"Ten minutes or so."
"All right," I said. "It ought to be enough. Keep your eye on me. You may have to reach out an arm or leg for me to grab as I go by."
"How are you going to move?"
"I've got a lifesaver," I said.
I writhed and squirmed and made every use of the law of conservation of angular momentum until I had my back to Nelly. Then I wound up and threw my fancy screwdriver as hard as I could heave it away from me. I didn't get the zip on it I would have liked, but because it was sort of like a throwing stick, I got a little more on it than you might expect, maybe fifty or sixty feet a second. And the thing weighed about four pounds, with its fancy ratchet and torque clutch. Since in my suit I weighed just about a hundred times as much, I started toward Nelly at just one-one-hundredth of the velocity I had imparted to the screwdriver. In a couple minutes I was drifting pretty close, but tumbling. I had forgotten that part.
Throwing the screwdriver had given my body the correct vector and some velocity, but I had set up quite a tumbling moment, since I had thrown from the shoulder and not from my center of gravity.
I chucked a couple lighter tools away to correct my drift, and Sid snagged me as I drifted by the hatch.
"Come to Papa," he said, and drew me inside. We didn't horse around congratulating ourselves. My air tanks were no longer hissing, and we made a quick swap.
Sid let me dog down the hatch while he figured position. He used the iron compass method, just taking a close look at Earth, which was more or less dead ahead of us. That was a good place for it, because we had no steering fuel.