【正文】 phere on each circle, like a single pearl on a string, and beside the pearls were names and numbers: Mnemosyne, Janus, Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, and Hyperion. Far beyond those orbits was a tenth one, visibly tilted. That was Iapetus. Phoebe, the most distant, could not be shown on the scale they were using. Now another circle was drawn in. It was an eccentric ellipse, almost tangent to the orbits of Rhea and Hyperion, cutting right across the circle that represented Titan. Cirocco studied it, then straightened. Looking up, she saw deep lines etched on Gaby39。s forehead as her fingers flew over the keyboard. With each pro gram she called up, the numbers on her screen changed. It had a very close call with Rhea about three million years ago, she noted. It39。s safely above Titan39。s orbit, though perturbations must be a factor. It39。s far from stabilized. Meaning what? Cirocco asked. Captured asteroid? Gaby suggested, one eyebrow raised doubtfully. The proximity to the equatorial plane would make that un likely, one of the Polo sisters said. April or August? Cirocco wondered. After eighteen months together she still couldn39。t tell them apart. I was afraid you39。d see that. Gaby chewed a knuckle. Yet if it was formed with the others, it ought to be less eccentric. The Polo shrugged. 39。There are ways to explain it. A catastrophic event in the recent past. It Bill39。s tongue had started at Cirocco39。s toes and was now exploring her left car. She liked that. It had been a memorable journey. Cirocco had loved every centimeter of it。 some of the stops along the way had been outrageous. Now he was worrying her earlobe with his lips and teeth, tugging gently to turn her around. She let it happen. He nudged her shoulder with his chin and nose to get her turning faster. She began to rotate. She feltw what he was doing. She locked her legs around his hips and let him do the moving. Bill was forty, the oldest of the crew, and had a face dominated by a lumpy nose and jowls that could have graced a bassett hound. He was balding and his teeth were not pretty. But his body was lean and hard, ten years younger than his face. His hands were neat and clean, precise in their movements. He was good with machinery, but not the greasy, noisy kind. His tool kit would fit in his shirt pocket, tools so tiny that Cirocco wouldn39。t dare handle them. His delicate touch paid off when he made love. It was matched by his gentle disposition. Cirocco wondered why it had taken her so long to find him. There were three men aboard Ringmaster, and Cirocco had made love to them all. So had Gaby Pla was taller than most of them. She thought it was more in his eyes, which were soft and brown and liquid. And his smile. Those eyes and that smile had done nothing for Gaby, just as Cirocco39。s charms had not interested Gene, her second choice. Mat are you smiling about? Bill asked. Don39。t you think you39。re giving me enough reason? she countered, a little breathlessly. But the truth was she had been thinking of how amusing the four of them must have looked to Bill, who had stayed out of the shuffle of bodies. That seemed to be his style, to sit back and let people sort themselves out, then move in when it began to be depressing. Calvin had certainly been depressed. So had Cirocco. Whether from preoccupation with Gaby or just inexperience, Calvin had not been much of a lover. Cirocco thought it was a little of both. He was quiet, shy, and bookish. His records showed he had spent most of his life in school, carrying an academic load that left little room for fun. Gaby just didn39。t care. The Science Module of Ringmaster was the finest toy a girl ever had. She loved her work so much she had joined the astronaut corps and graduated at the top of her class so she could watch the stars without an annoying atmosphere, even though she hated to travel. When she was working she noticed nothing else, did not think it odd that Calvin spent almost as much time in SCIMOD as she did, waiting for the chance to hand her a photographic plate or a lens cloth or the keys to his heart. Gene didn39。t seem to care, either. Cirocco sent out signals that could have drawn her five to We if the FCC had known about them, but Gene wasn39。t receiving. He just grinned with that boyish, touslehaired Aryan ideal face and talked about flying. He was to be the pilot of the Satellite Excursion Module when the ship reached Saturn. Cirocco liked flying, too, but there came a time when a woman wanted to do something else. But eventually Calvin and Cirocco got what they had wanted. Soon after, neither wanted it anymore. Cirocco didn39。t know what the problem was with Calvin and Gaby。 neither of them talked about it, but it was obvious that it worked only passably at best. Calvin continued to see her, but she saw Gene, too. Gene had apparently been waiting for Cirocco to stop chasing him. As soon as she did, he began to sidle up and breathe heavily in her ear. She didn39。t like that much, and the rest of his technique was no better. When he was through making cove, it al most seemed he expected to he thanked. Cirocco had never been easily impressed。 Gene would have been astonished to learn where he fell on her scale of one to ten. Bill had happened almost by accidentthough she had since learned that few accidents happened around Bill. One thing led to another, and now they were about provide a pornographic demonstration of Newton39。s Third Law of Motion, the one that used to refer to , action and reaction. Cirocco had done some calculations on the matter, and had found that the force of ejaculation was not nearly enough to account for the orgasmic acceleration she always observed at that moment. The cause was certainly spasms of the large muscles of the leg, but the effect was beautiful and a little frightening, as though they had bee big, fleshy balloons losing air, forced away from each o