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we
have. I hate to allow it."
    "If we get back, it will be worth it."
    "If! It's a big word, son."
    "And a big thing we're trying to do."
    "Well, I gave my word that if there was no help on
Earth, I'd see that the Phobos water hole lets you have all the water you'll
need. Good luck."

6
    Half a million miles above Saturn, Mario Rioz was cradled on
nothing and sleep was delicious. He came out of it slowly and for a while,
alone in his suit, he counted the stars and traced lines from one to another.
    At first, as the weeks flew past, it was scavenging all over
again, except for the gnawing feeling that every minute meant an additional
number of thousands of miles away from all humanity. That made it worse.
    They had aimed high to pass out of the ecliptic while moving
through the Asteroid Belt. That had used up water and had probably been
unnecessary. Although tens of thousands of worldlets look as thick as vermin in
two-dimensional projection upon a photographic plate, they are nevertheless
scattered so thinly through the quadrillions of cubic miles that make up their
conglomerate orbit that only the most ridiculous of coincidences would have
brought about a collision.
    Still, they passed over the Belt and someone calculated the
chances of collision with a fragment of matter large enough to do damage. The
value was so low, so impossibly low, that it was perhaps inevitable that the
notion of the "space-float" should occur to someone.
    The days were long and many, space was empty, only one man
was needed at the controls at any one time. The thought was a natural.
    First, it was a particularly daring one who ventured out for
fifteen minutes or so. Then another who tried half an hour. Eventually, before
the asteroids were entirely behind, each ship regularly had its off-watch
member suspended in space at the end of a cable.
    It was easy enough. The cable, one of those intended for operations
at the conclusion of their journey, was magnetically attached at both ends, one
to the space suit to start with. Then you clambered out the lock onto the
ship's hull and attached the other end there. You paused awhile, clinging to
the metal skin by the electromagnets in your boots. Then you neutralized those
and made the slightest muscular effort.
    Slowly, ever so slowly, you lifted from the ship and even
more slowly the ship's larger mass moved an equivalently shorter distance
downward. You floated incredibly, weightlessly, in solid, speckled black. When
the ship had moved far enough away from you, your gauntleted hand, which kept
touch upon the cable, tightened its grip slightly. Too tightly, and you would
begin moving back toward the ship and it toward you. Just tightly enough, and
friction would halt you. Because your motion was equivalent to that of the
ship, it seemed as motionless below you as though it had been painted against
an impossible background while the cable between you hung in coils that had no
reason to straighten out.
    It was a half-ship to your eye. One half was lit by the
light of the feeble Sun, which was still too bright to look at directly without
the heavy protection of the polarized space-suit visor. The other half was
black on black, invisible.
    Space closed in and it was like sleep. Your suit was warm,
it renewed its air automatically, it had food and drink in special containers
from which it could be sucked with a minimal motion of the head, it took care
of wastes appropriately. Most of all, more than anything else, there was the
delightful euphoria of weightlessness.
    You never felt so well in your life. The days stopped being
too long, they weren't long enough, and there weren't enough of them.
    They had passed Jupiter's orbit at a spot some 30 degrees
from its then position. For months, it was the brightest object in the sky,
always excepting the glowing white pea that was the Sun. At its brightest, some
of the Scavengers insisted they could make out Jupiter as a tiny sphere, one
side squashed out of true by the