The Platform was no more than a hundred and fifty yards away. No more than a hundred.
He would miss it. He would pass sixty feet or more beyond its outermost edge. Randy would undoubtedly try to throw him the space ropes he'd tied together. The odds were enormously against his being able to catch them.
He said nothing. If Randy thought that he'd run out of air before he reached the point nearest the Platform, he would reproach himself less; he'd believe he couldn't have done anything, anyhow.
Fifty yards. Twenty. He saw glittering metal only sixty feet away. But there was no conceivable action he could take to move himself that sixty feet.
Then something dark came toward him. It grew larger. It was Randy, plunging out from the girders with a hundred and twenty feet of space rope trailing behind him, made fast to a firmly bolted beam.
He collided with McCauley. McCauley felt him gripping fiercely. He felt Randy clinging to him savagely against the jerk of the rope which must tighten presently.
The jerk came, violent and abrupt.
Randy gasped in relief. He took away one space-suited arm to haul at the space rope that had checked McCauley's slow drift past to nothingness.
"Very nice work, Randy," said McCauley composedly, "but you took an awful chance."
They bumped against the substance of the Platform—one square metal tube some three inches by five.