship’s motion halted.
It was Swenson’s turn to curse. “It doesn’t fit,” he said.
Rioz threw the projector groundward in a passion and went flailing up into space. The projector kicked up a white crystalline dust all about it, and when Rioz came down under pseudo-grav, he did the same.
He said, “You went in on the bias, you dumb Grounder.”