And as we toiled there at the connections, it seemed to me that never could we complete them in time to escape the great rings. For not only were there a half-score breaks in the intricate cables, but each cable held within itself a dozen smaller connections or strands that in each break must be exactly rematched. And working as we were with the great pincer-claws of the space-walker our progress was terribly slow. Minutes passed into an hour and another hour, as we labored furiously there outside the flier with those connections, and by then it seemed to us that the colossal rings of Saturn, a huge whirling storm of meteors, were but a few minutes from us, so vastly did they loom before us, and so swiftly were we and our flier falling. With the energy of utter despair we labored on there at the seemingly endless task of rejoining the intricate connections, our tools and materials that we were not using at the moment being simply released by us beside us, since they fell with us and our flier at the same rate toward Saturn and thus were within our grasp, our tools floated there beside us! * * * * * Now we were approaching the last of the connections, but now too we saw that it was only a matter of minutes before our space-flier and we would be whirling into the edge of the mighty rings of Saturn, that loomed now gigantic in their spinning meteor-masses before us! Already meteors were driving about us in space more thickly, and only by a miracle had our helplessly-falling flier escaped them so far. It seemed impossible that we could complete our task before the flier and ourselves were shot into the crashing death of those colossal whirling meteor-swarms, but we were working with the mad energy of a forlorn hope, and now too Marlin was leaning toward us with his space-walker to shout something to us. For when one space-walker touched another, their two occupants could hear each other's shouts, the sound-vibrations carried through the touching metal sides. Marlin was crying to us that but minutes were left us, and was ordering Randall to return back inside the flier and stand ready there to shoot it away from the great-looming rings the instant that the connections were repaired!