For as I glanced outward I had seen that was what was happening. The halting of the generators by the breaking of their connections between the flier's double walls had halted also the force-rays that had been pushing us out toward Neptune and that had been holding us out from Saturn's pull. With the halting of those rays the pull of the mighty planet had at once gripped our space-flier and now we were moving at swiftly-accelerating speed toward that planet's mighty bulk, toward the great rings but a million miles to our left! Were falling helplessly, faster and faster each moment, toward those mighty rings, toward their vast swarms of whirling meteors in which our space-flier and all within it could meet only an annihilating death! CHAPTER V At the Solar System's Edge "Out of the flier!" Marlin cried to us. "Our one chance is to get out and repair those broken connections from the outside." "But how----" Randall began, when the astronomer broke in on him. "The space-walkers! In them we can get outside, can try to repair those connections before we fall into the great rings!" A moment we stared toward him in sheer surprise, and then as one we were leaping toward the four big space-walkers, suspended from the flier's wall. For though we had not dreamed, in taking them with us, of any such emergency as now confronted us, we saw that, even as Marlin had said, our one chance to escape the annihilation that soon would be ours otherwise lay in their use. Swiftly, therefore, we unhooked the great cylindrical space-walkers, neither they nor aught else in the flier having any but small weight now, that weight being the result of the pull of great Saturn, toward which we were falling. Quickly swinging open the section near the cylinder's base that was its door, therefore, I pulled myself up into the cylinder, then closed its hermetically-sealing door with the small inside lever provided for the purpose. I was standing, therefore, in a metal cylinder seven feet in height and three in diameter, its top tapering into a rounded little dome in which were small windows from which I could look outward. My arms I had thrust into the great hollow jointed arms of metal that projected from the cylinder's sides, and had at my fingers' ends inside those arms the controls of the great pincer-hands in which those arms ended outside, and the control also of the small generator inside the cylinder whose little force-ray was shot down from the cylinder's bottom. This could be shot straight down, sending the space-walker upward by pushing against some larger body, or could be shot out obliquely sending the space-walker horizontally in any direction. Once inside the space-walker therefore, with its tiny generator throbbing and the equally small air-renovator and heater functioning, I was ready to venture out into the airless void.