He had a jet-powered maneuvering unit on his backpack but he also had clipped a long tether to the belt of his spacesuit. No sense taking any unnecessary chances, he firmly believed. Being exiled in this rotating beer can was bad enough; floating out to oblivion was not a fate he desired. Timoshenko was leading a crew of maintenance technicians on an inspection tour of the solar mirrors’ actuator system. Electric motors moved the mirrors automatically as the habitat rotated around Saturn to keep the mirrors pointed correctly toward the Sun. At the time appointed for the habitat’s night hours, the actuators closed the ring of mirrors, folding them down against the cylinder’s hull like the slowly folding petals of a flower. The entire operation of the mirrors was under automated computer control, backed up by sensor systems that reacted to sunlight and a preset timer built into an ultraprecise atomic clock. Yet the mirrors were constantly jiggling out of place. Not by much. Not enough to cause any real problems.
