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."