('The Ring Bonanza' by Otto Binder)

There was vast treasure among the rings, if one could find it... In his vac-suit he used his reaction pistol to propel him down toward the glinting mass.

Timkin reached the glinting body he had previously spied. It was irregular in shape, some five feet in its greatest diameter. And it had a yellow tinge in the soft light shed by huge Saturn over his shoulder. Timkin permitted himself wild hope as he chipped off a piece with his belt pick. He held the chip up to his glassine visor, squinting at the grain.

(Reaction pistol and belt pick from 'The Ring Bonanza' by Otto Binder)

His face fell slack.

“Fool’s gold!” he muttered, flinging the piece away in a small fury...

Theory had it that there had once been a moon of Saturn. within two-and-a-half diameters of the giant planet. Gravitational stresses had then exploded the moon into countless fragments, which took up the same orbit after spreading out and thus came to be the unique rings...

SEEMINGLY, there had once been life, and civilization, on the destroyed moon. Fossil bones, once buried within the moon’s crust, now floated within the ring debris — and bits of machinery of some vanished and unknown race.