The pale greenish bulk of Uranus was centered in the big bridge spaceshield against the black velvet dark and bayonet-bright stars, a water-splotched and faded chartreuse tennis ball on the diamond-spiked bed of night. At eight million miles she looked half the width of Luna seen from Earth. Her whitish equatorial bands went from bottom to top, where, Grunfeld knew, they were spinning out of sight at three miles a second--a gelid waterfall that he imagined tugging at him with ghostly green gangrenous fingers and pulling him over into a hydrogen Niagara. Half as wide as Luna. But in a day she'd overflow the port as they whipped past her on a near miss and in another day she'd be as small as this again, but behind them, sunward, having altered their outward course by some small and as yet unpredictable angle, but no more able to slow _Prospero_ and her sister ships or turn them back at their 100 miles a second than the fleet's solar jets could operate at this chilly distance from Sol. G'by, fleet. G'by, C.C.Y. spaceman. * * * * * Grunfeld looked for the pale planet's moons. Miranda and Umbriel were too tiny to make disks, but he distinguished Ariel four diameters above the planet and Oberon a dozen below. Spectral sequins. If the fleet were going to get a radio signal from any of them, it would have to be Titania, occulted now by the planet and the noisy natural static of her roiling hydrogen air and seething methane seas--but it had always been only a faint hope that there were survivors from the First Uranus Expedition. Grunfeld relaxed his neck and let his gaze drift down across the curving star-bordered forward edge of _Prospero's_ huge mirror and the thin jutting beams of the port lattice arm to the dim red-lit gages below the spaceshield. Forward Skin Temperature seven degrees Kelvin. Almost low enough for helium to crawl, if you had some helium. _Prospero's_ insulation, originally designed to hold out solar heat, was doing a fair job in reverse. Aft (sunward) Skin Temperature 75 degrees Kelvin. Close to that of Uranus' sun-lit face. Check. Cabin Temperature 43 degrees Fahrenheit. Brr! The Captain was a miser with the chem fuel remaining. And rightly ... if it were right to drag out life as long as possible in the empty icebox beyond Uranus. Gravities of Acceleration zero. Many other zeros. The four telltales for the fleet unblinkingly glowed dimmest blue--one each for _Caliban_, _Snug_, _Moth_, and _Starveling_, following _Prospero_ in line astern on slave automatic--though for months inertia had done all five ships' piloting. Once the buttons had been green, but they'd wiped that color off the boards because of the Enemy.