we?"

Whereupon John Endlich allowed himself the luxury and the slight relief
of a torrent of silent cussing inside his head. Damn the obvious
questions of women! Damn the miners. Damn the A.H.O.--the Asteroids
Homesteaders Office--and their corny slogans and posters, meant to hook
suckers like himself! Damn his own dumb hide! Damn the mighty urge to
get drunk! Damn all the bitter circumstances that made doing so
impossible. Damn! Damn! Damn!

Finished with this orgy, he said meekly: "I guess so, Hon."

* * * * *

All members of the Endlich family had been looking around them at the
weird Vestal landscape. Through John Endlich's mind again there flashed
a picture of what this asteroid was like. At the Asteroids Homesteaders'
School in Chicago, where his dependents and he had been given several
weeks of orientation instruction, suitable to their separate needs, he
had been shown diagrams and photographs of Vesta. Later, he had of
course seen it from space.

It was not round, like a major planet or most moons. Rather, it was like
a bomb-fragment; or even more like a shard of a gigantic broken vase. It
was several hundred miles long, and half as thick. One side of it--this
side--was curved; for it had been a segment of the surface of the
shattered planet from which all of the asteroids had come. The other
side was jagged and broken, for it had been torn from the mesoderm of
that tortured mother world.

From the desolation of his own thoughts, in which the ogre-form of Alf
Neely lurked with its pendent promise of catastrophe soon to come, and
from his own view of other desolation all around him, John Endlich was
suddenly distracted by the comments of his kids. All at once, conforming
to the changeable weather of children's natures regardless of
circumstance, their mood had once more turned bright and adventurous.

"Look, Pop," Bubs chirped, his round red face beaming now from his
helmet face-window, in spite of his undried tears. "This land all around
here was fields once! You can even see the rows of some kind of stubble!
Like corn-stubble! And over there's a--a--almost like a fence! An' up
there is hills with trees on 'em--some of 'em not even knocked over. But
everything is all dried-out and black and grey and dead! Gosh!"

"We can see all that, Dopey!" Evelyn, who was older, snapped at Bubs.
"We know that something like people lived on a regular planet here,
awful long ago. Why do