For with every moment the flier and our four space-walkers were falling at greater speed toward the colossal rings of huge Saturn, to the left, and the whirling titanic meteor-swarms of those rings were growing larger and larger. But a few hours remained before, with the growing acceleration of our free-falling flier, it would be meeting its end in those clashing, crashing meteors of the great swarm, so that if we were to repair the damage to it, and get its generators functioning again before it met its doom, we must work fast. Our four space-walkers were falling toward Saturn at the same rate as the great flier beside us, so that we hung just beside that flier in space without need to use the propelling force-rays of our four cylinders. And now Marlin, grasping with his great metal-pincer hands one of the projecting joints of the flier's great faceted walls, was pulling himself around it even as he fell with it through space, was pulling himself around to its other side, where the meteor that had struck us a glancing blow had done its damage. In a moment Whitely and Randall and I had followed, moving clumsily in our great cylinders as we fell with the flier on toward Saturn's rings, and as we reached the other side where Marlin was hovering now in his space-walker we saw that the meteor that had grazed us had demolished two of the great facets of the flier's outer wall, and had shattered and crumpled a third. Save for a slight denting, though, the inner wall seemed unharmed, a fact that alone had saved us, but the black cable-connections between the walls were broken in a half-score places, we saw. It was that severing of the connections that had halted our great generators, we knew, so now our first task was to repair those connections, and it was upon that task that we began at once to work. Surely never had men worked under stranger circumstances than those, was my thought as we began the work of re-matching the severed connections. For we four, cased in our four great cylindrical metal space-walkers, were falling through space at a tremendous and ever-increasing rate, even as we worked upon our great flier falling with us, we were falling through the mighty void toward the whirling rings of Saturn, looming immense in space beside us. It meant annihilation for us, if we could not complete our repairs in time to escape them!