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continue oscillating? Days? Years? The mirror couldn’t be perfectly frictionless; nothing in the universe was perfect. If it was perfect, the rubble wouldn’t be there in the center; the rocks that fell in would still be oscillating.
    He was the bob on a pendulum, he thought, with a frictionless surface instead of a rope. For a moment his thoughts took him back to his childhood, growing up on Vesta. He and his brother had competed with each other on the swings, seeing who could go higher. They must have tried a hundred times to swing so hard as to go all the way around, over the bar. They never succeeded, even with Vesta’s low gravity making it easy; when they barely got higher than the pivot point, the rope would go slack, and the swing would fall with a jerk.
    Thinking about the past wasn’t going to help him, and he forced his thinking back to his present situation. In a few minutes he would be back to his starting point. What about the safety rope? If it was still dangling down—but it wouldn’t be. He replayed his fall in his mind. The safety rope had snapped back like an elastic band when the clip broke, and disappeared over the edge. He would try to grab it, if it was in reach, but he wouldn’t count on it.
    It wasn’t. He slid up, frustratingly close to the rim, and for a moment he seemed to hover with the rim just out of reach, and then slid away. The tool pack hadn’t come any closer to him this time than it had on the opposite rim, and the rope was nowhere in sight.
    But here was something else to think about. Sedna rotated once every ten hours. In—he checked the time—two hours, the sun would be overhead. In the cold dark a hundred astronomical units from Earth, the intensity of the sun was dim, but what would happen when it was focused by a mirror twenty kilometers in diameter? In fact, that was very likely have been the purpose of the mirror, he realized. It wasn’t a telescope; it was an enormous solar furnace.
    But he wasn’t thinking. The mirror might focus sunlight to a high concentration indeed, but that would be miles overhead, at the focal point of the mirror. On the surface of the mirror itself, the sunlight would be no brighter, and no less bright, than any other time. It was freezing he had to worry about, not frying.
    Passing the bottom of the mirror. Lee clicked his image intensifier on again, watching the rubble in the center, trying to think of a way to make use of it. But it was still fifty meters away. Nothing useful there.
    He clicked it off, and he was surrounded again by a world of stars and darkness.
    Should he go back to reflecting on his life? Swinging with his brother, that was a good time, even if they never did make it over the bar. He could spend the remaining few hours remembering good times. The thing about being a prospector, he thought, is that you see a lot of places, but you only see the backsides, the seedy sides, the places in town near the dockyards. And they all look the same. He knew miners with a girl on each rock-town they visited, but no matter whether the deal was explicit or implicit, one way or another they were strictly pay propositions. He made good money, when he was employed, but somehow he never really managed to save any of it. It wasn’t that he was wasting his life, not exactly, he thought, but there had been enough of it already. It was time for him to move on. He needed to study, finish a degree, make something of himself.
    Well, he had plenty of time to study, if that was what he wanted to do. Not that it would do him much good—he was trapped in a bowl. But that reminded him, he did have one resource that he hadn’t though of. His personal databot had a load of study materials, and one of his subjects was physics. What if his problem had a solution somewhere in the physics texts? It was a long shot, but why not try?
    He booted up his study material, and put in search text: “PROBLEM, SLIDING ACROSS AN ENORMOUS MIRROR.” He had no real