"Yes, sir," said Sammy. "I'm glad, sir...."
"Keep quiet!" snapped McCauley again. "Push!"
The cumbersome and weighty mass of equipment, which on Earth would have weighed nearly as much as Sammy Breen, swung away from him. It went around until it was behind McCauley. There was now a system of three weights on a string. The middle one, which was McCauley, did not spin around. He only rotated. The others swung in a wide circle about him.
"Get set, Randy," he said sharply, "and have your rope ready."
"What...." Then Randy understood. He swore.
McCauley let go of Sammy Breen's space rope at an instant when in his circle around McCauley he moved toward the Platform. At that instant, of course, McCauley still moved away. But he let go. The result was that he sent Sammy Breen floating back toward the spidery metal framework, and he himself moved away faster. In effect, he'd taken to himself a large part of Sammy's momentum toward destruction. But not quite all. There was still Sammy's equipment, which formed a new two-weight system of masses spinning about a common center of gravity. Yet it did look as if he'd seen the possibility of saving one of the two of them, and had taken the action which gave that chance at life to Lieutenant Sammy Breen.
"Major!" Sammy cried out desperately. "This is all wrong! It was my fault! I should have cut the rope! I protest, sir...."
"Shut up!" rasped McCauley. "Within a minute or two you'll float to the Platform. It's not likely you'll strike a beam direct. Get ready to throw your rope to Captain Hall so he can pull you in!"
Now he cut his own space rope and held its end. With Sammy Breen gone away toward life, he and the mass of equipment at the rope's other end still had a spinning motion. But it was a slow one. Yet he could repeat the same trick he'd worked with Sammy, though not with the same effectiveness. He could sacrifice the weight at the end of his rope, just as before he'd sacrificed himself. If he chose the moment when in their spinning the heavy objects were moving fastest toward the stars, that would be the moment when his own motion toward annihilation was least.
He let go. The awkward clump of tethered space equipment went swiftly toward nowhere. McCauley seemed to cease to drift away from where Sammy Breen, floating steadily, made bubbling noises to himself as if he were sobbing in shame that McCauley had given him life at the expense of his own. McCauley was now a good six hundred feet off in emptiness from the lacework of silvery bars.