In a moment Randall had obeyed, pulling himself around the falling flier to its door and inside, while Marlin and Whitely and I worked tensely upon the last of the connections, matching and joining them with the greatest speed of which we were capable. Now it seemed that greater meteors were all about us, and now the huger, denser masses of the mighty rings were towering vastly beside us, as at plummet-like speed our flier and ourselves whirled toward them and toward death! Hanging there in sheer space at the falling flier's side, working madly upon those last connections, with all about us the glittering hosts of the stars and with beside us the titanic bulk of great Saturn and its colossal rings, we seemed caught in some unreal and torturing nightmare. Then as the huge meteor-masses of the mighty rings loomed just beside us, as I reached with the pincer-hands of my space-walker toward the last of the connections, I heard from Marlin in the space-walker touching mine a hoarse cry of despair. But at that last moment my claw-hands were swiftly joining the last connection and in the next instant came the steady throbbing of the great generators inside the flier! In that instant we had grasped our tools with one metal arm and with the other each of us had gripped the edge of the flier's shattered outer wall. And then, just as the flier and ourselves seemed hurtling straight into the mighty wall of whirling meteors that was the great rings beside us, the space-flier, with us three hanging desperately to it, was hurtling away from those rings as its great force-ray shot from inside toward them, was flashing at terrific mounting speed out from them into space! For an instant, so terrific was the accelerating speed of the flier beneath Randall's control inside, that we three, hanging to the broken outer wall in our space-walkers, seemed on the point of being torn away from our grip on it, of falling back to Saturn once more. But in a moment more, with a great distance already between the flier and the huge rings that had almost been our doom, Randall had halted it, was holding it motionless in space by means of a steady force-ray. Then we were swiftly repairing the break in its outer wall, by means of the plates and tools to which we had clung, setting those great plates in place to replace the three shattered ones, and then welding them swiftly into the flier's outer wall integrally by means of the molecular-diffusion instrument. That done, we pulled ourselves around the flier's faceted surface to its outer door, opening that door and closing it again once inside the vestibule-chamber. Then as Marlin touched a stud the vestibule-chamber was filling with air, and in another moment we were inside the flier once more, were pulling ourselves out of the great space-walkers, with Randall already out of his and at the controls.