Earth had everything going for it. Not only was the mother planet top dog in the solar system—her weak colonies hanging on by the skin of their teeth had to heed her every whim.

Her spaceships were tops; her armament invincible; and she had just developed a new method of computerized schooling that seemed certain to develop an army of superminds to do Earth's bidding.

Yet, if all this was truly so, then how was it that the pesty little mining ships of the poorest colonial offshoot of all—the barren rocks of the Asteroid Belt —had beaten Earth's fleet to a frazzle and her homemade strategists were outthinking the best of the whole High Earth command?

Turn this book over for second complete novel

WALT and LEIGH RICHMOND

AN ACE BOOK Ace Publishing Corporation 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036

PHOENIX SHIP

Copyright ©, 1969, by Walt & Leigh Richmond All Rights Reserved

Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

The Richmonds have also written:

SHOCK WAVE THE LOST MILLENNIUM

EARTHRIM

Copyright ©, 1969, by Ace Publishing Corp.

Printed in U.S.A.

Lullaby for our Space Children

Parameter, perimeter, and pir-

There's a trace in the space past the sky that is I There's a me in the lee of this starred infinity

That is out to prove the ethic that the universe is free. We're a shout in the snout of eternities of doubt—

We're a spit in the mitt as we take our aim to hit—in

the eye—

The multitude of factors that will try to nullify.Our parameters, perimeters, and pi.

Astronomy and chemistry and math—

If you know where to go and your slipstick's not too

slow (don't be slow!) Where electrons meet the nucleus of mass And protons go along the selfsame path Where the multiples of decimals that mark the whirling

sphericah

Indicate there may be trouble coming past-It's a laugh . . . tf you're fast

With astronomy and chemistry and math.

Diameter, circumference, and sphere-Space may not yet have noticed, but we're here—Space,

we're here!

With spectrographs dazzle and a certain yen to travel And the love of work that brings the concepts clear. When the know-how got to flowing, we made ourselves the

knowing

And we left behind the Earthbound who don't care for

the rare

Relativities that measure an incomparable treasure when

you steer

By diameter, circumference, and sphere.

Maneuver is a cone too far to see

Out where motions only relativity— Where inertia is the stronger of the forces, and no longer

Subject to the biting laws of gravity. Want to brake? That's a fake! But if planetfall you'd make

Turn your tail—raise your thrust—you're falling free Through vectors of a factor known as V

With dimension governed by your A times T.

Now E must equal M times C the square

If you really think you're headed anywhere And you care—to get there.

For a proton or an atom that exists as just a datum Does not wear—cannot care ...

But the manner of his travel to a human who can ravel Is decidedly a different affair. So beware.

For that E will always equal MC square.

His NAME WAS Stanley Thomas Arthur Reginald Dustin, and the acronym was intentional, "bought" for him by an uncle at a price. The name had been registered, the price accepted; but when his mother died and his uncle returned to the Belt his father's disapproval had registered as well, and he could be known only by his first name, Stan.

"Ruffians make up the bulk of the planeteers," his father assured him as soon as he was old enough to ask. "Ruffians and ne'er-do-wells who can't make it on Earth and have to flee. There is the occasional adventurer like my brother, but that is the exception," he had added carefully. "Even so, your Uncle Trevor has behaved beneath the dignity of the family."

The red hair, the set chin and the gangling length that he had inherited from his uncle could not be disavowed so easily, but the heritage was offset by a pug nose and freckles; and with that his father had to be content

There had been friction between the stern, unbending father and the easygoing, carelessly alive boy from the beginning. It was Stan's father's determination that one adventurer in the family was more than sufficient, that Stan should be schooled to the responsible position in his own community that his father had created for him. This determination had nearly obviated the possibility of Stan's entering the school on the Arctic slopes where he now sat in a learning cubicle answering test questions on the computer screen before him.

Interminable questions. They made up almost the entire curriculum of the school. Questions, with nothing on which to base his answers. Questions that leaped from subject to subject; that sometimes centered whole concepts and assumed not only knowledge from top to bottom of the field involved, but, Stan decided, intuition within it

Given the lens configuration in the diagram above, specify the index of refraction required in lens C, and select from the following list the type and weight percentage of materials required, to formulate such a lens for operation in an environmental temperature range of 220 to 260 degrees Kelvin.

Stan glared at the sentence as though it were an enemy, but it refused to go away. Yet, as though his body had a will of its own, he began estimating angles by eye and sliding the slipstick—his sole allowed tool of computation —while he shifted decimals in his head.

With a computer and about six months' time perhaps, I might be able to come up with some sort of answer, that part of his mind which refused to be disciplined considered. The things they expect you to know on a test like this, he thought ruefully.

It had been a compromise on both his and his father's part. Stan wanted, perhaps because it was denied him, abjectly and unreasoningly but absolutely, the training necessary to ship on the interplanetary lines. At least that was his stated ambition—to go out in the ships that plied the system.

What he really wanted, the secret desire that gnawed his vitals with a deep, unreasoning yearning, was to explore the stars. But before that became possible, the Einstein formulas would have to be rewritten; and they'd been proved long ago and over and over. That desire was hopeless, and, he told himself severely, it was a sign of immaturity to continue to harbor it. The fact that his father did not even suspect its existence was hardly surprising. Stan hid it from himself whenever possible.

His father was not only adamantly against anything that smacked of space, but actually anything that smacked of technical training.

"You shall indeed go to the planets; explore the entire system," Stan's father had explained carefully, "but as a tourist, free to explore; free to sample the best of everything that is offered; free of the slave-labor that marks the life of a"—the word was distasteful in his mouth—"a planeteer, or a Belter."

The school here was a compromise, his acceptance into its five-year course a surprise to both of them. And Stan was not even sure how that compromise had been reached.

The Mentor who had had him called for conference during a late afternoon of his final high school year had been a stranger, and strangely dressed even by the most flamboyant standards. Stan had entered the conference room cloaked in the normal long gray cloak of privacy over his own almost-colorful dark blue singlet and matching hose, to be received by an older man in silken gold tunic and trousers and soft gold kid slippers. It was his face that kept Stan's attention: it was uncreased, smooth, almost featureless.

"I am Katsu Lang," the Mentor greeted him with. "Won't you throw off the cloak? I expect we will be friends, and no privacy between us."

Startled, Stan had removed the cloak and folded it carefully over a chair.

He had been accepted, Dr. Lang told Stan slowly, in a newly organized school set up under rather special conditions, teaching a "newly developed engineering course." Designed, the Mentor had said, to best equip a candidate for a general understanding of the society and possible usefulness in its further technological development.

"Accepted?" Stan had asked, and been assured that the criteria had been rigorous; that he had been found acceptable under the most exacting standards.

He wasn't at all sure how it was that he had quite suddenly become convinced that this five-year course was what he wanted; but he had been quite sure that it was something his father would refuse.

"If you will permit us," the Mentor had assured him, his strange, nearly poreless face without expression, "I believe that this part can be handled for you. If you accept this assignment. . ."

Stan had accepted, and though he was not sure after he'd arrived at the school itself that it was what he wanted—he was here; he had been at the school for over four years.

But it wasn't a school, Stan told himself. It was a series of tests. It was nothing but tests, actually, with occasional lectures that seemed more designed to puzzle than inform. The first day's schedule had consisted of nothing but tests, in this same cubicle, on subjects that ranged from engineering to sociology to anthropology . . . any and every subject you could think of. At the end of the tests he had learned that the next day would consist of a similar series, and that he could study for it or not as he liked.

But study what? There had been several areas in the first tests that had left him blank and curious. He started on those in the tiny library cubicle assigned to him; and he'd found that each tape he'd worked through had led him on to other tapes; and pure curiosity had kept him going, on and on. ...

He'd fallen asleep in his small room, expecting to be called for the next day's assignments, and had not wakened for nearly fourteen hours.

Without even pausing to find out what meals he'd missed, he'd gone straight to the classroom cubicle, where the impersonal quiz program had simply begun on his arrival and continued until he left.

Famished, puzzled, uncertain, he'd left the cubicle and searched until he'd found an office. His knock was answered and he'd entered to face again the Mentor in the golden suit with a gold belt embossed with entwined snakes.

"I. . . overslept."

"Filing time is important, too," the Mentor had said soft-

"I ... I haven't eaten. Dr. Lang, I don't know the schedule, I don't know what to study. I haven't met my classmates. I. . ." His voice had run down.

"You will find your classmates in the common room, whenever you care to go there. Your studying seems to have followed a very well selected pattern. The meal schedule is posted in the common room."

"But. . . lectures? Classes?"

"They are posted."

"On what terms will I be kept or dropped? I assume that you don't keep all the students. You said that the course was competitive."

"It is competitive. We expect to drop at least three-quarters of the students to lesser courses within the five years."

"You ... I guess you're sort of leaving it up to each of us how we study and what we do?"

"Isn't that advisable? In selecting for the best, that is? Those dropped will have fine courses and careers ahead of them."

There was no use asking questions, Stan realized. He took a deep breath.

Tour questions—your tests—cover subjects with which I am completely unfamiliar. How do you expect me to answer the questions? How can you expect us to pass the tests?"

"Have you found it impossible to answer the questions?"

Stan found himself blank for a minute. Then, with an effort, he forced himself to recall one of the tests he'd had the day before. It was a mathematical quiz, and he'd watched himself sitting before the board, the questions arising one from another, across the screen, as he'd answered them. There were long pauses before each answer; pauses in which he'd strained every mental muscle he possessed to . . . remember? Grasp? Analyze? And the answers had come, feebly and unsurely, but they had come. Correct or incorrect, there had been answers there when he'd reached deep and strained to . . . remember.

He felt exhausted, as though he'd been running for miles and was wilting. Standing there before the smooth-faced Mentor, he tried to frame the question that would give him the answer to the school itself.

"If a test selection asks something that you do not know," the Mentor said softly, "you can always answer that you do not know. That would be quite a valid answer, would it not?"

Tve come this far, Stan told himself grimly. I wont he licked by the prospect of endless examinations. And I wont be one of those relegated to merely fine courses and careers.

"You have had your inoculations?" Again the soft voice carried no inflection other than the question.

Stan was startled. Inoculations had been part of the entrance proceedings. He nodded, mutely.

"You will have them weekly," he was told. "They will .. . help."

And the answers had come. Almost invariably, if he reached hard enough. The answers seemed to grow out of the pyramidal structure of the questions—and yet, they didn't. He was calling on information he had not known he possessed, and it puzzled him; and yet the catholicity with which he pursued information during the free hours of the day must be ths source, he told himself.

The hours between exams—and outside the sleep that seemed to claim him willy-nilly and occupy far more hours than he liked to waste this way—were in the nature of a race. He never had any idea what the next day's tests would cover. So he found himself grabbing for information in those off-hours in so helter-skelter a manner that he was attempting eveiything and acquiring nothing.

Five years was a long time, he finally decided. If a subject was dropped today it would probably be resumed in the forseeable future. And he began following the subject of each day's tests in that day's studying. It seemed to pay off.

It was the sleep that he continued to fight After that first night, it hadn't been a normal sleep, not for a long time. It had been a feeling of sleep that built an increasing tension within until it would seem as though he were bursting; and as it seemed inevitable in bis dreams that he would burst, he'd wake; he'd fall asleep again almost instantly and go through the increasing tension again horn-after hour; and he'd wake exhausted.

He found himself increasing his study hours to avoid sleep; found himself fighting to keep his attention on the library tapes to the point of exhaustion. But exhausted as he might be, at the moment he fell asleep the tension would begin to build and build . . . until one night he didn't wake and there was what he remembered later as an internal explosion that had continued for some time as a series of minor explosions. They wafted him forward and back, forward and back, as on a constantly reversing current, until he drifted peacefully with it, no longer fighting, no longer tense.

Waking, he'd felt refreshed for the first time since coming to the school. That night he'd returned to his sleeping room expectantly and had fallen asleep to the old tensions, but almost immediately an explosion had occurred—a lesser explosion this time. Then came the forward and backward motion that was as restful as a rocking chair.

The process had gone on for a week, until finally the tensions and the explosions had dropped out and the rocking motion had begun the instant he'd fall asleep. He looked forward to it now: to the refreshment, greater than any he'd ever known; to the soft currents themselves, and the satisfied feeling with which he'd wake.

His life had taken on a similar alternating-current rhythm. The tests were a flow in one direction: if he relaxed and let his subconscious work, the answers came easily; whereas if he strained they seemed to be stopped.

Studying was an alternate flow, a pursuit of knowledge that was a furious, instinctive demand he found within himself for knowledge that came from his conscious and pursuing mind. It was a competitive urge that claimed him daily as he left the testing cubicle and took him direct to the library and its concentrations.

The race left him little time for the common room, though there were games and conversation to be had there. On the occasions when he did appear, it seemed to be full of students, uncloaked and informal as Stan now was, in variations of the dark singlets and hose that were stylish. He rather assumed that the other students were taking the same hours he did for studying, and didn't worry about it What they did was their business, he decided.

Mostly, though, when he allotted himself time off—and no one in authority seemed in the slightest interested in setting hours or schedules except for the occasional lectures, meals, and weekly inoculations—he went topsides. He'd discovered the entrance to the outside once when he went determinedly exploring the school plant, originally an oil refinery complex abandoned when the age of oil ended. There'd been heavy outside wear—quilted boots and trousers; hooded and gloved tunics—in the small room beyond the door that was marked simply OUTSIDE; and he'd helped himself and gone out into the arctic wastes.

That first time he'd not intended to go far, but the empty spaces beyond the small entrance held an enchantment. The sun was on the horizon, bright and small, and making a gold path across the white expanse. He followed the path almost blindly, drinking in the lonely sweeps of snow; a loneliness that he'd never found before; that created a hunger in his entrails. The cold air bit into his lungs, and he fastened his hood to cover his mouth and nose and went on.

Abruptly the sun was gone, and a wind rose violently to sweep snow into his eyes. He kept on for a bit, but the wind gusted harder; he turned to find the white expanse on all sides, his tracks covered, and no sign of the entrance through which he'd come. A near-panic gripped him, and he stood stock-still for a minute, feeling it wash over him, feeling his body react to panic, the urge to run pulling at his legs.

Then he laughed. This, he'd thought, must be what it was like to be in space. And he looked at the whiteness reflecting back the remaining light and stretching to infinity in every direction, and felt an urge to throw out his arms and embrace it.

Turning then in a complete circle, he had tried to determine the direction from which he'd come. It was then that he saw the small figure approaching and recognized it instantly by the golden padded suit, shaped like his own, but glowing in the reflected light.

Bracing himself against the gusting wind, Stan went to meet the figure. "Dr. Lang," he shouted through the wind when they were near, "have I done wrong to come out?"

The face that he knew to be broad and expressionless was hidden behind the hood, but as the wind lulled between gusts, the voice was unmistakable. "I think, Stan, that we shall give you a special inoculation. No, you have not done wrong. Should it be wrong to come out into the open?"

A question for every question, Stan thought. But, "No," he answered. "This is peace. It should be sought."

After that, he'd gone out for at least a little while almost daily. He'd never gotten lost again, and he'd never met the Mentor again. But the trips topsides had come to mean a relaxation and a cleansing, more effective than a shower.

Stan had missed his home and friends at first as the strange course went on; but more and more the trips home had come to seem "like visits to a foreign land, the people to speak an alien tongue.

And then, in one short week, his home became enemy territory.

He had barely arrived for Christmas vacation when the news broke on 3-D: ships of the Belt had attacked Earth Fleet; had attacked and destroyed a few of the mighty vessels that controlled interplanetary space.

And the Belt forces were led by Trevor Dustin.

The shock was felt everywhere. It was impossible. The tiny, weak population of the Belt taking on the might of Earth?

But as the hours passed and the 3-D marshaled its onthe-spot coverage from space itself, the shock became greater.

The screens showed the huge battleships of Earth, light-colored to reflect back the impinging rays of the sun; long cylinders more than two hundred feet across, spinning slowly to give gravity when not under thrust Mighty ships. Their hulls held six feet of water for radiation shielding over the entire surfaces; water that served as a major part of the life-support systems for the crews and the two thousand Space Marines that were the normal complement They were armed with powerful laser beams for space warfare, with projectile and atomic cannon for planetary warfare, though the ships themselves would never come nearer to a planet than a two-hour orbit. Massive monsters, capable of maneuvering at up to a two-G thrust. . . .

And darting among and between them like a flight of stubby crossbow arrows, black so that they were nearly invisible, the tiny ships of the Belt

"The Belters have dropped their freight doughnuts, and they're using the central control-cabin/thrust-tube segments of their freighters as fighting ships!" an excited commentator explained. "They've painted them black so they can't be seen by eye ... a useless gesture. They can be seen by ladar."

Breathless, he went on, explaining to an Earth audience that had never considered the problems of Belt shipping. "The Belters load their freight into doughnut-shaped containers, the way freight used to be loaded on Earth into the trailer end of a trailer-tractor truck. Their control cabins are directly attached to the ion drive tube that centers any spaceship, and that control cabin is the only part of the ship that needs shielding, since the freight travels in vacuum. When the freightnut is loaded, the control-cabin/drive-tube combination is fitted into its center and the Belter accelerates it into a Hohmann orbit toward its destination, then lets go. The freightnut is picked up at the far end of its trip by a similar ship/drive-tube.

"Those drive-tube ships are fast," he went on. "With no shielding needed except for the small living section, they're long and fast and maneuverable. They can get thrusts up to any G's a man can take; and the system of dropping the freightnuts makes almost every ship in the Belt a fighting ship."

Then the head of Earth's Space Commission was brought on to reassure the vast listening audience. "The Belters," he said solemnly, "are getting too big for their britches. Of course they haven't any fire power at all, comparatively speaking; and this uprising should be over in a few hours. They have been listening to the traitorous leaders who have quarreled with Earth's very light and reasonable control measures from the begiririing. When this is over, the traitors must be weeded out, and restrictive measures taken.

"It may hurt a parent to spank a child," he went on in a kindly tone of voice, "especially an insanely brave child. However, it must be done for bis own good. The very act of attacking where there is no possibility of winning shows the extent of the delusions of grandeur from which the Belters must be rescued."

Yet time went on, and the predicted spanking became more and more remote.

The tiny ships of the Belt were everywhere, black mosquitoes diving onto light-colored elephants and pulling out again. They didn't even try to match fire-power with their prey; just dove almost onto the Earth ships, then pulled into steep climbs that flicked their tails toward the hulls of their enemy and sprayed them with the full jet streams of their drives.

A few were swatted, but very few compared to the numbers that were diving again and again. The mighty laser guns of Earth Fleet had been built to focus sharply at distances of one hundred miles and better, and were having trouble with their accuracy in this in-fighting. The Earth gunnery officers did hit their targets, as demonstrated with fair frequency by minute sparks of light on the target hulls. But the targeting sparks seemed to be without effect except when a spark hit the control-cabin end; and even then it was usually followed by only a tiny puff of steam that was gone almost as soon as it appeared, while the Belt ship arrowed on instead of exploding.

Not so with the stings of the myriad Belt mosquitoes. As the tail of the Belter lighted the hull of its prey with the ghastly blue glow of its jet stream, a great gout of steam would pour forth, and continue to spout. It did not take many hullings before the giants dissolved from hydrostatic shock in great soundless blasts of steam and debris on the viewscreens of Earth.

They were strange battles to watch, as the two fleets came together time after time: the ponderous ships of Earth maneuvering majestically, while the tiny Belt ships dove in and out among them, dancing like fireflies at punishing accelerations and decelerations, in patterns impossible for the heavily manned, heavily armored leviathans of Earth.

"Guerrilla ships," the Belters were called by the astounded commentators. Guerrilla ships that were showing a technological invincibility that had not been suspected. Guerrilla ships that were recklessly, impossibly, remaining on the attack—and winning.

It was over in three days; three days in which neither Stan nor anyone else left the 3-D; in which food was something to be gulped between battles; in which sleep was out of the question.

Stan watched the last and crucial fight. The Earth fleet had been maneuvered into massing; and the guerrilla ships were diving through the mass, one after the other, picking off the central ships while the firepower of the Earth ships was limited for fear of hitting their own. It was a daring thing to watch as the one-man Belt ships threw themselves, unhesitatingly, into and through the mass of monsters.

Stan was watching too, when the flagship of the Belt fleet, Traitor Dustin's ship," the commentators called it, as tiny as the others, took a hit and spun out, exploding slowly in the fantastic silence of a space war. But with that ship went the giant of the Earth fleet, the main battleship, Earuna.

It was over. Earth Fleet had withdrawn to "regroup and study the situation," the commentators said, though the euphemism was obvious to even the most chauvinistic. Earth was defeated, and the Belt independent

And Uncle Trevor dead, Stan added to himself, while the commentators talked excitedly of the unexpected technological abilities of the Belt, which were matched (they emphasized) by the technology of Earth, though that technology had not been thought necessary to the control of the spaceways. . . .

Stan left the 3-D, but instead of going to his den to sleep, he took the elevator to the top of the sky-rise, to the park-area where he could look into the sky and think beyond it

As he left the elevator, a familiar figure, tall and heavy under its flapping cloak, was approaching it "Hi, Tom," Stan said, preoccupied.

Traitor Dustinl" was Tom's only greeting, and Stan found himself ducking a roundhouse right cross that barely missed his nose, the broad sweep of Tom's cloak sleeve slapping across his face.

What happened next was as much a surprise to Stan as it was to Tom. He had been attacked. The attack had missed only because of his own quick reflexes which, almost of their own accord, now had Tom engaged in a half-nelson, Stan's left arm gripping a pressure point at the back of Tom's neck.

"What shall I break first?" he heard himself asking in a mild voice. The overstimulation that should have resulted from a flood of adrenalin to the circulatory system in the standard fight-or-flight response wasn't there. There was none of the raggedness of heavy breathing that would formerly have accompanied any fight. The automic responses hadn't been needed or triggered. He hadn't even had his attention on the fight He was still debating his own fierce pride that the Belt had won. He should be loyal to Earth —or should he. Somehow there was a feeling of justification, both in the war and in his own personal battle that he neither understood nor wanted to question.

The next day he had gone to the tailor's and had himself fitted for tunics and trousers—of a light gray silken material that held a gold tinge. Then he'd selected a tunic belt of gold—plain gold—though he knew that the tailor, his family and friends would find the clothes, the color, even the fact of the belting, distasteful.

He'd made his visits home as infrequent as possible after that and now he felt almost a stranger there; and the feeling was mutual. The pug nose was gone; the freckles gone.

"You look too much like your former uncle for comfort," his father had remarked on his last trip home. "If I were not assured that this school is training you for one of the higher governmental positions, I would suspect..."

Stan punched the last figures into the board before him, and to his surprise saw it clear completely. Then the questions were replaced with a terse summons:

Student S.T.A.R. Dustin. Report to Professor Mallard in Office 201.

Stan jerked out of the daydreams that had more and more accompanied his tests over the years as he had relaxed to let the answers come easily.

The almost hypnotic rhythm by which he had worked for more than four years lay shattered around him, and he felt as though he were stepping over its shards as he left the cubicle.

II

PROFESSOR MALLARD stood, cloaked but unhooded, behind his desk as Stan entered, his piercing eyes seeming to X-ray the student and his pursed lips seeming to find what he saw unpleasant.

Stan drew himself up. "Student S.T.A.R. Dustin, reporting as ordered, sir."

The professor's face relaxed, and he allowed a small smile to superimpose itself on the disdainful expression.

"Star Dustin," he said in a clipped voice. "Perhaps the name is prophetic, General."

Startled, Stan turned to find a uniformed figure seated casually behind him, beyond the door by which he had entered.

"So this is the young man." The general eyed Stan from his carrot thatch to his new gray-gold slippers, then nodded to himself and rose, a big figure in a carefully tailored uniform. "This your somewhat independent but exotically educated guinea pig, eh? WelL have no fear, Professor. Well tame him. We've tamed the likes of him and better before. After that well see whether he performs to specifications." He nodded briefly to the professor, ignoring Stan, took cap and gloves from the table beside his chair, and left without another word.

As the door closed behind the general, Professor Mallard almost let the precise smile slip, then replaced it carefully. "You have brought yourself to important notice, young man," he said.

Stan felt an internal stillness that held every sense alert, waiting. There was a sure knowledge of danger beneath the stillness, but it was the lesser of the two emotions. There was a dislike of the professor so intense as to be nearly overwhelming. Why the professor? he asked himself. Why not the general? And he found no answer except the fact.

"I haven't flunked, have I, Professor?" he heard his voice asking and knew himself to be asking for time to get his balance, to sort out the emotions that threatened to flood his system.

"Flunked?" Mallard considered for a moment, then shook his head from side to side. "No. Not that. A bit too . . . self-motivated, perhaps. But as the general said . . ." He decided to leave the sentence hanging.

A silence lay between the two then. The professor stood immobile, his eyes boring into those of the student.

He expects me to speak first, to look away, Stan thought He's determined to force me. Why? His chin lifted and firmed.

At the gesture, the professor's smile deepened. "Ah, yes," he said with the casual triumph that comes with winning a personal bet. "A bit too self-motivated. However . . ." He slowly dropped himself into the desk chair, tenting his fingers on its surface, each action deliberate. Then he began to speak, lightly, as though discussing a subject of no possible import.

"You will be apprenticed as a Marine in the Earth Space Service," he said. His eyes still did not leave Stan's, and the effect removed any casualness engendered by his tone. "You will be in that post for perhaps half a year. When your . . . obvious eagerness is thoroughly under control, and because you have shown yourself rather exceptionally bright you will be transferred to more and more responsible positions. By the time that we are ready to re-subdue the Belt, I expect you to be among the squad leaders of the effort. By then you should have a souad completely composed of personnel who have been molecularly trained as you have been, who should prove—"

"The Belt?" Stan heard his voice ask. "The Belt is independent, sir."

The professor brought himself up crisply. "The Belt is temporarily independent. It is, you will realize, a condition that Earth cannot tolerate."

"Sir." Stan paused, marshaling his words. "I should prefer another assignment. I have loyalties. . . ."

"Ah." The professor nodded. "Trevor Dustin's memory. The traitor mythologized into a hero. Trail Duster. And your nickname is Star Duster? What a mistake your parents made! I should have realized." Then, fiercely: "You know, of course, that he would be captured and hung if he were not dead already? That he has been hung in effigy?"

Then the voice relaxed. "Well, the first inoculations you get before going to—never mind." He clamped his mouth with a sudden snap, then smiled again. "We can understand your misplaced loyalties, young man. We can also handle them. You have been accorded a high honor, and it is not one that you will be allowed to refuse. It is an honor that has already been accorded you in part, for you were accepted into this school although your IQ was at first thought to be too low and—"

"Sir.If I may interrupt. I should like to talk the matter over with Dr. Lang."

The professor's face showed another of its abrupt changes. "Professor Lang," he said distastefully, "is no longer with us. He has not been with us now for almost three years."

Stan felt himself sinking, as though a support had been removed from beneath him, and the feeling startled him. He'd barely known Dr. Lang, but he'd trusted him. And Dr. Lang was no longer here? Somehow Stan had thought of him as . . . well, as standing in the wings, watching and waiting. It was an odd thing to have thought, he reminded himself. He'd seen the smooth-faced Mentor perhaps four times, and exchanged very few sentences with him. Yet the feeling of trust, of familiarity, of . . . Dr. Lang had represented to him what he thought of as the school. And Dr. Lang had not been there for most of his schooling.

The professor's voice was continuing, and he brought his attention back to it. "At any rate, young man, you have very little choice. The results the school is obtaining must be demonstrated to the military in no uncertain terms and as immediately as possible. We have convinced them theoretically that with molecular training we can put the wisdom of an older man into the resilient body of a young man on a stimulus-response basis. But theory and demonstration are two separate items. Therefore the demonstration must take place. Once they are convinced, we will be able to do this work on a mass production basis.

"You have no choice, as our top pupil, but to be the demonstration agent—and you will not fail us." Over the precisely composed face a slight smile was allowed to appear and the voice that continued was more kindly now. "We have made an investment in you of well over a maga-credit. That is an obligation that you cannot disregard."

Stan was startled. "A megacredit, sir?"

"That is correct. Later, mass production will bring the costs to a reasonable figure, but experimental work comes high."

"I . . ." Stan paused. Then: "You keep saying 'molecular training.' May I ask, sir, just what sort of training I have had? I thought. . ."

"You thought! You were not supposed to think!" The professor's voice was almost a snarl, but immediately he brought it back under control and allowed the slight smile to recompose itself over his severe features, in spite of the annoyance that threatened his composure.

"The training you have had did not require thinking; and the insistence you have placed on independent study has gone far toward nullifying the results we had every right to expect. However, it has also enhanced the results, and the nullification can be itself nullified. But you must not forget—you must not be allowed to forget—that it is the molecular training that has given you the education and the abilities of which you find yourself possessed."

"Am I allowed to know," the boy before him was choosing his words carefully, "just what this molecular training is— of what it has consisted?"

"You will be questioned on the subject, and you must know enough to answer those questions intelligently. Yes." Mallard leaned back in his chair and his voice took on a lecture-platform quality.

"You have been trained by molecular memory transplantation. The inoculations you were given were of memory molecules, produced originally by minds thoroughly schooled in each of the disciplines to which you have been subjected." He leaned forward again, and again tented his hands on the desk before him. This explanation was a familiar one. He had used it effectively on the military, on prospective donors. It came easily to his tongue.

"These memory molecules are extracted from trained and dedicated persons in each discipline. They are then duplicated in the laboratory and returned to the original donor; any of the duplicates may be substituted with equal success. The donor loses nothing but a few blank days during which a majority of his memory molecules are sorted and duplicated and then reinstalled. And even should the reinstalling, by some misfortune, not be complete, the infinite filing system of the body's biochemical processes can reduplicate and replace throughout the donor's system from the molecules that have not been extracted in only a matter of weeks."

Stan listened in growing amazement to the statements, recalling the memories of the tests, the search for answers that seemed to be right there but not quite within reach, and their sudden appearance. He thought he was drawing facts and abilities from his "subconscious," but...

"But, sir. I understood that memory was an electronic, not a molecular function. That it was a function of the brain itself .. . ?"

"Ah, yes. The electronic brain function as against the biochemical body function of memory storage." The professor was pleased with himself now. Stan might not be the student he would have most wished to see succeed, but the work of the years would be demonstrated, and his efforts CTilminate in the recognition that he—yes, he deserved. There was pleasure in his voice as he went on:

"The research is new. As far as we can tell, the old educational system of study, which required information to be filtered through the five senses into the electronic brain system, gave the student conscious control of the knowledge and abilities he acquired. Whereas our molecular training implants, introduced directly into the biochemical information-filing system of the body, produce a stimulus-response basis on which the knowledge is available. And," he added, the pleasure in his voice becoming more pronounced, "it is the stimulus-response reaction to information-need for which we are training."

The professor paused, nodding his head slowly. "You can see that the normal response of an older person to any situation calling for his knowledge and abilities would be quite different from that of a young man. What we need is youngsters, primed with knowledge and trained abilities, who will use those knowledges and abilities the way an old man would use them: with caution, with due regard for accepted methods of operation, with due respect for his superiors.

"With this molecular training system, we will be able to fill the action posts of government and the military with young men who will dependably react to almost any situation not only with the most extensive knowledge and abilities that experts have achieved, but in the manner that would be dictated by those same elderly, disciplined minds!"

"In other words," Stan said slowly, "what you are doing here is creating educated robots?"

Mallard found himself jerked back to the realities of the moment, and he stared at the boy. "That's a harsh term," he said finally. "But, yes, in its way. What we are doing is putting the education and discipline of mature minds into young bodies. You may find this emotionally upsetting at first thought," he added kindly, "but consider. You have an education and abilities that could have been given you in no other way. You have a spread of knowledge that no one person could have attained in one lifetime; and you have acquired this while you are still young. If the knowledge and abilities are not exactly under your control, why—in the military no one is under his own control anyway, so what loss?"

Stan found his emotions chaotic, fear predominant; but was not convinced. If he was, in fact, a robot, why must it be for the military?

Then anger surged. Their puppet, was he? But he'd studied—for himself and by himself—and that was not puppetry. There had to be a way to find out whether, essentially, he was indeed what they supposed him to be. But it would take time.

"I . . . I'll need some time to think this whole thing over," he said weakly.

"Of course you will, my boy." The professor nodded to himself. "You have had a strenuous course, and will need a bit of relaxation. So you are being given a two weeks' leave to return home and enjoy yourself. Then you will report back here for a short pre-induction training, and will be taken to Greateryork for your first assignment. You've not been drawing against your student's credit balance, so you have in excess of two thousand credits to spend any way you wish before you report to your new post. Enjoy yourself. You will be quite busy for a while after you return, so enjoy your leave."

Accepting the professor's smile and nod as a dismissal, Stan left the room. Pep talk's over and I'm to swallow the fact that Authority has made me a guinea pig without my knowledge, he thought, and I imagine without my father's knowledge either. I'm supposed to swallow it with pleasure and feel obligated to go right on being a demonstration guinea pig for the rest of my life.

The bitterness of the thought surged through him. But, he asked himself honestly, would I change the situation if I could? Would I forfeit having had the course? And he knew he wouldn't.

The resentment was there; but the knowledge was there too; knowledge in fields that had each taken a man his entire lifetime to acquire. The knowledge is there, he told himself, and I got most of it from Professorburgers. But he found himself fiercely glad that he'd studied as hard as possible; that there was knowledge there, too, which he had gotten by himself, for himself.

His thinking was still caught between resentment and pride by the time he was aboard the tubecar that would whisk him through the vacuum tunnel system. Having inserted his credit card and dialed his destination, Stan would be delivered direct, in this same tubecar, to the tubeport beneath the sky-rise that was his home in Elko, Nevada, more than two thousand miles away, in under two hours.

Home. He'd thought of it through his childhood as open and free, with its sky-rise buildings separated by several acres of trees and playgrounds and fresh air; with the vistas of distant mountains giving the feeling that there was some real space in the world, even when you knew the mountains themselves were thoroughly inhabited.

A nostalgia for the open wastes of snow and ice topsides at the school shook him, and he drew his cloak of privacy more tightly around him, though he was alone in a two-seater. He'd always had privacy. It was the factor given top priority in a crowded civilization. But space—that was another factor, and a different thing entirely; and he'd found himself drinking it in in his daily trips up and out into the intense cold and intense aloneness topsides at the school.

Suddenly he knew he was not going home; not just yet Five percent of the credits given him as student aid were spent; but the other credits were untouched yet, and they'd take him where he wanted to go, keep him for at least a few days—a few days in which he could watch the tugs that took off for space.

He looked at the map of the tube-network on the screen of the car before him, saw by the tiny light that marked his position that he was already in the main Alcan-Europe Tubeway that carried most of the traffic across the Pole; and nearing Anchorage.

He leaned toward the small keyboard beneath the map and pushed the button marked CHANGE OF DESTINATION. Then he inserted his credit card into the slot beside the keyboard.

With a click the keys of the board loosened so that they could be used, and he punched out carefully: White Sands. Then, glancing at the map, he added the coordinates given there.

The action put the invariable record into the computer for anyone who cared to ask through Information Retrieval.

But who would care to ask? He was a student, with two weeks and a fist full of credits to spend as he pleased.

Ill

STAN AHHIVED at Termdock, White Sands, and made his way to a visitor's gallery from which he could watch the vast tarmac on which the space tugs landed and took off.

For an hour he watched in fascination as the stubby-winged aerodynamic needles, skirted like old women for their ground-effect takeoff, ran through their twenty-five mile ground run. The real activity of the port was invisible to him here, restricted to the mile after mile of underground warren that subsurfaced the field itself. There would be mountains of freight being fed up to the waiting tugs through moving belt loaders. There would be the few passengers and the many workers. There would be rebuilding and repair, bargaining and sweating: the varieties of activity that backgrounded trade between Earth and the system.

Above, Stan had seen two takeoffs and three landings while he watched; and it had left him unsatisfied.

Why had he come here, anyhow? he asked himself. To think. To think—and to be near the ships that were reaching out; to be near the fact of space.

But he felt shuttered from it; felt as barriered as ... as a robot, he told himself.

Abruptly he straightened away from the rail. He had plenty of credits to his card, didn't he? And seven hundred of those credits would get him freighter-tug passage, round-trip, to Orbdock. At least there he'd be in space itself, or nearly. At least there he'd see the real freighters, the ships that went into the system, not just their servicing tugs.

Stan entered the freight tug with his hood up so that the excitement boiled in him would be disguised, but all the pilot saw was another privacy-mad stupe of a suburban Earthie. He gestured to the acceleration couch beside his own.

"And keep that damned cloak out of my way," he said, not bothering to hide his casual contempt.

The boy's flush was not completely hidden by the hood that shrouded his head, but he only asked timidly, "Don't planeteers wear cloaks?"

The question didn't merit an answer, the pilot decided, and only replied, "Hmmmph," then busied himself over the controls.

Stan restrained an impulse to throw back his hood, contenting himself instead with studying the pilot.

He was perhaps thirty-five, with a mobile face over a wrinkled uniform; his every gesture was alert and intent on what he was doing. The gestures were quick and sure; the hands . . .

Stan's eyes followed the hands to the controls they were manipulating, and a feeling of familiarity tugged at his senses. Alert now himself, he leaned forward. That would be the skirt control; there the dials indicating atmospheric density; that the rate-of-approach indicator; there . . . His hood fell back and his cloak loosened without his noticing the fact.

"Belt in. We're taking off." The pilot didn't even look at his passenger as he strapped himself into the padded chair.

The surge of acceleration was less than that of a tube-car, but it thrilled along Stan's every nerve, and he watched the great tarmac move past, then fly past, and finally flash past as the tug reached mach speeds; felt the surge as the needle-ship went through the sonic barrier as though bursting a brick wall with a karate blow, and flew beyond it, free. He saw the pilot's sure hands flash first to the vanes which angled them suddenly upward, and then to the skirt controls which withdrew those ground-effect wrappings into the belly of the craft.

Earth fell away, and Stan, who had seen it fall away in this manner a hundred times in 3-D dramas, exulted in the difference of the fact from the fantasy; saw, eventually, Earth like a ball to his vision and himself the still center of the blackness of space. They were an ecstasy of factors, those differences. A robot, am 1? he thought. TU get my own experiences! But it was a small thought, far at the back of his mind as his senses drank in the facts of flight.

Orbdock is mile after mile of interlocked gridwork of air-stiffened tubing, floating in space. The zero-G plastiplex is centered by a two-thousand-foot plastic doughnut that spins slowly to give gravity to the offices and restaurants and trading halls, the repair shops and maintenance and living facilities that are the nucleus of the dock.

Freight and passengers arrive here from Earth via space tugs which dock at one side of the complex. They tether there to the longest tubes of the grid, tubes which string out from the grid itself like loose spaghetti.

The freight is transferred through the tubes by fan-powered pneumocars directly to the interplanetary ships that berth on the far side of the complex. Spherical, with ion-drive tubes through their centers, the ships look like huge balloons with sticks through them; or like some form of alien insect which hangs, as though disdaining the complex itself, at the very tips of the tubes through which it is fed its tonnage of food, air, water, freight and people.

The passengers are transshipped through the tubes by pneumocar, too, but usually go first to the spincenter doughnut.

Stan stepped out of the pneumocar into a shrub- and flower-bordered area that held a restaurant on one side, an information booth on the other. He made his way into the restaurant and chose a small table near the wall, his eye caught by its clear plastic and the aquarium beyond. He knew the water was for shielding from the strong radiation of the sun out here beyond the atmosphere; that it also served as a major part of the air and waste recycling system, and that the fish were part of that system too. He knew that the water was flowing past in six-foot-deep rivers, its motion creating the spin of the doughnut he was in, that gave him gravity. But the serenity of the fish, of the plants stirring in the river's morion, belied the fact.

There could be no viewports as such within this shielding, but huge screens showing the complex beyond gave the illusion of windows; though the scenes were all still, the arrival and departure of tugs or ships was almost the only visible activity, and those might or might not occur while he watched.

He turned his attention to the people around him. They seemed to be mostly ships* personnel or dock workers, in uniforms of various styles and kinds—some neat, others looking used and rumpled. He felt conspicuous. There were cloaks to be seen, but very few, and those obviously tourists. Earth tourists, Stan thought, surprised at the distaste that went with the thought; and realizing with revulsion that the category included himself and that his cloak was the mark that categorized him.

He sat for hour after hour and let his senses simply absorb the scene: the light gravity, the complex, the space beyond and between its network; the smell of recycled air, the movement, the talk around him, the soft music—the feel of an orbital station. He felt drugged with the new sensations, drugged and content to sit, unthinking.

And then, as though a switch had closed, his mind turned on; his emotions, held in leash since he had left the school, would no longer be denied.

Over a megacredit the school has spent on me, and I am obligated for that, he found himself telling himself. Or am I? I didn't bargain for the investment, though Vm glad Tve got it—extra knowledge, be it robot or my own.

But shall 1 be a guinea pig for the rest of my life? Let them manufacture me into a complete robot? A megacredit. Is that what a lifetime is worth?

And while he talked to himself, he felt the tug of the ships he had watched all afternoon. Man will never reach the stars, he thought. That's been shown by the equations. But...

But oh, the free, untrammeled spaces between the planets! Yet, was the Belt a free man's area? He didn't know; he had no way of knowing. The Belt had won its independence in a daring and individualized fight; his uncle had fought to win that independence and died for it. Yet had the freedom he had won survived the hazards of necessity the Belt itself imposed? Survived the fact that to stay alive a man must be enclosed in atmospheres built and designed for man? And was that so very different from being enclosed in a privacy cloak, the only protection against an environment too crowded to be meant for man?

The 3-D told of slaves in the Belt, working and sweating because there was no "outside," no "topsides," to which they could escape. The 3-D told of hardship and privation. But Uncle Trevor—Trail Duster Trevor—he'd been a proud man and a strong one, with a strong laugh. . ..

Stan remembered the only time he'd seen his uncle after he was old enough to remember the details. He'd been tall and strong, swinging the youngster into the air and then onto his shoulders, as though physical contact were not something to be avoided. Stan had been scared at the time, but he'd responded after a minute to the hard hands that lifted him; to the feel of flying through the air; to the height of his uncle's shoulders; to the exhilaration of roughness and . . . yes, to the physical contact itself.

You don't make slaves of that sort, he told himself now.

He remembered the taste of fear as his uncle bent down, and the rough hands took him up in the delicious freedom of flying. Freedom and fear, he thought now; would freedom always carry the connotations of fear? He supposed it would, for freedom was bought by a man at a price, and only a stupid man refused to recognize the price as he demanded the commodity.

"Get yourself an education, boy," the big man had told him, roughing the red hair so like his own. "But don't let 'em make you a sissy while they're giving you an education. Do your own thinking while you get the information you need, boy. Then come on out to the Belt I'll have a berth for you; but you're going to have to get yourself there, you know." Then he'd added, half under his breath, "And you not even old enough yet to properly remember."

The small boy had remembered; and the twenty-four-year-old remembered now with a nostalgia that was overwhelming.

Guinea piggery; and for the military at that. . . .

With a rejection that was almost bigger than he could contain, Stan flung himself to his feet.

At the gesture a man at a nearby table looked up.

"Where's the hiring hall? Here or on Earth?" Stan asked him abruptly.

The man, hard-faced, hard-muscled, in rumpled coveralls, looked Stan up and down—the soft student's hands; the quiet student's face; the crisply cut hair; the cloak. . . .

"It's up here. Level five, quadrant three," he said disdainfully. "But a fat lot of good it will do the likes of you."

Stan nodded his thanks curtly. "You might be surprised, sir," he said, and was himself surprised at the title he'd given the surly spacer, though he felt justified in giving it.

The hiring hall turned out to be in a much lighter G area, a barn of a room filled with figures of every description: uniformed and coveralled; neat and slovenly; none cloaked. All had what Stan had come to think of as the spaceman's look, a hard, almost blank expression. An inner absorption, or just blankness?

High on the walls, constantly shifting lights listed the names of ships in dock, their destinations and their needs in the way of personnel. Occasionally a loudspeaker called a name and an office number, and a figure would rise and make its way to one of the cubicles.

"Where do you sign up?" Stan asked the nearest figure, a small man with a wizened face and sharp eyes that surveyed him again disdainfully.

"Application boxes there," the man told him after the survey, nodding toward a series of booths against the wall behind him that closely resembled the test cubicle in which he'd spent so many hours at school.

Inside it was nearly the same—a seat, a desk, a scanner; except that the seat was of air-support plastic; the desk a harder plastic; and instead of a keyboard into which you punched your answers, there was a glass plate on which you wrote, on which you pressed your fingers for printing; a scanner for retináis.

Name and number.Fingerprints. Retináis. Main area of training. Stan thought a minute, then entered: Engineering. Preferred destination. Without hesitation Stan wrote: Belt City. That was all.

There was a pause, then the screen cleared and a metallic voice came to him through a tiny speaker: "Take a seat in the hiring hall. You will be called."

He found a scat near the application booths and waited. From this part of the spincenter there were no view-screens. He watched the crowd. He slept. He woke and watched the crowd again. He grew hungry, but he ignored the hunger.

He was asleep again when his own name, coming from the loudspeaker, woke him. "S.T.A.R. Dustin," the voice was chanting. "Report to office seventeen."

The office he entered was tiny and bare except for a desk and two plastic puff chairs. Behind the desk sat a heavy man, erect even in the sagging softness of the pneu-mochair. His face held a hauteur that spoke of authority. He was cloaked, but the hood was back. Stan was relieved. At least his own cloak—he had thought of discarding it but had lacked the courage—wouldn't be held against him.

Tm Stan Dustin," he introduced himself.

The man looked him over carefully. "I gather you want to work your way to the Belt?"

Stan nodded and remained silent, standing.

"Sit down, sit down." The man gestured to the chair by the desk. "I'd have recognized you even if your identity hadn't been checked quite thoroughly," he said. "You resemble your late uncle Trevor Dustin quite remarkably." Stan started but remained silent. T gather your decision to go to the Belt is irrevocable? Have you notified your parent?"

1 haven't notified anyone," Stan said, his heart sinking.

"I rather thought I'd let my father know after I was gone. I hope it won't be necessaiy to your hiring—"

"Probably wise from your point of view," the man interrupted. "I assume that any sane family would discourage you."

"I hope that it's not to discourage you, sir, from—" The man looked at him quizzically. "It is not my business to be encouraged or discouraged," he said. "I have the quite dubious honor of representing your late uncle. Did you think I was a hiring hand?" Stan nodded, crestfallen.

The lawyer shook his head in annoyance. "A lack of perception that will not get you far," he said cruelly. "However, that is not my purview. Young man, your uncle left instructions that if you decided, quite on your own, to go to the Belt, and initiated action in that direction, I was to see to it that you got there. So I've taken passage for you on a Mars freighter that raises within the hour. Naturally, you can't go to the Belt directly, relations being what they are, but Mars is a free port. At Mars you will transfer to a Belt freighter. I have the passages here."

Stan found that he was both pleased and disappointed. Why disappointed? he asked himself. Was he trying to prove something?

The lawyer looked at him distastefully, as though he could read the other's thoughts. "Perhaps you could sign on as a member of a ship's crew. Probably not. But most certainly the technicalities of signing on would alert your family and any others that might be interested in delaying or preventing you. Which is why," he went on dryly, "I have seen fit to drop everything, charter a space taxi, and get here, preferably before you kft Orbdock, for the privilege of seeing you off at the earliest possible moment and before you involved yourself in some mess from which I must extract you. However I may feel personally, I am professionally charged with getting you to your destination, and I should prefer that the charge did not involve us together in legal technicalities that might associate our names for years."

Stan said stiffly, "I did not mean to seem ungrateful, sir. I-"

"But you wanted to run away on your own? Well, it's a fine fat attitude with little that is practical to recommend it. However," he went on before Stan could interrupt, "I am quite sure that I am not doing you a favor in assisting you in getting to the Belt.

"You will have to leave your Earth credit balance as it stands. If you draw it down to zero, or even draw heavily on it while at Orbdock, the computers will automatically be alerted and start an investigation, which will delay you. When you get to the Belt you will find that Belters are an intolerant breed, not given to lightly accepting gifts, such as yourself, from Mother Earth. Neither is Earth apt to accept you back lightly, should you fail in the Belt. You will be very much on your own. Do you still wish to go?"

"I'll take my chances," said Stan defiantly.

The lawyer harrumped. "Well, traitor's blood is traitor's blood, and you are like your uncle in looks as well as actions."

Stan flushed and started to speak angrily, but the lawyer gestured him silent. "This business is as unpleasant for me as for you. Let us get it over and done with. There is also a bequest here for a thousand shares in a small Belt enterprise which your uncle founded. Whether it still exists, I do not know, but I do not think you should build any hopes on it. Your uncle's death left the corporation in the hands of two partners who may or may not be surviving themselves; and it is an enterprise which may or may not have survived. The shares are yours, for what they may be worth. The corporation is called Astro Technology."

Having finished his business, the lawyer abruptly hooded himself and left the room without a farewell.

Stan stood gazing at the passage vouchers and the shares of stock lying on the small desk. Then he pulled his travel-case from the greatpocket of his cloak and stuffed the papers inside, zippering it carfully.

It was as he started to put the case back into the great-pocket that the realization came.

The Belt, he thought. Tm going to he a Belter now.

A grin came over his face; his chin lifted; and with a huge shrug he dropped the cloak from his shoulders, letting it fall to the floor; stepping over it as he walked out of the office.

IV

STAN REACHED Orbdock, Mars, still preoccupied with his own chaotic emotions and the changing vectors of a lifetime of habitual thinking and reaction. The change had been accelerated and made easier by the fact of being in space, and by the new sensations and information that his senses were absorbing; but his real attention had been on finding out just what his own basic precepts were, or could be; and the experience and the information flowed by, almost unnoticed to his preoccupations.

Spincenter at the Mars Orbdock was small compared to Earth's, the doughnut a mere two hundred feet in diameter, the gravity at the rim only .15 G; but Stan, who'd been in a tenth G acceleration all the way, was used to it by now and stepped confidently from the pneumocar when they reached the rim.

It was more barren here than on Earth, although the walls were clear plastic and showed the same aquarium beyond.

Beyond the usual restaurant he could see what must be the information center sloping sharply up from him, a big board on its wall with changing names and numbers on it. He turned in that direction to see a man coming toward him in red skintights with matching red lad slippers; his waist was belted in gold worked in the pattern of a snake.

The outfit fascinated Stan, and he found his eyes returning again to the figure as he made his way toward the big board in the distance. To his surprise, the man was approaching him.

"You Dustin?"

He was larger than Stan, blond, and apparently of about the same are. Perhaps a little older. Heavy in the shoulders, slender of waist, and lithe in his movements as he approached. His face looked puzzled.

"Yes, but how did you know?"

"Well, your ship's in, and I've been waiting for you. You're not Mars-clad, but you're not Earth-clad either. It was a guess. I understand you were from Earth?"

Stan felt minutely proud of his gold-tinged gray tunic and trousers, which were more in the nature of the red-suited man's clothing than either Earth or Mars style.

"I'm Dustin," he reaffirmed. "Stan Dustin."

"I'm Paulsen. Skipper of the Sassy Lassie. I reckon you're my passenger for Belt City. I've been waiting for you, ready to scat, for the past three hours. You ready? That all your duffel?" He nodded at the travelcase Stan was carrying.

"That's all of it," Stan answered.

"If you have a yen to look over Marsport, you'll have to catch the next freighter. The Marjorie is due in a couple of days. You want to wait for her and see the sights?"

Stan grinned. There was an air of defiance in Paulsen's attitude. Or perhaps intolerance? Whatever it was, he was obviously prepared to shake Stan at the slightest excuse.

"I'm ready," he said quietly.

"Okay. I'm tied up "at Tube 109."

Paulsen turned and strode swiftly to the pneumocar that Stan had just left. Stan entered in time to see him punch out a destination on the controls, and the car started accelerating up through the doughnut, through its spoke to the hub, then angling off on an increasing acceleration toward the tip of the tube where Paulsen's ship would be anchored, some six miles away. Deceleration caueht him unexpectedly, and he found himself swaying forward in his seat.

The pneumocar stopped, and Stan was floating in null G. Grasping the seat ahead of him he pulled himself behind Paulsen to the opening of the car which was locked onto the Sassy Lassie's air lock.

He saw Paulsen pause a second, then push himself through the opening, and as the skipper moved from before him, he could see two extra figures in the air lock, each hand-held into place from one of the straps on the cylindrical walls. Stan pushed himself in, carrying his travelcase, to join them.

The situation seemed eerie and unreal to senses schooled to gravity; but the two grim-faced men in the lock with them were veiy real indeed.

"This Dustin?" one of the two asked Paulsen.

"Yep."

"You just Rst a passenger. He's wanted on Earth."

Finding a handhold, Stan held himself immobile, watching Paulsen, v/ho glanced at him briefly, glanced at his belt, then turned back to the other two.

"Charges serious?" Paulsen asked.

"How should I know? Some school on Earth sent orders."

"School? Dnstin, what's the problem?"

Stan found himself answering in normal, unhurried tones: "I guess the school I left doesn't like the idea that I prefer the Belt," he said quietly.

"Still want to go?"

"Yes."

Paulsen turned his head again to the other two and his voice was grim. "You interfering with a Belter in the normal pursuit of his business?" he asked.

"Dustin's no Belter."

"He's my passenger."

Stan grinned to himself. Then, releasing his travelcase, which continued to float inconspicuously at his side, he said pleasantly, "I sure wouldn't want to cause you unnecessary trouble. Skipper. Come on, boys." And with that he pushed back through the entrance to the pneumocar.

Just inside, ho held himself out of the way so that the two following him could reach the control panel. Then, turning his head, he noticed the travelcase still floating in the air lock.

"Oh. Mv duffel," he said happily, and pushed himself into the air lock again, angling his motion toward a large red handle marked EMERGENCY PRESSURE RELEASE.

His fingers grasped the handle before anyone could react, and he used it as a lever to set his feet against the side of the lock and pull against his own leverage.

Abruptly the air spilled from the lock, and with a thwummp, the tube bulkhead closed. Stan, timing the lowering of pressure by a feeling of internal expansion, had just released the handle when Paulsen reached him.

"Get your hands off that dump switch. You'll have us in vacuum," he said with a snarl.

Stan pushed away to the bulkhead handle, tested it. It refused to budge.

"But they're on the other side and the pressure's triple out there."

Paulsen looked at him in complete disbelief, then a smile crept over his face. "Well, there's not enough pressure in here for comfort very long," he said, and began cycling them through into the ship proper.

The trip to Mars hadn't prepared Stan for the control cabin of the Sassy Lassie. It was clean, but it had a used and battered look. It had been repaired and re-repaired, and it very definitely had the feel of being lived in. There were two decks for living quarters beneath this cabin before you got to the ion-drive tube, Stan realized; but it was normally a one-man ship and the skipper probably spent most of his time up here.

The freight doughnut around the ship below was useless to them except in spacesuits. It was vacuum and unshielded; so that this thirty-five foot tall, approximately twenty foot wide extension of the rocket tube was the "ship" as far as people were concerned; and of that space, the hull shielding left only a cylinder twenty-three feet tall and with an eight foot radius for living quarters.

Stan pulled himself over to the acceleration chair beside the pilot's without waiting to be told, and strapped himself in. Paulsen was already busy releasing the ship from the docking tube so that it would drift off, "Before we get boarders," he said lightly.

"Thanks for the backing, Skipper," Stan said carefully in reply.

Paulsen answered, "Your air dump used up a lot of air. Since we don't want to stop for it here, I'm traveling at low pressure, just to be on the safe side of our emergency supplies."

There was silence then as Paulsen warmed the motors, nursed small pulsed thrusts to give them distance, and finally cut in power to the drive to give them the normal one-tenth G acceleration. Then he pulled the log toward him and began to write.

Stan let his eyes wander around the control cabin, and a sense of familiarity tugged at him. His interest was so intense, though, that it triggered the study habits he'd lived by for so many years, rather than the quiz habits; and the more he concentrated the more the familiarity faded, to be replaced by a need to leam, to discover each dial individually, each effect of the ship's motion as a separate effect.

With a start he recognized the symptoms and forced himself to relax, to let his eyes wander over the dials without any conscious attempt to interpret them, to let his senses absorb the small cabin and its smells and feels and informations.

This was a Kinco Sixty freighter, better known as a K-class, its capacity about half that of the big Earth-Mars freighters. It wasn't a question. It was a fact that he knew.

The circular wall of the tiny control cabin was a checkerboard of insulation squares, except that most of them were covered by instruments. These ships didn't spin to give their crews gravity; thrust was the only gravity they offered. So the river system of hull-shielding which gave Earth ships their spin-gravity could be replaced by com-compartmentalized shielding in hull sections. The squares would give individual access to the many sections of shielding behind.

The air lock was directly behind Stan and Paulsen as they sat in the acceleration chair-couches that could be lowered nearly to the horizontal for high-G thrust. Between the couches and the air lock was the tiny well that gave access to the decks below; and in a small opening built into the wall above the air lock bulkhead was the emergency medical kit.

The instruments before them were plainly visible from both seats, and the controls were double so that either he or Paulsen could maneuver the ship. Their tenth-G acceleration would continue for half the trip, and would build them to tremendous velocities on an exponential curve; then they'd start decelerating for the second half of the trip, to come into relative morion with the asteroid that was known as Belt City.

Paulsen con'd, of course, accelerate the doughnut into a Hohmann orbit, then drop it and take them at higher accelerations and decelerations to their destination; but since he was shepherding this load and would probably pick it up himself, the chances were he wouldn't bother. But he could. And that brought up the possibility—the probability—that the Sassy Lassie had been one of the ships of the Belt Uprising. Had Paulsen . . .

Excitedly Stan turned to the skipper, but his thoughts were cut off by a thunderclap which hammered his body. Instantly the explosion was followed by a high-pitched whining scream that echoed on each nerve, and the internal feeling of bursting that meant rapidly falling atmospheric pressure. Instinctively he opened his mouth and yelled, expelling the pressure from his lungs.

Paulsen's hps were moving, his fingers reaching out to a control—the control that would cut the motors, Stan realized, even as he released the straps and pushed his own body out of the deep seat beneath it, twisting with the push to bring his hands into line with the small opening in the wall above and behind their seats. His fingers found the opening and began groping, since his eyes refused to focus. The scream was fading, then cut off abruptly just as his fingers found the syrettes they were seeking, grasped two, and reached one toward Paulsen.

The skipper was almost beside him, a hazy figure, and Stan groped for his hand, forcing one of the syrettes into it.

Now Stan brought the remaining syrette to his leg with a slap that forced the needle in and injected its contents into his system. Pulling the syrette carefully out, he pinned it to his tunic, his eyes now barely making out the most gross objects in the cabin swinging lazily about him as he spun slowly in free fall.

The dioxo solution from the syrette spread a warm glow through him. Stan opened his mouth wide and expelled the last of the air that was doing its best to strain out of his lungs. The pressure in his ears let go with a loud pop. The cloudy look of things before him and the burning sensation in his eyes caused him to squeeze his eyes tight shut, and as he did so, pain shot through them, tiny crystals of ice grating across the tender surfaces; and as this was followed by a sensation of cold, he realized that the boiling tears would freeze in the vacuum around him and freeze the lids shut.

Something grasped him, and he struggled momentarily, then realized it was Paulsen and slacked off. There was a feeling as though someone was trying to stuff him into a bag, but no sound.

Then he felt drawstrings pull tight at the shoulders and across his chest, and suddenly there was pressure around his face again. The bag was then slid quickly down over

Stan's arms and tied at each joint; then down over the torso with a repeated lacing. Blinded by the tears, he opened his eyes nevertheless to see clear plastic standing only inches ahead; and, as he began to breathe again, Paulsen's voice came to him over a tiny speaker somewhere in the hood.

"That's right, Dustin. Work your jaws and the swallowing mechanisms. Keep blinking your eyes."

As Stan became more aware of his surroundings, he saw that he was in a loosely fitting plastic bag, tightly belted at each joint.

The tingly sensation in his throat came to his attention, and he realized that the "air" he was breathing was not air but carbon dioxide quickly developed from a small plastic pack of acid and soda. It was a device that could not have been used except for the diox which would supply his oxygen requirements for the next hour.

The pressures removed, Stan found a handhold and turned himself toward the control panel.

Paulsen was in his seat now, checking the space around the ship for enemy craft—and the guy wasn't in a spacesuit. Unbelieving, Stan stared. Paulsen had on a hood, but just that, over his regular red pilot's suit. But of course. That pilot's suit was a gas-proof spacesuit; and the hood that had obviously been unzipped from a pocket at the back of the pilot's suit collar had a similar pressure gas generator packet.

Stan sighed his relief, then let his attention wander to the deep hole in the checkerboard wall centered above the control paneL

The hole was a full two-foot square that had blown through to the outside hull and was now crushed there, a mess of metal and foam plastic insulation, at the bottom of what seemed to be a square tunnel into the hull structure. The water shielding from the compartment had obviously been blown on through into space, followed by the air from the control cabin; but the hole through which they had blown could not be seen past the mess of metal and plastic.

Paulsen was through with his check now, and his face looked puzzled, but he only said, "I'm going to put us under drive to get gravity, then well see what the damage is."

The return of even the light tenth-G gravity was grateful to Stan's senses, and the cabin reoriented quickly a-round him.

"If we can work fast," Paulsen's voice came to him abruptly over the tiny intercom, "we can save having to pressurize the bunk area to get you into a tightsuit. I've got plug-in compartments aboard, of course, so it shouldn't take more than half an hour to clear up this mess. Do you think you can take the bag for that long?"

Experimentally, Stan flexed his arm and found that it responded stiffly. The veins that had been standing out like cords against the taut skin were beginning to recede. The rapid breath induced by the one hundred percent carbon dioxide atmosphere was exchanging nitrogen out of the blood at a rapid rate, and pressure was equalizing between himself and the suit.

"Seems okay," he said. "A little stiff and a few cramps, but yeah, I can work like my life depended on it."

Paulsen chuckled, then without another word crawled into the tight tunnel.

It was several minutes, while his squirming legs were the only indication of motion within, before his voice reached Stan again.

"I think I've got it more or less in one piece. Pull me out, but slow and easy."

Stan took h~ld of the ankles, braced himself against the pilot's seat, and started the slow tug, following instructions as he pulled, unable to tell what was going on.

"Harder. Oops. Hold it. All right, pull. Damn it, lost it. Push me back an inch. Not more than an inch."

It only took about ten minutes, but they seemed long. Finally, shoulders past the edge now, Paulsen pulled his head out. "You can hook on and get it the rest of the way," he said. "My muscles are cramping."

Stan reached his arms, head and shoulders in, and felt around until he got the positioning of the package of crushed metal and foam plastic, found jagged handholds, and began to inch the mess out. Then, with a jerk, the wreckage let go its final hold and dropped him, jagged package in his lap, into the pilot's seat. He sat there a minute, panting, then looked around.

He was alone in the cabin.

For a minute he stared in panic around the small room, then the skipper's voice came to him: "You all right?"

"The wreckage fell and sat me down in the pilot's chair," Stan said.

"Don't touch anything," was the only answer.

Stan was suddenly amused. "Don't touch anything," the man says. I whop back into the pilot's seat, carrying a package that spills onto anything and everything around, that would have knocked anything fragile in spite of me, and he says don't touch anything.

Before he could do much cautious maneuvering there was a thump as something was levered up from the cabin below; and the skipper's voice said, "Wait" A minute later Paulsen was at his side, carefully lifting the wreckage from his lap.

"Stay right there. Ill be back," he said, taking the wreckage into the freightnut access lock.

Stan relaxed, content to be the inept passenger for whom the skipper must care. Twisting his head he could see the plug-in unit Paulsen had brought—a ten-foot plastic bag filled with water and what looked like white noodles.

He turned back to the square tunnel before him. By craning his neck he could see down the six-foot tunnel to the hull at its far end, and he easily located the hole by which the water and air had escaped—a circular hole, about two inches across and bulging smoothly outward.

Paulsen had patching material in his hand when he returned and, Stan estimated, they had about ten minutes left to do a patching job. Without pausing, Paulsen wriggled into the tunnel and was busy for several minutes. When he had wriggled back out, he reached for the plug-in unit, and with Stan's help fitted it slowly into its niche. When the tip of the ten-foot bag reached the hull, they applied pressure, squashing it slowly to fit its compartment. Then, while Stan held the square of inner hull and cabin insulation in place against the water pressure, Paulsen snapped its bolts into place, and the section was sound again.

They still had time to spare as the skipper fed air back into the control cabin, though Stan could feel the slightest touches of cramp in his muscles.

"Even lighter pressure this time. We sure been getting rid of the air this trip," Paulsen said over his suit speaker before shucking the hood.

"That hole didn't look like an accidental rock coming in to me, Skipper," Stan said cautiously, removing his own emergency suit. "It looked more like an internal explosion."

The other looked at him queerly. "Yep. It sure wasn't any accident."

"But it was so easy to fix up! No real sweat. Why in hell would anyone bother?"

"That's what I was going to ask you," Paulsen told him tartly. "And since we're sharing this one together, maybe you'd better let me know at least how serious it's likely to get."

"But this is your ship. Somebody must have been after you"

"I thought of that. I thought maybe the Earthies had started sabotaging Belt ships at Mars. But anybody who set out for a systematic system of sabotage would have taken time to find out how Belt ships are built. It wouldn't have been a hasty, ineffective job like this one. Then I thought mavbe you were an Earthie spy, and somebody in the Belt was after you. But in that case, I'd have been in on it. So either of those is possibly the reason, but not probably."

Stan staved silent, and finally Paulsen went on, "On the face of it, I had a chance. Not much of one, but a chance. But you didn't.

"You're an Earthie. You're an Earthie passenger. You wouldn't have been expected to know about diox. Even if you knew ab^ut it, you wouldn't know where it would be found. Even if I'd been the one to get it and hand the syrette to you, you wouldn't know what to do with it without waiting for instructions, and that would have been too late.

"You're supposed to be dead, Earthie. Which tells me somebody wants you dead real bad. Which also tells me that I'm a sitting duck as long as I'm with you, and maybe you'd better give with a little info."

As Stan staved silent, the other shrugged, then started to pull the log toward him. His hand hesitated on the book itself, and slowly withdrew. Then he leaned back, clasping his hands behind his head.

"Look," he said conversationally, "I'm not a prier. And I'm not asking many questions. And who you are and what you are is not, essentially, my business. But when a High-G

Earthie—that means rich—is on my ship—and I risk the Sassy Lassie without knowing I was going to—by taking you aboard; and you hadn't warned me one word—and when you ignored my question . . . I'm not a prier," he added defiantly, "but by God—"

"You don't have to pry. I'll answer any questions you want to ask. I'm as puzzled as you are," Stan admitted. Then he asked, "But why shouldn't you pry? It's your ship, and-"

"I reckon," Paulsen said slowly, "that's another difference between Earthie and Belter. On Earth, everything about you is in the computers, and anybody can find out anything they want to, like what you spent and where you spent it, and probably if they're interested, why.

"But in the Belt, the only think anybody else needs to know about you, unless you want to tell 'em, is what job you're doing—which they can tell by the color of your suit; or what kind of training you have—which they can tell from your belt. Those are useful bits of information for you to have other people know. If you don't want 'em known, you change to a plain suit and a plain belt. Inside your belt is your credit rating, which automatically changes as you spend or get credited—but that's private information unless you want to display it; and though it goes through the computer nobody else can get at your credit rating in the computer but you.

"So a man's not subject to interrogation by computer or by anybody else, unless he wants to be. And it's . . . well, you just don't pry into a man's business. It's his business. If it affects you, you stay with him or you leave; but you don't pry."

"Well," said Stan. There was a lifetime of training behind that "well." It was a lifetime habit that anybody could know anything about you at any time, except for the privacy cloak and the immediate moment, and it took time to digest the fact of his obvious freedom from that sort of— yes, prying. Then:

"Would it be prying to ask why you took on the Mars guys when they wanted to arrest me?"

Paulsen leaned back his head and laughed, a loud, long, tension-relieving laugh, and Stan found himself smiling in return.

"You can ask, but I don't think I rightly know the answer to that one," he said at last. "I wasn't looking forward to an Earthie passenger, but—well, you got off the ship without a damned privacy cloak. And then there was the belt. Out here a gold belt means AT training; and the level of training is indicated by the workings of the belt. I didn't think your belt meant anything but it . . . well, it might. Then you walked straight, and you talked straight. You didn't sort of slink, like most Earthies. And anyhow," he added defensively, "Marsers and Earthies just aren't allowed to interfere with a Belter. We don't let 'em."

Stan thought a minute before answering. Then: "I don't know why anyone would be after me," he said slowly. "I was as surprised as you were—probably more so—that those guys had a warrant for me from the school. I'm supposed to be home for a two-week leave; and I'm supposed to report back to the school. But it's just a school," he added, and knew himself instantly for a liar. He'd always thought of it as just a school, until the day he'd left. But that wasn't something you could explain, even if you wanted to.

"I'd say," Paulsen was speaking in a slow drawl now, "that, if it's the school, they want you back, dead or alive."

"Yeah," said Stan. "It—well, it just cant be the school. But it can't be anyone else, either."

"You said I could ask anything I liked. Okay. It may be important. Damned well could be important to you; and it is to me as long as you're aboard. So I ask: What are you doing out here anyhow?"

"I guess I'm running away from the school. They were training me, I just found out, for the military. I didn't like the idea."

"Oh? So you just up and ran away? You must be really High-G to afford it."

Stan grinned. "I only had enough to get to Earth Orb-dock. I was tiying to find a job on a ship, when a guy came and said he was my Uncle Trevor's lawyer, and that I'd been left some stock—a thousand shares—in something called Astro Technology. He also left me passage fare out, so . . ."

At the look on the other's face, his voice ran down. What could he have said to cause a reaction like that?

V

THE SILENCE went on and on; and Stan waited. Finally Paulsen spoke:

"Your name's Dustin," he said. It wasn't a question. "And your uncle was Trevor Dustin." He looked over at Stan in awe. "Do you have any idea who Trevor Dustin was?"

"He ... he was nicknamed Trail Blazer Dustin. I've

been told," Stan said, "he was killed in the Belter Upris-

ing------ "

"He was the biggest hero of the Belter War of Independence," said Paulsen reprovingly. "He was the guy who—well, he was Mr. Belt. He was the guy who invented ship-guerrilla; who invented ship-freeze. He had us paint our hulls black to radiate the heat out and freeze the hull shielding water so we didn't blow open when a laser beam bit into the hull. He was the one who invented putting soft plastic noodles into the shielding water to absorb freezing expansion and to take up the hydrostatic shock from those laser hits.

"He was the one who taught us to sting the Earthies with our tails, since we didn't have the fire power to hurt them. .. . You're Trail Blazers nephew?"

Stan nodded dumbly, his mind racing.

Paulsen was continuing slowly. "And you've got Trail Blazer's shares in AT?" At Stan's nod, he went on: "One of his partners is dead; the other's sort of in retirement AT's in the hands of—well, they're different now. Powerful and power-hungry. They're taking over an awful lot of the policy-making out here. AT's different than it used to be but . . . but look. This belt." He thumbed at the gold belt he wore. "It means I've been trained by AT; it's the most valuable possession I own.

"The school's been going down since the partner that ran it went into retirement, almost four years ago; but

the belt that says you're AT-trained will give you top priority on any job they say you've been trained for. It's going downhill, but it's still better than the best."

He looked at Stan again. "If you've got a thousand shares of AT stock, I don't have to ask who's trying to kill you. Nor whether it's serious, either. I think the AT partner who died—not your uncle; the one who died shortly afterward—well, the scuttlebutt is that he was murdered to get him out of the way of the guys who took over at AT. It's been hushed, but he probably was."

"So what do I do now?"

"Damned if I know. But you're fast on your feet and you've got an amazing amount of knowhow, even if there are some pretty astounding gaps in it that take a guy unexpected. I think I'm on your side, at least for this part of the action. I haven't liked the way the school's been going recently—the kind of kid they've been turning out. Seemed more like zombies than AT-trained experts. I don't know much about the rest of AT enterprises, except they're rooting for war with Earth, which doesn't make sense to me. And maybe if you've got enough Dustin blood in you, you'd be better than what's there now. I damned well better be on your side, at that, if I want to keep my hide; 'cause somebody sure doesn't want you around. So I reckon we better figure how to keep you and me both alive until you can do something with those shares."

"But we're on a ship that they know I'm on, which puts your ship at hazard. And—"

"First thing we do is see if there's a beacon on this crate. Then, when we get de-bugged, if we're bugged, we put the doughnut on a homing course ..."

"Does that mean a Hohmann orbit? It sounds as though it should."

Paulsen laughed. "Right. We put it on a Hohmann orbit for Belt City. Then we turn on its beacon and let it coast on in, while we cut loose and get there a bit before they expect you. Or you want to change course for AT's own asteroid? It's about two weeks away."

"I think Belt City. It might be a good idea to find out—" "Well, at any rate, we'll land there at an unexpectedly early time. You're probably right. ATs a small pebble; you'd be conspicuous. At Belt City, with about six million people around, we can get a little lost. We'll land at a docker I

don't normally use. And once we're docked, well skip into the tunnels so fast they won't know where we got to. What do you want to do once you get there?"

"Why ... I was going to look for a job."

Paulsen looked at him in disbelief, then threw back his head and guffawed. Then, "With a thousand shares of AT in his clip, the guy wants to go out and look for a jobl Well, well." More soberly he asked, "Do you realize that with those shares you could practically buy the Belt? A fair slice of it, anyhow."

Stan's thoughts were chaotic as he began to grasp the implications of what the other had been saying. Finally, "Well, maybe it's . . . What would you do?"

"Actually, I don't know just what I would do."

The two sat silent for a minute. Then Stan said, "Maybe I should get a job until I find and speak to somebody that my uncle trusted."

"I know who the retired partner is that ran the school. I think he's even at Belt City. You oughta be able to trust him, I'd think. Lang. Dr. Katsu Lang."

Belt City had originally been a chunk of nickel steel approximately twenty-five miles in diameter. In terms of planets, this was practically microscopic; but in terms of the size of particles in the Belt, it was relatively large.

At first it had served as a base for small technological operations, mainly because of its mass. Later it had served those who were interested in the mass itself, and the nickel steel had been carved off in chunks and pieces and carted away; while other chunks and pieces of it had been drilled and bored on the spot to fashion crude reaction vessels for this or that in the line of chemistry.

It was then that Alfibe had taken over; the Alfibe Corporation was using the vacuum of space to make boron into microscopically thin fibers of tensile strengths far higher than any of the metallic alloys. Boron fiber was not new; it was just that space vacuum made it newly inexpensive to manufacture. On Earth, mass production had brought the costs down from seven hundred credits a pound to seventy credits a pound. Here the fibers could be made for seven microcredits a pound—and a pound was a lot of fiber.

The boron fiber was a major trade item with Earth; but for use in the Belt it was combined with aluminum from asteroids that were towed in for mining, to create a metal of tensile strengths fourteen times stronger than steel, pound for pound—and a pound went a lot further.

So Belt City grew. Port facilities that had been built for the boron fiber trade were enlarged for Belt trade in Alfibe; were enlarged again as corporations were formed to build Alfibe ships for the Belt.

Where port facilities are available, every form of manufacture for trade will move in. It wasn't long before the surface of the planetoid, as well as its mined caverns, were crowded.

That was when the Belt City Corporation was formed, its board of directors made up of the heads of the corporations that supported and were supported by the planetoid; its major duty was overseeing the G-swing and the balance of industry—in this instance, the weight balance of industry.

The terms "gravity" and "G's" were commonly used, but the weight effect was by centrifugal force, and the G-swing necessary to keep that force evenly applied was constantly being upset by new heavy industry moving in, by new construction that failed to take into account the balance and counterbalance necessary to prevent wobbles. The wobbles were not only upsetting to the manufacture going on, but had proved several times nearly disastrous to the vast hydroponic farms and the "ranches" where meat was grown in vats, the necessary core factors to any Belt habitation; and the swing-weight of the city was shown to be too critical a survival factor to be left longer at hazard to unplanned activity.

The first and gigantically expensive but necessary act of the BC Corp. was the construction of an even flooring over the entire scalloped-looking built-up portion of the planetoid, a section around the equator that extended roughly thirty degrees to the north and south. It was flooring, not ceiling, since centrifugal force applies outward, and the floors of the existing structures were toward space, the ceilings toward the planetoid core.

The second and concomitant—and quite as necessary—act was the contraction of hull-style river systems immediately over the new floor. The rivers were for inertia] control of rotation with huge tanks to provide for balance and counterbalance; they also served as the medium for growth of sea life and plankton as an additional source of food, and as a far superior method to the simple hydroponics one for recycling air and waste products.

That was the start of the planned growth of Belt City; and because of the planning it was now possible to really grow. New overall floors were needed and constructed almost immediately, always as a unit, surfaced with built-in rivers. Transportation systems for freight and people intertwined through the growing structures in an orderly and efficient manner. The internal ecology was protected from sabotage by unthinking corporate or individual action.

And always, as the city grew, the growing hydroponics farms moved outward to the rim where the plants could take full advantage of the highest accelerative stress. There were plants that would grow with practically no gravity; there were others that wouldn't grow without at least three-quarters G; but almost all grew best where the gravity was most nearly Earth-like. So the G-swing was set to maintain a full gravity at the rim, leaving the lower areas to their proportionate heights; and the plants that were the city's sustenance were given top priority on that best-growth potential section. People-comfort was never more than a secondary consideration, though the schools were kept on the rim, which gave the children a full G during part of the day; and enough credits could buy you space between the farms.

Now Belt City hung in space, a wedge-shaped wheel around the central nickel-steel core that was itself cav-emed and structured for man's use. The floors that made its rim extended now more than twelve miles out from the original surface; and where the original sixty degrees at the equator had given the first flooring a width of twelve miles equal to its radius, the outside rim was now nearer twenty-four miles across.

From the north and south poles of the planetoid, taking advantage of the null-G at these axes, the long strands of docking and transportation tubes of a space-dock complex were strung out. The tubes extended a good thirty miles beyond the non-rotating caps by which they were attached to the rotating asteroids; and each ship that docked was tethered and serviced by several of the tubes.

Fan-powered strut-cars traveled the tubes from ship to planetoid-cap, then dived across to c»mplimentary tubes in the rotating structure of the planetoid itself.

There were parts of Belt City that gave the impression of being crowded; and there were places where people were likely to be only once a year, or perhaps even less; other places people, went only to work. All of the areas were served with air and heat and power and freight and transportation by the tubes and their strut-cars that efficiently serviced the entirety of the inside-out asteroid that was Belt City.

"The docking tubes look like a man-of-war's tendrils, with the ships its prey," Stan said softly, watching the planetoid enlarge on the Sassy Lassie's viewscreen. "Or like a net for invaders."

Paulsen looked at him in surprise. "I reckon they do look a bit like that," he said finally in satisfaction. "The docking tubes are the green ones. The passenger tubes are yellow. The freight tubes are the red ones. And the orange ones are the smaller tubes in which liquids can be carried without being loaded into jungle-gyms."

"Jungle gyms?"

"Boy, as much as I've been educating you, there are still gaps!" Paulsen smiled ruefully. "Tubecars you use on Earth, because that's an induction-repulsion linear motor vacuum system. Pneumocars you have at Orbdocks, where the tubes are air-filled, and the cars can run on battery-powered fans. But pneumocars are built for comfort, and they're a luxury we haven't gotten around to out here. Here we have the air-filled tubes and the battery-powered fans, but the cars behind the fans are just . . . well, jungle-gym affairs that you can strap freight into or people can ride sitting on the bars. They have floors and skirts for use in C fields, but the rest is just a batch of struts. They're formally called strut-cars."

Expertly the skipper matched orbits with the asteroid, then maneuvered slowly until the Lassie hung at the tips of a ganglion of different colored tubes. He reached over and flipped a switch marked MAGNALOCK, activating powerful magnetic coils at various spots on the hull, and with a soft thump each of the green tubes reached out and sucked onto the coil-area that matched its code-pulse.

"We're docked," he said succinctly. "Now to air lock us into the passenger and freight systems."

While Paulsen worked over the controls, Stan watched on the screen as a great yellow tube bent slowly and unwillingly, stretched a bit, and then made contact with the magnetic coil around the air lock, its internal pressures resisting every motion but being slowly overcome by the magnetic attraction between its head and the coils. The action was repeated with one of the red tubes, which was made to seek its own type of pulse-code and fall into place over the access lock that would have led into the Lassie's missing freightnut

"Okay, bud," Paulsen said, unstrapping himself almost as the red tube thumped into place, "here's where we get lost. You think you can fly the tubes? Now that you can see how far out we are? Or had we better take a chance on the strut-cars? We could go freight. . . ."

"I can fly," said Stan shortly and unstrapped to push his way in the null G toward the freightlock where they'd already prepared their wings and fins.

He was wearing one of Paulsen's bright red pilot's suits now. "You better be in spacemen's outfit," Paulsen had said. "Wear mine until we can get you some of your own." "But they're pilot-red," Stan had objected, "and I'm not a pilot. How do I get to be one?" "By flying a ship," said Paulsen. "Here, fly this one and do me a few navigation problems." It had been as simple as that. Once he had proved to a competent pilot his ability to fly and navigate a ship he was entitled to wear pilot-red. His gold belt, though, was his own.

The wing and tail outfits they would wear, flying the tubes, had been blown up in advance, and Stan had practiced getting into them, had been instructed carefully in their use. They hung now in the air lock, ready: two stub-wings, scarcely longer than his arms and shaped somewhat like a bee's wings, and a seven-foot tail that would run from his waist to wellbelow his feet.

In the null G he had no trouble slipping his feet into the foot-grips about halfway down the length of the tail, belting it to him with the belt that went around his waist, then reaching down and pulling the wing-straps across his shoulders, slipping his hands into the handholds of the wings. Gently and experimentally he moved a wing, and found himself caroming into the air lock side.

"Save it for the tube," said Paulsen shortly, palming open the air lock bulkhead before slipping his hand into his own wing-grip.

Before them the tube stretched out, an eerily glowing red diminishing to a point in the far distance; infinitely long, infinitely fragile, seen from here. Stan made an involuntary motion and found himself flying into Paulsen, who swung out his arms in counteraction and was propelled out of the air lock into a long glide down the tube. But he kicked his feet up at the knees, and then snapped them down to come to rest spread-eagled across the three-yard diameter tube, wings and tail touching the sides.

"Watch out for those unintended movements," he called back. "Did you see the stop I made? Do you get the idea?"

"I think so. Every slightest movement sure counts."

"Yep. Tail motion is the most important part, though, remember. A gentle up-down swish of the tail with the arms held rigid will give you plenty of speed. The arms can propel too, if you're in a real burry. If you want to stop, just flip yourself over like I did, but don't forget to straighten out, or you'll keep right on tumbling. I'm going ahead. You come on along."

Widi that, Paulsen pulled his wings down toward his body, flipped them, straightened them out, and dove off down the tube, tail undulating in a smooth powerful stroke that had him diniinishing down the tube like a bird in flight.

Poised on the hp of the air lock, Stan tucked his head down to line it with the direction of flight and slipped his wings open. His head scraped the tunnel, slid along it. He kicked his tail, found himself twisting, and brought his wings into play again. He was moving rapidly, but his head was scraping first one side then the other.

In automatic reflex, he pulled up his feet The tail flipped over, flipping him end over end in a wall-to-wall passage down the tunnel. Frantically he pushed his feet out, pinioning his wings. His head buried itself deeply into the soft wall of the tube. He threw his arms and legs wide, and found himself stopped, spread-eagled across the tunnel.

Dizzy, he looked around. There was the tube, stretching away from him. His wings looked a bloody red in the eerie light. And Paulsen would be far ahead by now.

Carefully, he pulled in his wings, gave a light flutter to his tail. He was moving down the tube, but scraping from wall to wall. Experimentally he balanced his wings, flapped them gently. The motion, tried gently, centered him more or less in the tunnel, so long as the tail flapped evenly and slowly. The walls of the tube were moving past at a fair rate, and he was scraping them very little. He increased the motion of his tail. His speed increased violently—and his head rammed firmly into a hard surface.

Summoning every bit of presence of mind he possessed, he flipped his tail, then straightened it, threw out his wings, and landed spread across the tube—facing the closed bulkhead of the Sassy Lassie's air lock.

"Damn," he muttered, "ITl never get to Twelfth and Main this way."

Very cautiously now, Stan fanned himself around one wing, aimed himself down the tube and flapped his wings gently once. It worked. Slowly and smoothly he took off down the tunnel. With care he added a tail motion, but the two legs moved not quite in unison. His speed increased, but the slightly uneven motion added a vector of steering for which he had to compensate rapidly. He was caroming from side to side, but he found himself compensating with more and more efficiency.

His speed was remarkably high, he noted, as the walls of the tube seemed to wobble past his erratic motion; but he was tiring. It was hard work. He knew that once he got into a good, stable glide headed along the center, he could rest; inertia would keep him going. But he was still awkwardly wing-and-tail tipping the walls when he heard a shout in the distance.

"Halloo," he answered.

"Junction here. Can you follow me?" The voice was coming much louder now, and by craning his neck he could see the rapidlv ncaring figure spread across the tunneL

"Move or I'll run you down!" he shouted.

"Pull up your knees, then straighten out," was the reply, too near.

Stan pulled his knees up, then straightened them violently, and found his head thrust firmly into the plastic wall, while his tail scraped to a rest on the opposite wall.

"That's how vou stop." Paulsen's noncommital voice was only feet away. "You get started like this."

Paulsen drew his wings in across his chest, ducked his head and allowed the tail to give him a slight lack forward, snapped the wings open again and was off down the tunnel.

Stan started to try it, found himself confused, stopped. Suddenly he couldn't remember the first motion.

Abruptly he let go, relaxed, and let his arms and legs take over. With relief, he let natural motions replace the forced ones he'd been using; slow motions that didn't demand strength, only gentle undulations that took him faster and faster.

In the near distance he heard a call: "Right turn. Kick only your right leg when you get here." It was a Y-branch, and his turn was not smooth, but the compensations were coming naturally now.

Cautiously he craned his neck and sighted Paulsen not too far ahead. There were tiny lights further ahead, too, and Stan quit kicking, allowing himself to glide along at a speed he guessed to be in excess of fifty-five miles an hour.

"Stretch your legs apart and slow down."

He stretched his legs as far as he could force them, and was rewarded with a fluttering, vibrating sensation from the tail fin, and a simultaneous rapid slowing of his forward motion. The stiffening tube members in the tail had been pulled flat by his action, allowing the plastic between to wrinkle and flutter in an action that absorbed energy rapidly.

"Okay. Park. Or are you going to run me down?" came the call.

Stan kicked both legs up and back, and once more succeeded in ramming his head into the soft plastic wall, but this time he was going too fast The tail scraped the far wall and snapped open again beyond it, leaving him still sailing down the tunnel, but feet-first, a direction of travel for which the device hadn't been intended. The flexible wings bent and tried to wrap themselves around his arms, buffeting him madly first against one wall and then the other. The tail bent too, and forced his legs into a crouch position; and then—snap—he was headed down the tunnel head-first again, but with most of his momentum gone. Again he tried to brake, and this time was successful.

"Fanciest stop I've seen yet," Paulsen greeted him.

Stan was about to give a short reply when he looked beyond Paulsen to a large open chamber full of moving tubecars that looked like they'd been stripped for action. Freight was fastened haphazardly into the frameworks.

One of the strut-cars—an object sized to fit neady into the tubes, its three-yard fan covered with a mesh grille, its rear simply a tubular jungle-gym—was heading straight for their tube. The monster fan looked lethal for all its grille-mesh protective covering.

"Look outl" Stan yelled. "That freighter wants in. It's going to try to chase us back up the tube."

Paulsen turned in a leisurely fashion as the huge freighter came to a snarling halt about three yards outside the tube, and hung there buzzing at them like an angry, oversize bee.

"It can't come in while we're here."

"Oh . . . good. Hey, could we reprogram one of those to take us where we want to go?"

"Could. But it wouldn't be a good idea. The dispatcher would get hep to us. Those things have a tracer on them, in case they go wrong and somebody has to come out to correct them. It's easier to hitch a ride on one that's going our way. You think you can handle an open space like this? Fly it, I mean?"

"Should be easier than running into the walls of a tube all the time," Stan answered, "as long as you're sure one of those outsize bees out there won't try to eat me for a rose."

"You haven't got enough oil for that kind of bee to worry about." Paulsen dove gracefully from the tube and Stan followed. They'd barely cleared its mouth when the big strut-car, with a final angry buzz dove in and accelerated off in the direction from which they'd come.

The fact of flying this time seemed almost familiar; and to Stan's surprise he managed it with fair ease. Was this one of the familiarities of the molecular training? he wondered. Surely it hadn't been an intentional part—or just possibly it had.

Ahead of him, Paulsen had come to a hovering stop over one of the dark tunnel mouths that led into the city, identifiable only by its code name; he now settled gracefully onto the very hp of the tunnel and divested himself of his wings and tail. As he was deflating them Stan shucked his own wings and settled himself precariously; there wasn't enough G-pull to feel safe.

The cavern in which he sat was dim, lighted only by the reflected red light of the transparent tubes through which they had come, and by the faint glow of the signal lamps lighting the various tunnel entrances on all sides of him, up and down.

It's unsettling, he thought. You have to become accustomed to thinking in odd directions.

The strut-car traffic above him and to his side seemed to be sorting itself out in a haphazard manner, each vehicle searching slowly for the pattern of lights that would satisfy its own equations, then diving into the tunnel that matched its code. The freighters were large and awkward in this space, moving very slowly; and since it would be quite impossible for any one of them to pass another freighter in a tunnel, one of the code signals must indicate, Stan decided, whether the tunnel was occupied or not

Following Paulsen's lead, Stan folded his deflated wings and tail assembly into a small packet that fitted into a pocket, and fastened it to his belt

"Why don't we just fly on in?" he asked.

"Ever try flying in a G-field?"

"Well, no. I guess it can't be done. Leonardo da Vinci even failed at that, didn't he?"

"Oh, it has been done. On Mars. Even on Earth. But you need bigger wings and a lot more room to maneuver in. These wings wouldn't hold us up in a tenth of a G. Right here"—Paulsen patted the floor on which he was sitting and almost dislodged himself—"we've got less than a thousandth of a G. But it picks up as you go down—or rather, across. And from here on we get heavier. I think that's our ride coming now," he added.

Stan looked up at an angry buzzing overhead to see a freighter hovering there, waiting for them to get out of its way.

"This part is tricky. We have to stay in its way until we get in position to jump after it right after it goes by. But don't grab any struts that might pinch you into the wall. These walls aren't plastic. Incidentally, this thing has no sensor circuits on its backside."

Carefully Stan worked his way back in the very light gravity field to just beyond the edge of the tunnel. Paulsen was doing likewise, holding only one hand in front of the big buzzing freighter to bar its passage.

"Let it go all the way in—itll be downward from here— then fall in after it. We'll catch up quick enough." Paulsen pulled his hand out of the way and with a snort of fans the freighter surged forward and dived into the hole. As soon as it had cleared the mouth, Paulsen slipped in behind it feet first, and Stan followed.

Sliding out over the emptiness was like sliding into a soft pillow. He was moving downward, but slowly.

It was pitch dark in the tunnel, and for a minute Stan wished that the Belt City Corp. had used the translucent plastic tunnels on the surface, at least until the tubes reached the built-up areas and went inside. Then his eyes began to adjust, and he could see the faint emergency glow from his buttons—the spacemen's last protection against utter darkness in enclosed spaces.

He looked down and could see tiny glows that meant that Paulsen was there ahead of him in the pitch black; and beyond Paulsen—near or far, he couldn't tell—the code lights of the freighter. If the freighter had accelerated, as it was quite capable of doing, it would be far ahead of them. Could they catch up? But it would be moving at a steady pace, possibly fairly slowly, and they were accelerating.

By the faint illumination from his buttons he could see the wall of the tube moving gently toward him, and he reached out and pushed himself away. By the feel, he was moving fairly rapidly now. The next time, it was his back that was scraping the tunnel wall, and as he pushed away again, to fall free, he found his speed quite impressive.

"Look out Don't land on me."

Stan looked quickly down. The glows that were Paulsen were moving beneath the code lights on the back of the freighter, and those lights were rising beneath his feet Slowly at first then faster; and the illumination they provided gave him a true sense of falling for the first time. Then he was down and onto a package of freight at the back of the strut-car.

"From here on in things get heavier," Paulsen said. "We're still on the surface, but we're coming away from the axis into the gravity areas. It's about a half-G at the surface at the equator. Then the car will dive on out to whatever level it's dialed to. Well change to a car for the area we want when we hit the equator shift-space.

"Find a comfortable seat on this side," he went on. "The tubes tilt gradually, so the side of the freighter that drags is the side that has the ground-effect air support; and that's the side that will be dragged by gravity to the bottom when the tube flattens out into a cross-G slant. These cars are designed to go almost anywhere—up, down or across G. They stay in the tubes mostly, but they can go out of the tubes for unloading, in half-barrel shaped runs."

Just when the freighter shifted from fighting the force that caused it to cling to one wall of the long down-tube, to the fight against the centrifugal force that substituted for gravity here in Belt City, would have been hard for Stan to say; but now it seemed to be gliding down a less and less steep slope, and slowing as it came to a shift-space between tunnels. This shift-space was different, Stan realized. It was dimlv lighted, and there was a definite gravity. The cars hugged the floor. They criss-crossed their way about the low-ceilinged cavern, searching out new codes, but always gliding only a few inches from the floor.

Paulsen was examining a card attached to a package beside him.

"Do we chnnge here?" Stan asked.

"Nope. We're in luck. This one is headed for a shopping area."

The hunting neriod for their own freighter was brief, and it dived into another tunnel. But this time they weren't falling. The tunnel felt level, and for a while it continued that way. Then they were going downhill again—a sensation, Stan realized, rather than a fact. Actually, they were slanting up-level toward the rim. Now the walls were lighted, and numbers began to flash past; numbers that were blocked out both in the binary code that the strut-cars could read, and in common decimal figures. But it was still code as far as Stan could tell, and he felt no familiarity with it.

Occasionallv and briefly there would be a widening of the tunnel as the freighter passed a platform level with its own floor, each such dock area causing a thwop of changing air pressure as they passed it.

And then thev began passing an occasional terminus of a different type; a place in which the car could be halted to shunt sidewise and pass through a lock. Stan was about to ask the advantage of this configuration when a surge of deceleration thrust him forcefully against one of the packages ahead of him, and the freighter came to a halt next to Just such a system, moved slowly sidewise, and passed nose-first through a lock.

Immediately beyond the door was a lighted area, with freighter-troughs leading out between unloading docks. There were two men on one of the docks unloading a freighter, but most of the docks were empty.

Their freighter nosed its way into the empty dock next to the one being unloaded. The men from the crew straightened and one called over, "Hey, there."

"Hi," Paulsen answered laconically. "We hopped a ride in. Our freighter was too loaded and we didn't want to wait for a yellow-belly. This is twelve-thirty-two, forty-seven south fifth, isn't it?"

"Yep. Area one, seventy-five, sixty-third."

Stan felt his stomach wrench. As the man had straightened to accost them, one had shown himself to be long and willowy, arms hanging out of proportion to his height; the other to be short and stubby, out of proportion the opposite way. He kept from averting his eyes.

"Which way to the walks?" Paulsen was asking.

"Through that door.Shops."

"Thanks."

They went through the door into a walkway, mall-centered, shop-lined, its ceiling perhaps sixty feet above them, and five levels of walkway between their own and the ceiling. The flowered and shrubbed mall served as the well to the multileveled walkways of the shopping area; and Stan could see stairs leading from one level to another at intervals.

His first impression was of color—a riot of color. There was color in the luminescence that flooded from the far ceiling; from below the walkway above his own; from every partition between the shop windows along the walks. There was color in the flowered and shrubbed mall; color in the display windows of the shops; color in the costumes the people on the mall were wearing.

There was an air of gaiety to the scatterings of people around, and the gaiety and color were infectious.

It was several minutes, as they strolled along the mall, before Stan could sort out individual impressions; and then it was with an empty feeling at the pit of his stomach that he realized that under the color, under the gaiety, something was very wrong. The Mutt and Jeff of the freight dock were not isolated cases, if the people he was seeing were any sample. The willowy, gangling form was predominant, the shorter, squat form less in evidence; but almost everyone, male and female, presented some grotes-querie.

There were bums and scars to be seen. That you would expect of a pioneer society, he thought. But the differences in build and structure of the majority from the norm he was used to ... It was like a hydroponics farm not properly tended, missing some of the essential elements, or grown without proper light, or with poor G considerations, Stan decided, and knew he had the answer.

There were a few normally formed persons like himself and Paulsen; but they were so far in the minority that he knew himself to be quite conspicuous.

Paulsen was leading them into a restaurant, and as they sat down he didn't wait to be asked. His voice was gruff, held a bitter note of defiance.

"Space is unforgiving," he said, "and the sins of the parents are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generations. Sins of omission, and sins of commission," he added. "And ismorance is no defense."

He paused for a minute while his eyes sought through the people at the tables around them and then returned to Stan, who sat silent.

"As a matter of fact, ignorance not only isn't a defense, it's the one unforgivable sin out here. Unforgivable by space, that is. Ignorance kills, and it kills right now. Or it maims. Ignorance and stupidity.

"You're seeing the small ignorances and stupidities when you look at the people here at Belt City. Not enough provision for this; not enough attention to that . . . little errors. The big errors—their results are death. Even so, this is a protected environment, here at Belt City. A freak can still stay alive. Outside Belt City, a small error in judgment is sure death.

"You can't be just an average joe, and survive in the Belt. You can't let anybody else do your thinking for you, and expect to survive. We each live our own lives and do our own thinking out here—and we each pay our own price for our own inabilities. We don't do it because we figure it's a good way to live, to be independent and stay on your toes; but because if you don't you don't live.

"And any one of the joes you see out there—the ones who got metabolically unbalanced and grew beyond their strengths, or the squat ones who got G-squashed, maybe before they were bom, or the burned or the deformed—any one of them is still brighter and more able to take care of himself under any circumstances—any single one of them is a better man than any molly-coddled puppy dog of an over-protected Earthie, and don't you forget it. If they weren't brighter and more able, they'd be already dead; and the death rate's high. Because space hits you where you hurt if you act ignorant or stupid even for a little while; but it hits to kill if you stay that way. "Space doesn't forgive," he ended.

Then he changed—expression, manner and voice—and Stan knew that this subject was dropped, now and forever, as far as Paulsen was concerned.

Looking around the room in a casual manner, Paulsen said lightly, "There's a telescreen over there. You go screen Dr. Lang. Ill order us up some rose-hip tea. Then we'll see what gives from here."

The screen was normal Earth-style, and Stan had no trouble with the controls. He kept the screen dark while he dialed computer info for the code for his old friend. Then, as he was about to dial Dr. Lang's number, the screen before him suddenly cleared, and he found himself looking at a heavy face with tiny, porcine features. The small, alert eyes riveted his gaze, and the man spoke without preamble:

"Mr. Dustin, I am Jonathan Weed of Astro Technology. Your activities since the Sassy Lassie docked have been reported to me from no less than five different sources. Your current position is pinpointed as twelve-thirty-two, forty-seven south fifth; area one, seventy-five, the restaurant at fifty-eighth.

"Tour call to Dr. Lang will not be accepted. Since AT is only one of several parties interested in your current activities, and since you must know that your interests lie with AT, I suggest that it would be to your advantage to report to my office immediately, before your life becomes unduly complicated by others. You are, as I hope I have impressed you, easily monitored in our society.

"I am at thirteen-oh-two, eighty-one north sixth, and any of the area directors will bring you to me. Your friend Paulsen can get you to the area."

Stan started to speak, then changed his mind. As his mouth closed, the man on the screen rose slowly, so that the intricately woven gold belt he wore dominated the screen. His hands went to the belt, and framed it from the sides.

"In the name of the Belt," he said in a voice of authority, "I command you to come. Immediately. Unobtrusively but rapidly."

Abruptly, Stan cut the connection^ rising from the seat in the same motion. He turned to see Paulsen standing behind him, evidently having heard the conversation.

Paulsen was smiling gently.

VI

THEY'VE SPOTTED US," Stan said furiously. "Let's jet."

Paulsen nodded, still smiling, and turned toward the walkway, taking long strides that would appear unhurried but would cover a lot of territory fast.

Stan fell into step with him and continued talking: The guy said he was Weed of AT, and that he'd had a tracer on us since we left the Lassie, but I doubt that last. They simply spotted us when I tried to call Lang. Must have his phone monitored. That Weed character! He was trying to give me some sort of hypnotic command or other, to get the hell up to his office. What a dullie!"

Paulsen was leading them back to the freight loading area behind the shopping center through which they had come, apparently thinking to take the same freightways.

"You going to double back on the same trail?" Stan asked, worried. "Now they've spotted us, it should be easier to tracer us. Maybe . . ."

"Doesn't matter. Mr. Weed just said to be unobtrusive. I don't think any of the others have spotted us yet."

"Any of the others?"

"He warned you that others were looking for you too," said Paulsen impatiently. "We're to be unobtrusive about getting to his office, but I don't think we have to hide exactly. It will be just as well if AT can tracer us. Then if anybody else stops us, they can get to us to help."

Stan came to an abrupt stop, and Paulsen, of necessity, turned to see what had occurred. It was then that Stan got a good look at Paulsen's eyes. They held a strange blank-ness.

"Where are you taking me?" Stan asked.

"To Weed's office, of course. We're to hurry."

Stan stood stock still, estimating his chances. Without Paulsen he was indeed a stranger in a strange land. But with Paulsen?

Why hadn't it occurred to him that the AT school was a molecular memory training school? Katsu Lang had headed each; and each had turned out—robots. If he had needed any demonstration of what Mallard had been talking about, he had it now before him.

But why wasn't he, himself, reacting in the same manner as Paulsen? The command had been "in the name of the Belt." And it was quite obviously a phrase that keyed in a hypnotic condition. But there'd be another command phrase for use on Earth; and that hadn't been used. Okay, he was safe until somebody started using whatever phrase had been selected to key in his own robotic responses. He shivered violently, knowing his own vulnerability to be as great as the one he was witnessing; then, with an effort, he pulled himself back to the immediate problem.

He and Paulsen were facing each other just inside the door to the unloading area. From the corner of his eye, Stan could see the Mutt and Jeff freight loaders straightening, beginning to pay attention to what must seem a disagreement—a disagreement in which they would take the part of the Belter against an Earthie.

Idly he let his fingers go to his belt, then glanced down at it. Paulsen's eyes followed his own. When he was sure that Paulsen was looking directly at his belt, he said softly, "Wait here." He started to use the command phrase that Porky had used, but stopped. If he got it wrong, he'd trigger the wrong reaction. Anyhow, it was not a phrase he could bring himself to utter.

Paulsen was looking confused. "We are to hurry," he said.

"Wait here. Then well hurry."

Not daring to pause any longer, Stan turned on his heel and went back through the door onto the walk. Turning a-way from the direction of the restaurant, he lengthened his stride toward the nearest byway.

Behind him he could hear light running footsteps, obviously not far behind, or he couldn't have distinguished them among the numbers of people about. He was just yards from a byway, but the runner was not many more yards behind.

Abruptly, he turned into the byway. No sooner had he made the comer than he flattened his back against the wall of the shop he had rounded, hands loose and ready.

As the figure came around the comer at top speed, he reached, reflexed, half caught her on the withdraw, and ended up supporting his quarry to keep her from falling.

He was looking down into a pretty Oriental face, topped with mussed dark hair, flushed from running, and completely startled so that the mouth was still open in an "oh." She was wearing a gold belt over tunic and trousers.

In spite of himself, Stan began to smile. "Every day in every way," he said happily, "the robots get prettier and prettier."

The flush that mounted her cheeks this time was not from running. She pulled away from him in fury, then softened again.

"You're Star Duster," she said breathlessly, "and you've got to trust me quick, because I can get you out of here. I'm Sandra Lang. Will you trust me?"

"Yes," said Stan, surprising himself. He would rationalize later that he couldn't get out by himself; that trusting her was the best gamble available. There would be all sorts of reasons, but when it came right down to it, he trusted her because he trusted her. It was that simple.

She nodded at him, but remained still, thinking. "They'll have all the strut-cars monitored, so we can't go by car," she said hesitantly. "Freight cars, too .. . Oh, I know."

Back onto the mall she led him, down a ways, across the mall, into a foodstore. Through the store to the back through a door to the delivery area, looking in every direction, then breaking into a run to catch a man stopping over some newly unloaded vegetables on a platform.

"Mr. Jim." She stopped beside him, panting. "Are you returning anything to the rim right now?"

The face that turned up to hers was graying, lined, a bit grim, but the expression softened as he looked up. "What sort of trouble you in today, Sandra? I thought you'd outgrown hide and seek."

"This one's for real, Mr. Jim," she said solemnly. "This is Star. We both need to get out to Gramps's, fast and inconspicuous like."

"Those crates over there," he said, smiling at her fondly. "They're going back out to Rosie's. You get in them and m dial you to Katsu, then you tell him to dial them on to her. Hop in. How serious if you're caught?"

"Plenty." She didn't amplify the statement, but her tone left no doubt.

"Don't you get yourself mixed up in politics, Sandra," he told her severely as he opened two of the biggest crates for them to climb in. "It's not a game for sweet youngsters like you. A pretty face is no protection when it's power politics that's being played," he went on as he replaced the covers and checked the lashings to the strut-car, "and they're playing it rougher every day." Then, "Here you go," he ended, and Stan felt the strut-car begin to move as he lay curled in the dark in a crate on a freightcar near a pretty girl who was the granddaughter, obviously, of the man who had made him a robot. And perhaps Tm a fool, he told himself, but there was something inside that refused to believe the statement.

Katsu Lang sat at the keyboard of the symphony master, taking out the tensions that had been building within him in thunderous, rolling tones of barbaric style, harnessed to an insistent violin concerto theme. The contrasting elements delighted him, and took his attention from the chase he knew to be going on, matching the demanding insistence of a violin rampant, he thought, to the overpowering brutality of a cadenced bass viol clawing at the understructure of the racing theme. The two musical forces were harmonized by a patterned form that included within itself the warring elements—and he found himself quite satisfied with the resultant dynamic stability.

He had turned on the recorder, and he knew that the tensions had given him a body of music which, with a few months spent in organization and handling, could be made into a great work.

Lifting his fingers from the keys, he leaned back in the maestro's great seat and flipped on the recording of what he had just played. It washed over him in rolls of movement and countermovement, and it almost drowned the tiny wrist receiver that told him that Sandra, at least, was back. And young Star Dustin must be with her, he decided, for if she had lost him she would not return until she found where he was taken and what could be done—and that would necessarily have required more time.

Muting the recorder, he rose to meet his guests, approaching now through the apple orchard beyond the bays of the music stall. The grass carpeting beneath his feet felt resilient; the glow of late afternoon filled the air. He wondered idly if the Earth boy would recognize the programming which kept the light of the enclosure that was his home tuned to the Earth-light sequence for any time of day. Or the need for that programming: the changing colors within the atmosphere modulating a changing of b^dv reactions, preventing the hypnosis that is a single-light-frequency response.

We have so much to learn of artificialized living, he thought; and, he added to himself, so much to learn of learning itself.

The two coming through the orchard made a graceful contrast to the stubby-fingered grace of the trees themselves, now in full leaf with tiny apples budding.

Paulsen was not with them. It had been some vears now since he had seen Paulsen—one of the hopefuls of the program that had turned out to be so flawed. Sandra was light and graceful beside the tall figure of the now grown young man that was Star Dustin. The young man's stride was easy, his head high, the hair a deep flame beneath the trees. He was graceless in contrast to Sandra, but his stride held a strength that was a grace of its own. How very like Trevor, Lang thought.

He watched Stan's face as the young man stepped through the bay into the music stall; watched his slight catch of breath as he noticed that the grass over which he had been walking continued as carpeting of the stall; watched his glance as it went to the acoustically designed canopy.

Then the boy's eyes met his own, and he felt the warmth of pleasure with which the Other responded; and, like a slap in the face, the fear and fury which shuttered it almost instantly afterward.

He bowed his head in reaction to the mental blow, then managed to make the gesture into one of greeting.

"Welcome, Stan Dustin, son of my late partner and very true friend," he said formally.

"Son?" Stan's voice was startled, and there was hope behind it.

"You are Trevor Dustin's son, Stan. The other was a fiction of convenience, and in the Belt such fictions are not necessary."

"Then, if I am the son of your true friend, why did you let them make me into a robot?" The words seemed torn from Stan, but he looked straight into the older man's eyes as they poured forth.

"Would I have made my own granddaughter into a robot? It was an unforeseen flaw in the program, Stan; and one that was enhanced and emphasized by those who killed the third partner and forced me out."

Stan's face crumpled from the fierce anger it had held, and the hope and pleasure slowly returned to it. Holding the younger man's eyes with his own, Katsu Lang continued softly, "It is my hope that if you will work with me, as Sandra has, we can find the key to changing the responses."

The work began next morning, work that was based on tests in a cubicle like the one in which Stan had spent so many hours for so many years on Earth; and he threw himself into the tests with a fierce, exultant hope that was overridden only by the need to eat and sleep.

The tests went on for three days, but in the afternoon of the third day Katsu Lang came to call him from the cubicle into a small study, where Sandra served them tea.

The older man waited until the tea was served and the three were relaxed in deep pneumochairs. Then he said slowly:

"Stan, you are not a robot You do not show any of the robotic reactions."

The sentence hung there between them for a long minute, while Stan looked at him, trying to stifle the hope that flooded him, hope that would surely be dashed. . . .

"I do not understand, sir. I was trained, with the others. I saw Paulsen's reaction...."

"Nor do I understand, Stan. But I have given you every test of which I can think. I have used every hypnotic command I know that has been trained into those who attended either the Earth school or the one in the Belt.

"Then, in case I had not known the ones to which you might be keyed, I have tested your reactions to the information patterns to which you were trained molecularly. And even to these, you respond as you yourself would respond; not as the donor of the molecular patterns would have responded. You respond as a young man would respond, armed with vital knowledge from many fields—not as the person would have responded who had spent a lifetime acquiring the one set of knowledge, with his reactions necessarily shaped by that knowledge alone, and with the thought habits of such specialization.

"Further," he went on slowly, "your information depth is not limited to what one man in each field might have acquired in one lifetime; but is infused and colored with factors that must have been transmitted genetically from generations back, for it includes accurate and detailed information on factors which have not been in use for generations."

"What do you mean by that, sir?"

Lang took his time before answering, sipping his tea thoughtfully. Finally he said slowly, "For instance, when you flew the tubes. Your reactions, I gather, were structured in an accurate, detailed, seat-of-the-pants knowledge of small-plane flying; of flying of a type that hasn't been done since the very early Twentieth Century. . . ."

Stan broke in excitedly. "You're right, you know. I could almost feel the flimsy structure of a ... a flying machine around me; and a stick in my hands with which to guide her; and someone shooting at me. . .."

"So detailed? I had wondered. Yes, I think it is undeniable that you have picked up genetic recordings along with the molecular memories with which we were training you."

"Sir . . . Dr. Lang. Why am I not a robot, and what about the others?"

Again Lang paused and sipped his tea. Then he leaned back and half-closed his eyes. "The normal method by which a person acquires information," he said, "is through the five senses. Information is fed into the brain by electronic signals from each of the five senses. In the brain that information is assembled by the intelligence, analyzed, sorted out, and readied for storage—for filing. The intelligence is the analyzer.

"Reason," he went on, "is the function of the intelligence. The information input is electronic, is analyzed by the intelligence, and is filed in the biochemical body which acts on it without further analysis.

"Now, when you hypnotize someone, you remove the intelligence from the circuit, and the responses you get are purely logic-circuit responses—backed by an eidetic 'memory,' or complete access to the near infinite information filing system.

"And when we put information into the body through a molecular memory framing system, we are filing the information biochemically without putting it through the electronic brain/intelligence system. It is therefore filed without analysis or patterning.

"The only way that this information can be properly correlated and patterned by the intelligence is for it to be brought back to the cerebral circuits for review.

"Now it is possil le," and here excitement crept into Lang*s voice, "that, in insisting on re-studying every subject to which you were trained by molecular memory patterning, you forced the brain to call up all relevant information for review, so that the new information you had acquired could be patterned in with the old information already in the system.

"If that is true, then the 'alternating current' effect that you spoke of feeling while you slept would be the electromagnetic recall and refiling mechanism at work."

"If that's true, sir, then we can retrain Paulsen and the others?" Stan's voice held a hope so great as to make his voice shake. "We can . . . put the robots under their own control?"

"Let me think how it would work." Lang paused for a long minute, then began speaking again in a distant voice. "It would be necessary for them to seek out, on their own, information with which they had been inoculated. And then ... we must find a way to inoculate the sleep-review system.

"I think that, with your experience in mind, we shall be able to handle the retraining of the molecularly trained students—once we remove the influence of the basically hypnotic command-responses that have been driven deeply into them; and if we can get them where we can work with them for . . . I'd say at least several months." "That's a pretty big if, sir."

Lang smiled. "That is an if we shall have to find the means to accomplish," he said softly. "And perhaps, with your cooperation, we shall not find it impossible."

VII

STAN WALKED into Weed's office with his head held deliberately high, his shoulders squared, as though the trepidation that might be expected of a younger man faced with the awe-inspiring might of the AT Corporation was forcing a defiant reaction. He held the pose as Weed slowly rose from his seat and extended his hand, which Stan ignored.

"Ah," said Weed, "I see that you are unconvinced, though sensibly coming to see what AT has to offer." Stan nodded curtly.

"Very sensible of you." The porcine-faced man before him nodded his head solemnly. "Very sensible, though somewhat insensitive to retain this obviously recalcitrant attitude. However ..."

Weed reached into a drawer, pulled out a large signet ring, placed it deliberately on his finger, and stood twisting it, watching Stan to be sure that the younger man had fixed his attention upon it. Then, in a voice of command, he said: "I, the trainer, speak. You obey."

St2n felt the slight tug at his senses that recognized the old command, discarded it instantly, and then forced his eyes to take on a glassy stare, his shoulders to slump slightly, his head to lose its defiant lift.

"Ah," said Weed, and the sound carried a world of satisfaction.

Stan stood immobile, waiting. This was going to be quite tricky, he realized.

""Now, young man," Weed was saying, "we will get to the business at hand. I made a mistake earlier in not using the correct symbolism, but then I had two of you to controL Hereafter," he went on, "you will respond either to the Earth command I have just used, or to the phrase, Tn the name of the Belt, I command you.' Do you understand?"

Stan nodded, slowly.

"Then tell me," said Weed, "to what you must respond, and what response you must make?"

"I must respond either to the ring or to the belt, and I must respond with complete obedience," Stan said, keeping his voice flat.

The other looked at him sharply. Oh oh, thought Stan. I should have said to the phrases backed by the objects. Have I been caught out? But he maintained his glassy-eyed stare, and it seemed to satisfy Weed.

"Now, young man," Weed said slowly, "I must have your shares in Astro Technology."

Stan let his hand move as though toward a pocket, then hesitate, as though a stronger force was working on him; then move again to the pocket and hesitate again. Finally, he let his hand rest immobile halfway between his pocket and its former position by his side.

"Oh?" Weed puzzled for a moment. "I gather that the shares of stock you possess hold an attraction nearly as strong as the command under which you respond to me?" There was silence and he finally added, "Answer."

"Yes, sir. They do."

Weed sank back in his chair and waited a moment. Finally he said, "Give the shares to me."

Stan made the gestures of trying to obey again, again let his hand rest immobile in a halfway gesture and stood silent.

"Why do you not give them to me?" asked Weed. "I cannot, sir. They were given to me in trust." "Um." Then, "I could have them taken from you forcibly."

"You could, sir. That would break my conditioning. Then I could fight you." The voice was still a monotone, and Stan waited, forcing his eyes to remain unwavering. This was the crucial point. Would Weed believe that Stan could produce this much independent reasoning, while still under control? Lang had thought that he would. Weed was not a fighter; he was a weasler. He would have to figure this one out, but if he figured it out in terms that were normal to him ...

"I was told that you were independent. However," Weed said softly, let us reason together." Stan kept himself from breathing a sigh of relief. The pig was going to go along with it

"The shares—the trust—are, I gather, from your uncle?" "Yes, sir."

"And what would your uncle's wishes in the matter be?"

"I am not sure, sir. It is a trust. It is a trust to see that his projects at AT are finished in the way in which he intended them."

"Ah." Weed began to relax now. He'd been given a bargaining point and bargaining was something in which he felt secure.

"And just what were his projects?" Weed asked, almost happily.

"That the Belt become and remain independent sir."

"It is, and AT is seeing to it that it will remain independent. If that is all, you may sign over your shares to me."

"That I could not do, sir. I was given them in trust I might be able to give you proxies."

"Very well. I shall have them drawn up."

"No, sir."

"No?"

"No. The independence of the Belt was not my uncle's only project. I must carry out his projects." "What, then, were the others?"

"That AT remain technologically advanced over Earth." Weed's voice lost some of its aplomb. "That's being done, son," he said impatiently. "If you want proof ..." "Your word is sufficient sir."

"Then you have my word. That is being done. Anything else?"

"That the colony on Jupiter's moon be established."

"That is being . . ." Suddenly Weed paused. This was too easily checked, and the boy had mentioned that the "trust" under which he'd been placed was sufficient to break his conditioning if it was forcibly thwarted.

The name Dustin was one to conjure by in the Belt Weed knew. If he could get this boy's wholehearted—at least apparently wholehearted—cooperation, half his troubles with the Belters would be over. The Jupiter colony ship, the Phoenix, was a useless hulk; and perhaps this would be a method by which he could get the youngster's open cooperation, as well as getting him out of the way. It would take some cash and time to get the old hulk actually out into the system with Stan aboard, but the time could be utilized for propagandizing the Dustin reassocia-tion with AT; and the expense would not be too great.

A smile crept over his features. "Your uncle wanted you to see to it personally that these projects were properly carried out?"

Stan nodded.

"And you recognize that the first two have been implemented in the proper manner?" Again Stan nodded.

"Then why don't I assign you as, say, a vice president of AT, to take the Phoenix and carry out the project of the Jupiter moon?"

Stan kept his voice dead with effort. "Yes, sir."

"Do you know what the Phoenix is?"

"She's a ramjet scoop ship, sir, that was readied to pirate air from Jupiter and to ferry personnel to Io to prepare the colony site, sir."

"Very well. We will make you vice president in charge of the Jupiter project, and commander of the Phoenix. And for your part, you will sign over those shares to me."

"No, sir."

Weed's face fell and his voice showed the short leash on which his obviously childish temper would be held.

"What now?" he asked with restrained fury.

"The Phoenix will have to be rehabilitated. I will have to have a crew, and they must be trained. Then I can give you the proxies of which I spoke."

Weed sat back grimly. But it was a perfect plan; and obviously, except for this evidently strong loyalty and compulsion, the boy was under control. Well, he could have an "accident" any time that he went out of control, once it was publicly established that he was enthusiastically with AT. The expense would be justified. They would actually save money by buying the loyalty of the Belters at the price of refurbishing the old hulk. And the boy might even get the project far enough underway so that it became commercially feasible as a corporate project, in the long run, after the coming war was over.

"Very well," he said. "You will announce your loyalty to the AT Corporation as now set up, and will proclaim it widely and frequently." He watched the boy closely for reaction, but the glassy stare and the solemn nod were his only answer. "We will refurbish the Phoenix. It may take several months, and I shall demand your complete cooperation during that time."

Stan nodded again, and again in the flat voice said, "I will pick my crew immediately, and set up quarters for training them. I will announce my loyalty to AT as now set up. You will see to it that the Phoenix is properly refurbished, and I will inspect it occasionally. When we are ready to take off, I will sign proxies for my shares to cover the time in which I shall be absent."

Weed nodded to himself. Not a bad bargain at that, he decided. And, that "accident" could occur....

Tobey Olsen had started work at the Ace Sector Shipyards of AT the day that the hunk of ungainly nickel-steel asteroid that was to become the Phoenix was towed into the yards.

He'd been cable jumper during the laser-milling of the asteroid, when they put her into a free fall spin and milled her just as though she were in a lathe. He'd listened to the jokes about Trail Duster's Folly, and he'd laughed with the crews, but he'd believed in the hulk, and it had been pure magic to him, seeing the rounded, wad-cutter bullet form take shape.

They couldn't do this on Earth, he had exulted to himself, watching the jutting crags and the jagged irregularities cut smooth by the knifing of the huge laser beams as the hulk rolled gently and smoothly in the "jaws" of its inernal lathe, and the steel-strong, smooth squat form of the hulk that was to be a scoop ship began to seem strangely akin to his own squat form. Squat but powerful. The changing G's that his mother had met while she carried him had formed his own body, smooth, blunt and powerful, as the lasers were forming the shining irregular chunk of nickel steel before him. The squashing he had undergone had not squandered the strength inherent in his structure, any more than the lasers were squandering the strength of the asteroid they milled so delicately. We both came out better for the treatment, he told himself, and to him the Phoenix became the symbol of all that was powerful, though misshapen by Earth standards, in the Belt.

By the time the Phoenix hull was formed and the milling began that would make nests for 144 K-class ships at her back—the power structure for the bullet—Tobey had been made foreman of a small crew, doing part of that nulling. The waffle-like structure that would nest the K-classers was to him the epitome of beauty; a powerful nesting that would give the Phoenix a 144-ship boost into high acceleration. The ships would cut loose just before they hit Jupiter's atmosphere, would cut around, and would catch her on the far side, nesting in again to take the scoop ship on to Io.

The tanks that went into the otherwise solid steel of the nose area, and the plugs that would open or close those tanks, were the work of other men; but the tanks were small in diameter and deep in length, and the delicate job of milling the interconnecting tubing from tank to tank was Tobey's; for by then he was one of the most skilled of the laser-lathemen of the Belt. During the building of the long corridors, cabins, common rooms and life support systems that filled the Phoenix backsides, Tobey was crewmaster.

It was when the Phoenix was almost finished that Trail Duster had made him supervisor of the project It had been a proud day; but it had been less than a week later that he and the crew had been called off.

"The Phoenix has got to wait," the red-headed director of AT had told him. "Earth is interdicting the rest of the system to Belters; we've got us a war to fight."

Instead, he'd been supervising the reworking of every K-class that could be called in—the 144 scheduled to power the Phoenix, along with most of the privately owned ships of the Belt. There'd been little time and great fervor, and he'd worked the crews until they dropped, given them a bit of rest, and started them back on the job again.

It was when he said "ready" that Trevor had said "go," and the Belter War of Independence had been underway.

Things had changed then, with Trevor Dustin dead. Things had changed and stayed changed; and the old Phoenix had drifted there in the yards, fifteen miles from the nearest ship, a sort of stationary anchor point that defined one back comer of the yard—too big to move and too tied up in corporate policy to use; a vast, monumental junk pile, according to the new powers-that-be at the Ace Shipyards of Astro Technology.

Now Tobey stared from the orders in his hand to the man who had brought the orders to him.

"You're Star Duster," he said fiercely. "I heard you'd gone all-out for the new AT setup."

"Yep," said Stan. "I reckoned you'd heard."

"And you're going to refurbish the Phoenix? Finish her?"

"Yep," said Stan. "I reckoned you might have heard that too."

"Okay." Tobey's voice was far from friendly. "I'll get a foreman and a crew together. How fast a job you planning?" "A couple of months. Maybe three."

Tobey whistled. "WelL" he said slowly, "she was nigh onto finished when we dropped her. We might could. Where you going to get the K-classP One hundred forty-four of them?" he asked, his voice soft, not dangerous, just soft

"Don't reckon well get more than fourteen," Stan said, and waited.

"Humph," said Tobey, and stayed silent Then, "You won't boost her very fast with fourteen," he said cruelly. "Ill get on her, Mr. Dustin." He turned to the door of his small office, opened it, then flung back over his shoulder, "You sure are trying on big britches for an Earthie."

"I sure am trying on big britches for the son of a Belter," Stan said softly.

Tobey stood with his hand on the door for a long minute, then turned slowly back into the office and closed the door softly behind him. He came to stand beside the slender, red-haired figure seated in the chair beside his desk; his powerful hands hanging limp at his sides.

"I haven't given you a fair, have I?" he asked.

"No," said Stan. "I didn't really expect you to; but I was hoping." Then he added, "I guess you're giving me a fair now. WHl you talk a minute?"

Tobey nodded and seated himself at his desk. "Trail Duster," he said, "was . . . well, he was Mr. Belt. And I guess I didn't like it when they called you Star Duster."

"That was the propaganda machine at AT," said Stan. "I gotta let them keep it up, too."

"Gotta?"

"Gotta.If we want. . . Tobey, let's start out by scotching some of the rumors you've heard. Not the propaganda. You can scotch that or not as you like. It's a machine product and most buy it, but some don't I don't think you buy it. But the rumors—that's something else again.

"All right Rumor number one: The Phoenix is a rich boy's play toy. That one's true. If I weren't rich, I certainly couldn't have it Trevor made me rich by giving me his shares in AT. But the Phoenix is going to be used. Not just as a base here, or for scooting around the Belt having fun, but to go out and do the job she was intended to do. As soon as you can get her outfitted, well be taking off for Jupiter; and well be taking a complement of science personnel with us. If you find that you can go along with an idea like that, I'd be glad to have you aboard."

"Not with fourteen K-class for power, you're not going to do the job. Takes a hundred forty-four-K-class to boost the Phoenix at three-G, and you'll not be safe around Jupiter with less than a three-G drive. Fourteen K-class would give you about a point-three-G drive."

"Couldn't do it with that hunhP Yes, I know we couldn't However, we could run a scoop operation that way if we took our bloody time about it It's velocity that counts a-round Jupiter, not necessarily drive thrust. If we wanted to take, say, a hundred and thirteen to slow her down, and take a chance that our aiming was just right, we could do a dive with fourteen K-class." He watched the other narrowly.

Tobey nodded, his expression still hard. "You could," he said coldly. "That what you're planning?" Then he went on without waiting for an answer: "You're right that speed's the important thing. And you figured that time just like out of an Earthie textbook. But you got to do better'n that There are a few other vectors to add in. Like original velocity, old Jupe's orbital speed, and whether or not you want to come to a complete stop relative to whatever you pick out to come to a complete stop relative to."

Stan grinned to himself while he kept his face stem. The guy was hopping mad now, but at least he was listening. "And if I planned to do it that way, then that's how I'd figure," he said. "However, I was only pointing out that it would be possible, so I made the figures more or less arbitrary. From the pragmatic point of view I don't think that's a possible method, because I'm quite sure that AT won't play ball. I figure on getting fourteen K-class all right—and that's all I figure on. But I don't figure on keeping even those fourteen, because I expect that the powers at AT plan to let those K's boost me into a Hohmann orbit, and then they plan to yank them back. All of them. On that schedule, if they figure a true Hohmann orbit, I should get to Jupiter in about six years and, if I do, I could consider that I was a lucky son of a ... a Belter. One way or another, though, that would serve ATs purpose and get me out of their hair quite effectively for a bit, wouldn't you think?"

Stan eyed the other speculatively for a moment. "And now," he continued coldly, "I have just put my life in your hands."

Tobey's face was slowly losing its hard lines as he chewed the problem over before answering. Then, slowly, a grin crept out and his eyes began to twinkle. "Yep", he said, "I guess you have at that—if the story reads the way you're telling it. If AT is using the Phoenix to get you out of their hair, and you're on to it, then if I tell 'em you're on to it. .

Stan grinned back at the square-set yard supervisor. "Now let's try rumor number two," he said quietly. "The one that says I'm happy with AT. That one's true too. I'm happier than hell with AT. I'm not very happy with how it's being run, or where it's going under present management—but AT isn't going that way much longer, nor will it be run by those boobs much longer."

Tobey slid down into his desk chair and leaned back happily. "Hell," he said, "I could get killed in an accident just for listening to you. I hear you good, Star. What's the plan?"

"Well." Stan picked up pencil and pad. "Obviously the Phoenix has got to have her own power system, independent of the K-class. And obviously it will have to be installed without AT knowing she's got it."

Tobey raised one eyebrow. "She's a one hundred twelve gigaton mass. Star. If you've got a drive for her, you've got what they know to be impossible You could install it in front of their noses and they wouldn't believe it Don't know as I would either," he added.

"Then take a look and see what you think." Stan began sketching rapidly. "While you're refitting the Phoenix, could you whomp up a Tesla coil system like this"—he continued to sketch—"that reacts with the first nuclear resonance level of a lithium hydrogen reaction?" Swiftly he drew lines on a skeletalized outline of the Phoenix. "We could feed hydrogen in here . . . and hthium through . . . here. The plasma reaction center will be contained by an alternating field effect. And we sweep the reaction products out by supplying the hydrogen under pressure. We should wind up with a tight little fusion reactor which would put out plenty of power, I'd think. Plenty. Even for a gigaton mass like the Phoenix."

Tobey was staring at the sketch. "Ill be damned," he said, slowly. "Well, I'll be damned." He looked up at Stan with respect. "Now why couldn't I have thought of that one? A Tesla drive." Then his face clouded. "But look, a drive like that will sure push the Phoenix around the system. But, Star, it sure will be lethal to anything that gets in its wash And the yards—they'll be the first things in that wash."

Stan nodded. "That's why we've got to get those K-class aboard. We've got to hold this—well, you're right; it's a Tesla drive—until we've got distance. Use the K's to boost us away from the Belt."

"But, look, Star. With that drive, you ought to be able to pick up your own fuel on the way, if you had a magnetic pickup system. There's plenty of fuel in the solar wind to be picked up with a proper focusing mechanism. You could use this drive as a matchstick, say, to light a little hydrogen fusion candle at some distance behind your tail, which would be held in place by the focusing coils that collected the protons. It would make a real good ram-jet."

Stan frowned, then his face cleared and brightened. "By damn, you're right. And you could, make a magnetic lens, set up external field coils like this. . . ." He sketched rapidly, pulled more paper to him, sketched some more, Tobey following his outline and sketching in details of his own. Finally, "That" he said, "should set us up a magnetic effect that would trap all the hydrogen a drive could use, and funnel it into a nice little hydrogen reaction sun at about twenty-five miles off the stern. Right?"

Tobey went over the sketch again, drawing out the fields with his finger, seeming awed even at the touch of the sketch. Then, "It works," he said. "With that nickel-steel hull for a core, I expect we can get plenty of magnetic field for that system. Why, you could drive anything with that. Not just the Phoenix. You could . . . you could drive a small planet with that, and keep its sun right handy behind it. . .**

Stan leaned back, staring at Tobey. "A planet," he said softly. "A small planet. With its own sun. Tobey, that's the answer to the quasars. Some people said they might be planets with their own drives, going space-hopping. And they were right. Tobey, we're going to the stars. Not just the system. The stars."

"With the Phoenix?" Tobey seemed nonplussed.

"Hell, no, not with the Phoenix. There's one little point in the Einstein equations that makes it pretty damned important to take a good-sized ship load when you go, you know; and to take along conditions under which a man can lead a fairly normal life. With a drive designed like this, we could get to Galaxy Center in twenty-one years. Take a year to build up to light speeds, then we cross the galaxy in no time. But that's nothing, shipboard time. If you go out one hundred thousand light-years in a ship and then come back . . . Well, there's two hundred thousand years of history has happened between you and the time you left. It's fun to think about. But without enough people along that speak your language, and without a home base that you can tolerate to stay on, it might get pretty damned upsetting.

"No, Tobey. This makes it possible, and we're going to the stars. But not on the Phoenix. We were going to set up Io as a colony—shucks, well set her up as a good-sized Galactic Scoutship. With what you might call a Tesla Tesseract drive. Call it a Teslaract drive for short. . ."

Tobey considered this quietly for a long time. Then his face creased back into a huge grin. "A Teslaract drive—and a planet for a ship. Yep. I buy that."

Then he leaned forward. "Now," he said brusquely, "I reckon that takes care of the long-range planning. But before we get to Jupiter to get to Io to build our Scoutship, we need the Phoenix. And we need to get her ready before AT gets hep or changes its mind. So we can .. ."

It was several hours before the two of them drew back from pages of sketches, satisfied that the preliminary work for the immediate project was well underway.

Leaning back in his chair, Tobey nodded to himself, watched the satisfied expression on Stan's face. "I'll start getting that crew together tonight," he said.

"Picked crew, Tobey.All of them information-tight. But just in case there's a spy .. ."

"There won't be any spies, Star."

Stan looked at the other, realized he meant it, nodded. "Okay. But, Tobey, take my word for one thing: no gold belts. Not on your crew. Don't trust a gold belt unless I give you the word to trust him. Okay?"

"I know about gold belts, Star. What I don't know is why you're wearing a gold belt"

Stan looked down at it ruefully. "Yeah," he said. "I'm wearing one. And it's going to be a proud thing to wear one of these days. I think I've got some answers. But until I'm sure I'm right don't trust a gold belt I guess that's got to include me, too, doesn't it?"

They both laughed, but Stan thought there was still a hollow sound behind that laugh.

VIII

TIME. Time was the factor both at the Ace Yards and in the rim area at Belt City where Lang and Stan were putting forty of ATs top gold-belters through a system of study that was more strenuous than any of them had ever thought he could attempt.

Weed had almost laughed when Stan brought him the list of the gold-belters that he wanted prioritied to his project; had spent long hours using the strongest command techniques he could dream up, but Stan had been adamant, and the theory of the "stronger loyalty of the trust I hold" overrode the other's objections.

"He's getting his money's worth in loyalties from the Belters," Stan told Lang grimly. "The propaganda's working. But I don't think hell let the gold belts I've picked actually take off with the Phoenix. Not without a fight. I guess that gives us the timing of whatever move he plans against us."

Retraining the gold-belters was a touchy question in itself. That they were being questioned in their off-hours by Weed and his gang, Stan was sure. Therefore they could not be allowed to know what was being done, nor why; nor could the hypnotic commands themselves be touched, for those would be specifically tested. They could not be touched until after they were aboard the Phoenix. Not even in Paulsen.

What they could do was reclaim the straight educational information the students had been fed, put it under the students' own control. So the schooling this time was thorough, but of an opposite form to what they'd had before. The gold-belters were put through a system of personalized study as intense as it could be made; and the testing that ended each day demanded of each facts from the areas in which he'd been studying that day, brought out in questions which were designed to draw on background facts that had been molecularly transplanted into their memories during the old schooling. Over and over Lang insisted, "Give us as much background information as possible with your answers."

Only in Sandra could the hypnotic commands be pulled and canceled; but the work with Sandra was sufficient to make Stan and Lang feel sure they had the techniques by which it could be done for all the students as soon as it was safe to do so.

Between trying to resolve the technical details at the school and the technical details at the yard, Stan felt as though he was putting himself through a course of study more intense than he'd ever attempted in his own education.

Once he carefully invited one of the gold-belters that he knew to be questioned by Weed to go with him to the Phoenix. "I've got to go over her stem to stem," he told the man. "Want to go along?"

The idea had worried Tobey, but it worked out as Stan had hoped. "He's got the preconceived notion that we're K-class powered. He won't be looking for a drive. He won't see it."

As it worked out, the man obviously looked at the obvious, unobtrusively looked for the unobvious, and asked questions that were intelligent enough, but that could be answered quite truthfully. By the time they reached the nose, Stan quit worrying and could put his own attention on an actual inspection for himself.

Time. The three months originally predicted passed, and the work went on. Two more months passed, and although everybody was at stretch, both jobs nearing completion, the work was not done. Then in the middle of the sixth month, Stan got Tobey on a tight beam channel.

"Tobey," he said, choosing his words with care, "it's gotta be go. Now. Say, three days."

Tobey chewed his hp. Then, "Yeah," he said. "I'm getting the signals too. Okay, it's go. Three days. Make it seventy-two hours from now."

"Right. And, Tobey, clear your crew from the B for baby crew area as of now. And seal it off from the A and C areas, but leave the corridors from the locks and officers' country open."

Tobey raised one eyebrow quizzically, but all he said was "Right," and without another word Stan signed off. Then he called Paulsen up to the monitor's desk from which he was supervising the work going on in forty cubicles.

"Is the Sassy Lassie fueled?" he asked, knowing that it was.

"Sure, boss," said Paulsen.

"Fine. So is my Erika Three. I'm canceling classes. Can you lift twenty-two out to Ace Yards?"

"When?Now? Give me a couple of hours to get food aboard and duffel..."

"No food. No duffel. Right now. The Phoenix is just twelve hours from here."

"Fourteen with a load like that"

"Fourteen hours from here. Our gold belts have never seen her. Thought we'd just jaunt over and take a look. You take Dr. Lang and half the class. Ill take Sandra and the other half."

"Just jaunt over, take a look and jaunt back? Thought you'd wait until we were ready to move aboard, then spend a couple of weeks aboard familiarizing."

"Yeah." Stan leaned back in the monitor's seat relaxed and smiling. "That's what I plan. But a looksee in the meantime ... I don't know. I figure they're getting a little stale and a little impatient A jaunt out there would break the monotony. Where you tied up?"

"Tube one-eleven."

"Okay. Don't even tell them where we're going. Let it be a surprise. Call them all in here, cancel all classes. I'll order up enough strut-cars, and we'll take off."

Stan, with his half of the class, reached the Phoenix first, sent Sandra to the bridge, the gold-belters along to Common Room B.

Having seen that his part of the class was safely in the common room, Stan stationed himself by the nest assigned to the Sassy Lassie. As soon as that ship was maglocked in, he made his way through the air locks.

"Turn off all circuits now," he told Paulsen.

Paulsen started to obey in reflex, then his hand hesitated on the switch. "Hadn't I better leave her on standby?" he asked.

"Not this time," said Stan in a voice of authority, and before Paulsen could object further he'd pulled himself back out of the air lock into the corridor.

When Katsu Lang and Paulsen, with the first of the gold-belters immediately behind them, pulled through into the corridor, Stan was waiting.

"Dr. Lang," he said, "you go on through to the bridge. Sandra's waiting for you there. Paulsen, you and your men gather in Common Room B. It's right down that corridor," he said, pointing.

Then he waited again until the last of the gold-belters was into the corridor before turning and cluing the bulkhead behind them, activating bolts that would seal it off until someone released them from the bridge. Following the men, now, to the common room assigned them, he quickly counted to be sure they were all there, then climbed on a table, gesturing for them to gather around him.

"We are leaving," he told them firmly, "almost immediately." There was an instant clamor, which he silenced with a raised hand. "We will have two weeks on board to become familiar with how this ship works. By the time we reach Jupiter orbit, we will either know that we have around us a good sound ship and a good working crew, or that we should turn back. I have no intention of turning back," he added. Then, "If we win, we will be opening a colonly about the size of Earth's moon, and our next step will be the stars. If we lose—well, that won't mean much to anybody but us.

"I brought you aboard by surprise," he said into a quiet that was the first reaction to shock, "because we have enemies. Those enemies will try to stop us. You are aboard and will stay aboard. I will talk to you again before we go under thrust."

With that he jumped down from the table and made his way to the bulkhead toward officers' country. He had crossed the bulkhead and secured it behind him before anyone had recovered sufficiently to try to stop him.

Now they were locked in. The best brains of AT kidnapped right out from under Weed's nose and secured in a nickel-steel prison in space.

Stan reached the bridge to find Tobey and two of his crew waiting with Sandra and Katsu Lang.

"Have you got two men who can handle a K-class?" Stan asked Tobey without preliminary.

"Any one of us can, Star," Tobey answered.

"Okay. Put them on the Erika and the Sassy Lassie. We've got to use them to swing the Phoenix so she's at right angles to the yard. We may have to take off on own drive power, and I don't want to crisp the docks."

Tobey looked at him quizzically. "I just got word that our fourteen K-class are on their way," he said. "I gather ETA about eight hours."

"In that case, let's get the Phoenix swung just as fast as we can. It may take a few hours to position her right, and I want her swung and the men onboard before those K's arrive."

"You really think Weed will make a move to take over the ship instead of letting us take off?" Lang asked.

Stan looked at the Mentor in surprise. "Of course. He's got to. He's not planning to lose his forty top goldiesl He'd do it even to keep from losing Tobey's crew, but it hasn't occurred to him they're vulnerable.

"No," Stan went on, "he's got to make his move now. We took him by surprise, loading the belters aboard, and he's off balance, but hell move. I expect those fourteen K's are loaded to the gills with soldiers, and we'll be in the middle of a first-class war in about eight hours.

"But meantime, Dr. Lang, you and Sandra can start setting up Common Room A for the de-hypnosis techniques. You can't start the actual work until after the war, but, assuming we win, I can free up a few men then to help you. You can get the place ready now, and you'll have two weeks on the way to Jupiter to do the job."

When the fourteen K-class ships showed, flying a tight pattern, it was Tobey himself who talked them into the nests, assigning each one its berth and berthing time, yak-king informally but with authority to the pilots, screening each one of them as he gave them instructions, and getting each one into a pattern of communication as he worked.

As the third ship magnalocked in, he switched his screen off and spoke to Stan, who was carefully out of range of the video.

"The pilots are alone in the control cabins," he said, "but I rather think you're right that there are other men aboard. Probably fifteen to twenty per ship."

Stan grinned crookedly. "It's a fair bet there are," he said.

"And, Star . . . these men are Earthies. There's not a Belter pilot aboard."

"Oh?" Stan paused. "You sure?"

"Hell no, I'm not sure," Tobey said. "But I'd lay odds on it."

Stan nodded. Then said, "If you can spot the command ship, bring it in last."

"I think I've got it spotted, and it even seems to be maneuvering to be last in. Okay."

Paulsen switched the screen back on and the process of talking the ships in continued. As the last ship was berthed there was a long pause, then Tobey's screen lighted to show the pilot of the final ship.

"Control officer," the man said grimly, "the locks aren't opening. What is the problem?"

Tobey raised his head to the screen as though from concentrated effort. "I don't know," he- said. "I was just trying to find out. I seem to be having some trouble with the magnalock system."

"Well, get it fixed and let us out," the voice said sternly.

Tobey left the screen on while he busied himself over the control console, biting on his lips in a gesture of vexation. Then he turned again to the screen.

"Have your pilots shut down all circuits for a minute," he said. "I'm going to send a power surge through the magnalock system to see if I can free it, but it might be enough to blow a weak circuit in a ship, and it'd be better if they were off."

"Who are vnn?" the man on the screen dem^ndM fiercely.

Tobey looked at him in surprise. "Tobev Olsen." he said finally. "Supervisor of the Ace Yards. Who are you?"

"Is Dustin aboard?" the man asked.

Tobey raised one eyebrow as though considering whether to obiect to the brusque treatment, then shrugged his shoulders. "I believe Mr. Dustin is with h's crew a"^ scientific personnel. They are"—his voice held a verv light sarcasm—"familiarizing themselves with the shin. If it will make you happier, I can have him called to the bridge."

"No. No, leave him to his toys. Very well. I'll have my men come off standby for a minute."

"Fine." said Tobey. "I'll give it a shot. If that doesn't work. 111 have to send a man down to open the locks man-uallv."

There was a pause while the pilot on the screen spoke into an intercom system. Then, "Very well. Olsen. All ships except this one have shut down, and I'm doing so now." There was a click and the screen went blank.

Instantly Tobev threw the switch that would send a surge of one hundred thousand gauss through each of the magna-locks to which the ships were joined—enough locking energy to hold the ships against a ten-G thrust; and enough stray magnetism to prevent the operation of anv radio or electric motor on board. The fourteen K*s were locked on, silenced, frozen in place, and helpless.

Then Tobey turned to Stan. "Your birds are secure. Star," he said. "Sure you don't want to just leave them aboard their ships? For a little, anyhow, until they learn who's boss?"

"No," said Stan. "Best we continue the operating procedure and get them the hejl out of our wav." Talong his seat at his own console, he activated a screen in the corridor outisde the locks. Tobey's twenty men were standing there, fully armed and at the ready.

Tobey had already activated his own screen and was speaking to his men. "Looks like what we've got aboard those ships is about twenty Earthie soldiers per," he said. "Think you can handle 'em?"

He was greeted with a roar of pleasure.

"Okay," he said. "Start with Lock Two. And boys," he added, "leave lock one-forty-four until last That one's got the command personnel aboard."

Stan watched, forcing back the tension that threatened to keep him from a clear head, as Tobey's crew began hand-manipulating the inner lock. This one they opened all the way, then five of them disappeared within. The outer lock would be opened only far enough for one man to squeeze through, according to plan, and ...

He could hear shouts and mumblings and a long time passed, but finally one man stumbled out of the lock into the arms of the waiting crew, followed a minute later by a small arsenal of personal weapons. The man was frisked again in the corridors, then shoved toward C section by one of Tobey's men, who held a gun to his back. Watching the man closely, Stan realized that Tobey had been right: these men were Earthies. He wasn't sure just what small clues gave the man away, but the Earthie background showed plainly.

Another followed, and another. It was a slow process.

When fifteen had come through, one of the crewmen came out and called toward the screen: "They say that's all of them."

"Don't believe it," Tobey answered. "Tell the rest they've got just three minutes to come out, then we're going to sleep-gas their ship and seal it They'll be there for at least two weeks, if they want to spend that long in suits."

There was a pause, and Tobey began timing it At the end of the three minutes he called again: "Come on out, boys. Then sleep-gas that one and seal it."

Emptying the second ship was a similar task, but it seemed to go faster. Tobey's crew was getting familiar with the operation. There were sixteen out this time before word came that that was alL

This time Tobey changed his command. "Take the last man out of that ship, send him into the other to see that we meant what we said. Then send him back for any more men that may be in his ship."

The last man out disarmed and disheveled from a thorough search for small arms, was brought up, given a low pressure suit and a diox shot and the lock on the first was unsealed. Five crewmen disappeared into the lock with him. Several minutes passed, then the Earthie came running from the lock, holding his arm, followed shortly by the five crewmen. One addressed the screen while the others sealed the lock.

"They thought he was one of us," Tobey was told succinctly. "They shot at him."

"Good." Tobey's voice was grim. "Now send that man back into his own ship, and let him tell them the story."

Shortly, from the second lock, men began appearing again, until the ship had disgorged twenty. When word came that that was all, Tobey instructed his men to use the wounded man as a shield, and go in to search the ship. It was all clear.

It took hours, but the crews came out, until they reached the final ship.

"Before you tackle that one," Tobey instructed, lines of strain showing around his grim mouth, "have one of the men from the first crew write a note. Get it shoved through the lock to the men in the first ship. See if they want to take advantage of a final offer, or if they prefer to stay where they are at our convenience, which will be a long time coming."

This time the remaining five men capitulated, and the only ship still unsealed was that one nested in 144.

"Now," said Tobey, "bring out the wounded man from that second ship. He's had first aid? Good. Send him through, alone, into the command ship, and have him explain the situation. If they want to capitulate, they can come out the way the others have—one at a time. If not, they stay where they are, and we sleep-gas the ship."

The man went in and the minutes passed. It seemed to Stan that time stood still. The inner lock on the 144 stood open; five of Tobey's crew were inside the lock. The outer lock was, presumably open enough to admit one man.

Finally the wounded man came out, was searched and sent on to Area C. Stan found himself holding his breath until a second man came out and the former process was on again.

The twentieth man out this time was in full Earth uniform, and Stan caught his breath as the men of Tobey's crew turned him this way and that, searching him as thoroughly as the others but, Stan noted, with a care that showed a deference for his insignia.

It was the general, Stan realized. The general that he had met once before, in Professor Mallard's office in the school on Earth.

"Bring the general to the bridge," he heard himself saying.

IX

THE GENERAL was seated on the far side of the desk from Stan; Tobey's man, JarL was lounging in the doorway with a stun gun, where he could keep a close eye on him. Tobey himself was seated against the wall.

If the general noticed the guard he gave no indication; he merely began to raise the hand that held a signet ring, to place it ^n the desk where Stan could see it. Stan let his own eyes follow it. Then, in a voice of authority, the general spoke: "I, the trainer, speak. You obey."

From the comer of his eye Stan saw Tobey jerk forward, Jarl draw himself up, but he gestured to them both.

"Never mind," he said. "It doesn't work on me." Then, to the general: "Remember? I'm the robot who refused to robe."

The general smiled, twisting the ring on his finger. "It always did seem a little too pat to me, Dustin. Very well. For the present at least, it seems to be your move." He looked up, the smile gently twisting his lips.

Stan found himself admiring the man. A professional to the fingertips. "What do you mean, 'for the present at least'?" he asked.

The general relaxed into his seat, but the motion in no way decreased the basic military exactness of his bearing. "I could, of course," he said genially, "stand on my right to give my name, rank and serial number and to refuse other information. But that seems hardly justified in"—he stared slowly around him, at Tobey, at the small cabin—"congenial circumstances. Instead I should prefer simply to tell you that I am authorized to give you clearance to Jupiter to continue your mission."

Stan nodded to himself. "That's why you brought two hundred and eighty men to board me—fully aimed?" he asked.

"Oh, we didn't plan to let you take the go]''-belters along. But I think we might have spared you fourteen pilots to K-boost you to orbit. Then you and Dr. Lang and the young lady could have remained aboard. Paulsen was to be allowed to remain as well."

"Thanks," said Stan. "Kindly of you, I suppose."

"You'd have had the Sassy Lassie. You could possibly have made something of the trip."

Stan laughed. The general looked at him thoudhtfnlly.

"I think, however, that under present ciT"rnct',nces . . .*" He allowed his voice to drop, then continued. "Since things have taken a different turn from that which we, ah, expected, I have sufficient authority to allow you to proceed with your gold-belters, and to keep the K's, once you have put my men"—he paused, and sketched a glance at Tobey, over his shoulder at the guard—"and Olsen's, down at the docks."

Stan smiled gently. "General," he said, "I must admit that you have gained my sincere admiration. It takes real guts, sir, to sit here in my office, my prisoner, and try to make terms that will set you safely back in the Belt. Earthies in the Belt," he said softly. "Earthie soldiers in the Belt You took off from Belt City," he added.

The general looked at him speculatively. "A small garrison," he said nonchalandy. "Available. So we used them."

"We?"

The general shrugged. Stan's face grew hard. "Weed," he said at last. "He took over AT so easily. I should have guessed. A tool of Earth?" The general's face remained bland, and Stan went on, "And he is the one who has been beating the drums for war with Earth—a war that the Belt was scheduled to lose. A fleet war that would be backed up by a fifth column in the Belt."

He waited, but the general remained silent.

"A small garrison, you say. Then you'd have been depending on a certain number of gold-belters in key points of control . . . hmm. I did upset your plans by kidnapping this particular forty, didn't I?"

He stared at the general, who had fixed his attention on the ceiling.

"Well," said Stan. "Well." Then he leaned forward and keyed the intercom to the bridge. When the screen lighted, he said, "Get the Belt News Service on the wire and ask where Earth Fleet is currently maneuvering." Then he leaned back and waited. The general's face had gone from red to white and was now coloring again.

It was several minutes before the word came through. "Last reports, sir, believed correct to about twenty-four hours ago: Earth in Gemini Sector and the fleet is reported maneuvering Beltward of Earth."

Stan switched off and turned to Tobey. "That puts Earth Fleet a bit over two weeks from Belt City at top acceleration. We should have at least that long before Weed is convinced that the general and his forces are irretrievably gone. He'll think that the general is using the K's to boost us to a Hohmann orbit as planned before coming back. It won't occur to him that we cduld knock out a force of two hundred and eighty Earth soldiers, especially when he thinks our goldies are under hypnotic control of the general, and that you're just aboard, Tobey.

"So I'd think we have at least two weeks before Weed can be convinced and can convince Earth that their schedule is shot to pieces, their cover is blown, and that they'd better scrap their timetable and attack on a crash priority basis; plus two weeks to get to the Belt. That gives us, say, twenty-eight days, phis or minus a few to go to Jupiter, and get back to intercept Earth Fleet."

Suddenly the general's voice rose to a bellow: "Surely you don't think this"—his voice choked off and his arm waved around to indicate the ship—"this ramscoop hunk could take on Earth Fleet? What do you think you are, a one-ship Goliath protecting the entire Belt orbit with a nickel-steel canister that doesn't even mount a cannon?"

Instead of answering, Stan turned to the guard in the doorway. "Jarl," he said, "quarter the general in one of the officer's suites under constant guard, one outside the suite, one inside with him. Take even the door to the fresher down. He is not to be by himself for one rninute. It'll tie up some men," he added, "but I think it's a good idea."

As the guard left with the general, Stan turned to the plug-heavy figure in the chair by the wall. 'Tobey," he said, "well get going as fast as you can assign your men to jobs. The Phoenix is a ramscoop . . . uh, canister," he added grimly, "and it's time she started cannoning."

Tobey nodded, grinning. "It's a picked crew, Star. They can handle."

The banded face of Jupiter was glaring in the control cabin screen, its fluorescence like a varicolored neon sign, with not one whit of surface detail visible from whatever might he below the neon glow of the upper atmosphere.

The hoot that sounded action stations went out over the intercom, dulled to a distant murmur in the control cabin.

"Main drives off. Relative velocity to be monitored continuously. Inertial guidance ..."

The ship was now on its own. Without drive, it was falling like a rock toward the huge planet below, aimed nearly directly for the equatorial belt and just toward the edge of the disk in a plotted flight that would take it around the curve to the east The chunk of nickel-steel that was the Phoenix would penetrate the atmosphere with a fantastic velocity, until the craft was gradually slowed in the thick friction of the hydrogen gas.

The G-needle climbed and climbed, and the droning voice that had been counting the seconds and the relative velocity had now switched over to reading G's.

Without moving his attention a hair's breadth from the control panel before him, Stan ordered, "Close the valves and activate the repulsion field."

"Aye, sir."

In the nose of the ship the huge tank plug was snapped into place by a magnetic field; and the gases forced through the radiator surface of the first compression tank began trickling out as liquids into the subsidiary tanks.

Then, almost as suddenly as it had come, the G-force dropped, the control room swung slowly on its gimbals to take up a new position oriented toward the planet they had passed. The lightest of tidal forces, less than a tenth of a G, was still tugging them back; but they were clear of the atmosphere and back in space.

Another G-force appeared as the drive tubes went into action and the control cabin swung once again on its gimbals, oriented now stem-drive in the normal manner of drive acceleration.

Stan smiled grimly. "And now we have a tight ship with a proved crew and full tanks of compressed liquid gas. We can go hunting."

X

STAN COULD only guess at Earth Fleet's course. It was purely a guess, and like a game of chess, the number of other moves that Earth Fleet might make formed an astronomical figure. Yet, like chess, those moves were limited to the area of the board, as long as the goal was Belt City and a war to destroy the independence of the Belt.

Arid it had to be Belt City, for the Belt would be won or lost there; and Belt City was where the Earth garrison of troops would be hidden.

Yet searching space by guesswork to locate the blinkers that would identify a fleet in motion was playing tag blindfolded in the dark, Stan knew. The search would have to be narrowed to a comparatively minute sector for there to be any hope of success.

When he took the problem to Tobey, the answer was immediate.

"Hell," said Tobey, "me and the crew, we know almost every skipper in the Belt . . . and Belt ships are all over the place. Til send out word we want to know where Earth Fleet is. Well get it."

"But Tobey! The fleet will be on radio silence and deep secret maneuvers."

"Won't make a nevermind," Tobey snorted. "There's no fleet made that can keep its whereabouts secret if you've got enough eyes watching from enough places."

But as the Phoenix sped on its swift flight sunward, the queries that sped ahead of it brought no satisfactory results. Rumors came back by the dozen; rumors that placed Earth Fleet all over the system. But no hard facts. Nothing on which to focus a camera.

Yet as the reports came in, the cameras went into action; and each sector named was filmed. After the twentieth report, Stan gave up sitting personally and looking at the blinking pattern of stars. Blinkers they spotted time after time, but blinkers that were normal Belt debris, either asteroids or ships, but no fleet.

And velocity and vectors, the basic factors of space flight, were drawing the deadline closer for any course change that would intersect—if the fleet was actually readying to attack Belt City.

Stan held himself calm on the bridge, but off duty he paced his office. Suppose Earth Fleet was refusing to react to the factors that dictated immediate action? he asked himself. No. They had to react now, or sacrifice the buildup of their garrison in Belt City. They had to react before the Phoenix returned to alert the Belt to the entire plot. They had to react. And the only sensible reaction was immediate attack. . . .

Then came an almost laconic message from a Belt prospector: "Bogies on my screen. Too far to be more than bogies. Could be a whish of asteroids out of orbit. But could be your fleet." The message was addressed to Tobey, who brought it instantly to Stan.

"Reckon that's them, Star?"

Stan stared at the message. "Who's your man, Tobey?"

"Prospector.A good one. He doesn't spook easy. When he says bogies, there are bogies. When he says they could be our fleet, he means there are enough of them and the characteristics are there. But he has no info on why they should be there; and they could be something else. So he's not about to commit himself."

"You think it's them?"

Tobey grinned. "I know damned well," he said. "Jim knows asteroids don't go out of orbit."

Hope surged through Stan as he and Tobey set up the computer for a view of the prospector's sector. As Tobey manipulated the computer, Stan manipulated the camera, swung it onto the target area and matched the stars on the videoscreen as projected by the camera against the stars on the videoscreen projected by the computer.

Blink, blink. For a few moments they were all blinking. And then with the fine controls of the camera, they phased gradually in until the stars bumed steady and clear.

There were many blinkers left after the background steadied out, and then those began to disappear as the computer picked off and identified the normal orbits of asteroids, leaving only the non-standard orbits of ships.

Many of the ones that were left, Stan could disregard. They were obviously K-class, identifiable as much by their winking patterns as by their size. But there was one group left, unidentified; and these he magnified up to the very limits of the camera's ability, and then again up to the very limits of the ability of the electron screen to magnify the camera's image. The ghosdy shapes were still mere pinpoints, but it was a group of at least twenty traveling in unison, and that, for Stan, was enough information.

For the next two hours, the Phoenix shifted back and forth across a line drawn from itself to the moving targets. The range was found, and the velocity; and it was very definite that its velocity would bring Earth Fleet to Belt City in fourteen days.

"We can just make it," Stan said, "with maybe two days to spare."

"Now hear this. Now hear this. All hands secure for high-G. Fifteen minutes."

Stan's eyes roved across the bridge as Paulsen's voice continued over the all-channel intercom, and his chin set slowly. He would have preferred to have Paulsen at the control officer's console. But not yet, he told himself. The hypnosis had been yanked; he was sure of it, and Lang had reassured him. Yet, not until there is absolute certainty, he told himself.

The other gold-belters thought themselves free now of confinement; but he had given orders to Jarl that once they had secured for high-G the bulkheads were to be secured without their knowledge, and the action reported to him.

"Area B secured, sir." It was Jarl's voice on his personal intercom.

"Thank you. Best you secure yourself for high-G now," he answered. Then to Paulsen, "Turn on screens and speakers throughout the ship so that every man, prisoner or crew, can watch and hear the action."

"Yes, sir," said Paulsen.

The minutes passed slowly, and the Phoenix hung directly in the course of the oncoming Earth Fleet with an orbital velocity that matched her fairly well to the Belt, though she was inside it.

Stan now addressed his first mate: "Mr. Barnes. Are they closing satisfactorily?"

"Yes, sir. They were all bunched up, but now they're beginning to spread out as though they plan to pass us in a ring partem."

"Are they still decelerating?"

"No, sir. When they smoothed out into a ring, they began to let 'em drift."

"And we're still nose-on?" "Yes, sir."

"Very well, Mr. Barnes. Operate the external proton beams to bring us up to ten KV negative charge." That would make the Phoenix negative in respect to Earth Fleet. Any metallic vapor discharged would be attracted to the fleet. Turning to the navigator's console where Tobey sat, relaxed, Stan saw him smiling, a grim smile with a fierceness tugging at the comers of his mouth, but a smile. Stan nodded quietly to himself and put his full attention on the screen before him. "Laser range?"

"Five minutes to laser." The voice became taut as Earth Fleet seemed to leap toward them.

"Count down to their range of firing, Mr. Barnes."

"Estimated countdown, sir, is four minutes; three; two; one. In seconds . . . thirty. Twenty. Ten. Nine, eight seven six. ..."

The countdown passed zero and went to minus one, then minus two. . . .

There was a swirling glare that covered the forward viewscreens, but Barnes held the controls steady and Stan watched the second hand of the chronometer. Three seconds. Then a slight jar.

"Damage control, sir. They all bracketed the same center of the bow and penetrated number one tank. We've lost approximately fifteen hundred cubic feet of hull from that area, and tank pressure is falling over toward zero."

On the screen the cloud of roiling metallic vapor that had been solid nickel-steel was drifting away from the Phoenix, racing ahead of them. Then, at first mistily and then more solidly, Earth's fleet appeared, pulling through the cloud of vapor, but scattering wildly as though they had attempted to miss its outer edges.

But there had been no misses. Each ship emerged from the cloud as shiny as a newborn nickel. The viewscreen showed no damage, only a bright, shiny mirror-surface which had been plated on the normal dull-white of the Earth ships by the metal vapor in vacuum.

"Mr. Bames. Put us on a braking course and maneuver as necessary to match velocities with the Earth Fleet. Set the course to maintain this distance."

"No ladar signals, sir." Paulsen's voice was strained as he handled the console above his couch.

On the screen, the circle of ships was drifting past them, and then seemed to rotate as Bames brought the Phoenix around in a match-course maneuver.

Stan flipped his microphone onto another channel. "K-class pilots. Get your ships warmed up. You will be dropped as soon as we match orbits with Earth Fleet, and you will each guard a section of that fleet. Take no action unless an attempt is made to remove the mirror plating on those ships. If such an attempt is made, sting 'em till they blow."

"They don't seem to be operating very well, Star, those Earthies." Even Tobey's heavy-muscled throat seemed to be having trouble with the now constant four-G maneuvering thrust.

"Few ships operate well with all viewscreens, navigation equipment, and aiming devices out of service," Stan answered in what he had intended to be a dry tone, but what came out as a croak.

"That was the damnedest suckering move anybody ever pulled on them, Star." There was a satisfied note in the croaking voice. "I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't even seal their air locks."

"How about common old radio, Boss?" Paulsen asked. "Does it bother that, too?"

"It'll have plated out over the antenna insulators too, and grounded them to the ships." Stan frowned in concentration. "They do have a system which uses the whole ship as a half-wave dipole. They might still be able to get through on that. Mr. Paulsen, see if you can pick up Earth Fleet on the four-ninety to four-ninety-five kilohertz band."

Paulsen began twiddling the dials and snapping over switches, and after a few moments was rewarded with a thin, scratchy voice. ". . . peat. S.O.S. Flagship Aurora. We have been hit by a mirror bomb. Our circuits are . . ." The voice scratched and grew fainter, then came in more strongly. ". . . screens blank. We cannot maneuver...."

"Very well, Mr. Paulsen. Break in on them."

"Phoenix to Earth Fleet. Phoenix to Earth Fleet." Paulsen's voice had reassumed the crisp duty-tone of the bridge.

There was silence elsewhere as Paulsen's voice intoned the call, a little louder, than necessary, Stan realized, for the benefit of the intercom. Listen good, you guys aft, he thought. Listen real good, all of you.

Abruptly the speaker on Paulsen's console came to life. It was a weak life, and the voice was scratchy. "Commodore Rimes to Phoenix. We read you." Stan pulled a microphone to him, nodded to Pauslen to switch the call over. Then said, "Commodore Rimes, this is Star Dustin, Belt Commander. You are now blinded, and therefore I must warn you: you and your ships are safe only as long as you make no attempt whatsoever to send men onto the surface of any ship. Any ship on which figures appear will be blasted out of space. Otherwise, you will not be harmed."

"Commander Dustin, I hear you. We will give you our answer shortly." The voice was stronger now.

Stan grinned to himself. "Commodore Rimes," he said, "while you are considering your answer, you might consider the fact that it is within my power to hit you with a megaroentgen second blast from my drive tubes that would kill everything on board and sterilize your entire fleet. I do not plan to do so."

There was a pause before the answer came back: "Commander Dustin, I have no choice but to take you at your word when you say that you will not sterilize this fleet." "There would be no point to senseless slaughter, sir." "Then I accept your terms. We will send no men to the surface until further notice. However, Earth cannot be too long patient with piratical actions. I hope, Commander Dustin, that you will come to the Aurora immediately to discuss the situation."

"Commander Rimes," Stan said grimly, "Earth Fleet was on its way to take over the Belt when we intercepted. The Belt has no quarrel with Earth. It is Earth that is quarreling with the Belt. We will discuss the matter at our convenience, and will at that time ferry you over here. In the meantime you will be safe only as long as you keep your men inboard."

After he had switched off, Stan leaned back in his chair and rubbed his hand wearily over his eyes. Then he turned to Tobey. "Your K-pilots are not to harm any ship unless and until a man comes to the surface to repair damage. We don't want anybody taking out their desires for personal retribution."

Tobey nodded, his eyes on Stan.

"And, Tobey. Belt City will have to take care of Weed and whatever Earthie garrison he has stashed there. Can you alert them?"

"We'll take care of the cleanup Job, Star," said Tobey quietly. "With Earth Fleet out of the way, there won't be too much of a problem in that They'll be knocked out as soon as the boys on Belt City find out they're there. But, Star ... I don't guarantee there won't be what you call personal retribution in that operation."

The general, Commander Rimes, Stan and Tobey sat around the small desk in Stan's office. Paulsen, Sandra and Dr. Lang sat silent against the walls.

The general, Stan noted, had lost none of his mihtary bearing, and Stan found himself irrelevantly pleased with the fact. There's a dignify about professional military men, he told himself hopefully, and perhaps some common sense. I'd hate to be dealing with Weed or Mallard, he thought

Then he turned to Commander Rimes and silently retracted the idea. Rimes was quite a different breed of cat, even though probably a professional. His bearing was arrogant rather than military; and he was rarrying it to the point of insolence. Frustration, Stan decided; and guilt Both show.

"You understand what has happened, gentlemen?" he asked, opening the conference.

It was the general who answered. "No," he said. "Not really. We know that you have knocked out a small army and then Earth Fleet I am not trained as a physicist Mr. Dustin; but I expect that the military will do well in the future to put physicists into prominent posts. It has been

—well, technological thinking, I suppose, by which the Belters have caught us by surprise each tune."

Stan smiled and shook his head. "You don't need physicists, General. You need individualists. Mallard and Weed were trying to give you robots; and that was the worst sabotage anyone could have perpetrated upon you. It takes a man who has had to fight and win against his own hostile environment to be able to fight and win against the far less serious opposition of an army or a space fleet."

Commander Rimes spoke up brusquely. "Whatever we may need, Commander Dustin, you may be sure we will put our attention to it. Our question is, simply, what do you hope to accomplish now? With us?".

Stan looked him over carefully. "I hope," he said, "to accomplish bloodless cease-fire and surrender terms in which Earth admits the Belt's sovereignty and withdraws all future claim to control of the solar system."

The commander snorted. "You have, sir, in a rather simple technological maneuver, blinded Earth Fleet and now hold it helpless. You fooled me, Dustin. You won't fool us twice, of course. You have also, I gather, captured and now hold a small force of Earth soldiers, captured no doubt by some other unexpected system. But Earth herself is neither stupid nor helpless; nor do I think you can dictate surrender terms to her."

Stan raised one eyebrow, looking at the commander quizzically. "Earth is not helpless? Well, no. Earth is just scared," he said quietly. As the commander started an angry rejoinder, he continued, "Earth has been afraid of space since the first Sputnik back in the mid-Twentieth Century. Earth's establishment has used every weapon at its command, from the top secret label to murder and sabotage, to keep man out of space . . . because Earth is afraid of spacemen. And rightly so.

"But, gentlemen, we are spacemen. And Earth may fear us all she likes; she can no longer control us. The Belt will accept Mother Earth as an equal, but Belters will be no man's servants. Neither, as free men, do we wish to force Earth to her knees, although we are quite capable of doing so."

"Force Earth to her knees? Why, you pipsqueak commander of a one-ship armada, Earth does and must control the solar system. She—"

From trie comer of his eye Stan saw Paulsen stiffen, saw Tobey half rise from his seat

Quicker than either of the other two, he leaned forward and his voice overrode the commander's, his eyes fiercely boring into the—yes, frightened eyes, he realized—before him.

"You don't control any animal but a tame one, mister," he said, and his voice held the grimness of space. "And take this as a dictum: the men of the Belt are not tame-not to you, not to anybody. You don't tame space with tame men, mister.

"The Belt," he added slowly, "the Belt will not now, nor ever again, accept as much as a single gesture of domination from the tame men of Earth. And we have the means to back up our refusal."

Commander Rimes opened his mouth to answer angrily, but the general silenced him with a gesture, and it was the general who spoke quietly to Stan. "You have the means?"

Stan turned with relief to the professional calm of the other. Slowly he nodded. "We have the means," he said; and then he added bleakly, "It is a brutal means. We will not use it unless we are forced to do so. But neither will we let the weaklings of Earth use our ethical sense to enslave us. If Earth forces the question, we will not hesitate to be brutal."

Stan paused a minute, noting that the commander was holding himself in check only by obvious effort, then turned back to the general. "You've seen the Phoenix dive through atmosphere? On Jupiter, where the escape velocity is much higher than that of Earth?"

The general nodded, and Stan went on. "If this ship was taken to about five thousand feet and orbited Earth, only once, at say the forty-five degree parallel, do you know what would happen?"

The general answered slowly: "There would be a rather major disaster from shock wave, I assume; and the forty-five degree parallel would, of course, take you across the major population and governmental areas...."

"Yes," said Stan. "Shock wave. But not just major shock wave damage, General, at the speeds at which this ship travels. Say a shock wave sufficiently deadly to kill anyone within five hundred miles on either side of the ground path zero. We wouldn't be breaking any nuclear test ban treaties. There would be no nucleonics involved whatsoever, other than the nucleonics of our drive. But the effect would be much the same.

"Where that shock wave touches ground, over a wide band, well . . . How much of Earth do you think would withstand a blast of upward of a million degrees of temperature? At that temperature, the very rocks would melt And the ground zero path beneath that shock wave would be as sterilized as any desert you now have.

"I doubt very much that Earth is prepared to pay for attempted domination of the solar system by such a disaster."

The general's face had gone quite white.

The glowing veils of neon light with which Jupiter hides her face from the rest of the solar system danced and shimmered before them as Stan and Sandra stood outside on the nose surface of the huge wad-cutter bullet that was the Phoenix, staring up at the still distant but approaching planet

"I knew it would be worth coming out to see it but oh, Star, I didn't realize how truly beautiful it could be!" Sandra's voice, even over the speaker in his suit throbbed with a joy that brought a catch to Stan's throat. Then she added, "It seems a shame to dive into that Are you sure we won't spoil the beauty?"

"Not much." He looked down at her trim figure in the P-suit tights that outlined every curve and detail. "Well just look like a big streak of hghtning—and be gone about as quick."

Her voice was hesitant Then, "But, Stan. Why should we bother? Why have we come back? We've won. You're in control at AT. The Belt is free. Earth is whipped."

"What do you mean, 'won,' liebchen?" Stan slipped his arm around the slender figure, holding her lithe suppleness close, though the bubble helmets kept their heads apart, and the heavy cloth of the P-suits made a wall between them.

"Why .. ." She looked up at him, her face showing through the bubble, doubtful. "We nave won, haven't we?"

He laughed, looking down into the bubble of her helmet, separating the blazing reflections from Jupiter on its surface from the stubbornness of her face beneath the clear plastic.

"In words made famous long ago, we have just begun to fight, you know," he said happily, a deep pleasure suffusing him. "Sandra, Sandra—can't you see that we haven't won? Not yet? There will be tensions between Earth and the Belt for as long as there are only the two terminals—two groups of men with different ideas. The only answer is for us to go to the stars, so that there are lots of groups with lots of ideas; then those ideas and groups will be so spread out that it's impractical, ever again, to get man bottled up into one little system where his only way to let off steam is to clobber his nearest neighbor."

"The stars, Stan? I thought that was just . . . just the stuff of dreams. Just talk. Can the Phoenix ... F"

"No. Not the Phoenix. Not to the stars. But see that spark of light over there? That's one of Jupiter's moons. That's Io. And Io falls just within the mass limits necessary to make a planetary starship. Itll take a few years to stock that ship, to get a colony going, to set up the necessary radiation belts and atmosphere, to build the small 'sun' that will be the focus of the magnetic vortex that will power and light our ship. It will take a few years to build her right But we can do it. The equations are all there. They've been there since the mid-Twentieth Century. And it's time somebody put those equations to work.

"Sandra," he said softly over the speaker into her helmet gazing up into the glory that is Jupiter, "Sandra, we can't stay planetbound or Beltbound, or systembound. We're going out to where we'll be a quasar on Earth's telescopes. We're going out to join the other quasars that Earth has spotted in her telescopes.

"We're going to the stars."

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