flow in the dregs of a paper coffee cup? Mitch
would--more so than ever. He had plant life in his soul, maybe from
wandering in the swamps near his home in Mississippi. He had been
supporting himself here at school by fixing gardens. If it was plant
life of a different, dangerous sort, with other billions of years of
development behind it, that just made the call stronger. Mitch just sat
and thought, now, the mouth organ he seldom played sagging forward in
his frayed shirt pocket.

Ramos--Miguel Ramos Alvarez--only stood with his black-visored cap
pushed back on his head, and a cocky smirk of good humor on his mouth.
Reckless Ramos, who went tearing around the country in an ancient motor
scooter, decorated with squirrel tails and gaudy bosses, would hardly be
disturbed by any risky thing he wanted to do. The thumbtacked pictures
of the systems of far, cold Jupiter and Saturn--Saturn still
unapproached, except by small, instrumented rockets--would be the things
to appeal to him.

The Kuzak twins stood alertly, as if an extra special homecoming
football game was in prospect. But they weren't given to real doubts,
either. From their previous remarks it was clear that the asteroids,
those fragments of an exploded and once populated world, orbiting out
beyond Mars, would be for them. Osmium, iridium, uranium. The rich,
metallic guts of a planet exposed for easy mining. Thousands of
prospectors, hopeful characters, and men brutalized by the life in
space, were already drifting around in the Asteroid Belt.

Two-and-Two Baines wore a worried, perplexed expression. He was a
massive, rather lost young man who had to keep up with the times, and
with his companions, and was certainly wondering if he was able.

Little David Lester, the pedant, the mother's boy, who looked eighteen
but was probably older, pouted, and his heavy lips in his thin face
moved. "Cores," Nelsen heard him whisper. He had the habit of talking to
himself. Frank knew his interests. Drill cores withdrawn from the strata
of another planet, and inspected for fossils and other evidences of its
long history, was what he probably meant. Seeing Gimp in the Archie had
set off another scientific reverie in his head. He was a whizz in any
book subject. Maybe he had the brains to be a great investigator of the
past, in the Belt or on Mars, if his mind didn't crack first, which
seemed sure to happen if he left Earth at all.

But it was Glen Tiflin's reactions that wer