asonably well-balanced individuals,
easily lost in a crowd. But the Big Vacuum could change that.

Ramos, Hines, and Nelsen had heard the stories. Now, their watchfulness
became almost exaggerated. They felt their inexperience. They made no
more radio beam contacts. One of them was always on lookout, clutching a
rifle, peering all around, glancing every few seconds at the
miniaturized radar screen set inside the collar of his helmet. But the
spherical sky remained free of any unexplained blip or luminous speck.
Fragments of conversations picked up in their phones--widely separated
asteroid-miners talking to each other, for the most part--obviously came
from far away. There was a U.S.S.F. bubb cruising a few million miles
off. Otherwise, the enormous emptiness was safely and perversely empty,
all around.

They kept accelerating. For a planned interval, they enjoyed all the
good things. They found that masculine guardedness and laziness went
well together. They ate themselves full. Like Mitch Storey had once
done, they all started hydroponic gardens inside their bubbs. In the
pleasant, steamy sun-warmth of those stellene interiors, they bounced
back and forth from elastic wall to elastic wall, with gravity
temporarily at zero because they had stopped the spin of their bubbs.
Thus they loosened their muscles, worked up a sweat. Afterwards they
dozed, slept, listened to beamed radio music or taped recordings of
their own. They smiled at pin-up pictures, read microfilmed books
through a viewer, looked at the growing plants around them.

There was an arrogance in them, because they had succeeded in bringing
so much of home out here. There was even a mood like that of a lost,
languid beach in the tropics. And how was that possible, with only a
thin skin of stellene between them and frigid nothing?

Ramos said just about what he had said--long ago, it seemed, now.
"Nuts--the Big Vacuum ain't so tough." But he amended quickly, "Yeah, I
know, Frank--don't scowl. When you aren't looking, it can up and kill
you. Like with my Uncle Jose, only worse. He was a powder monkey in
Mexico. It got so he thought dynamite was his friend. Well, there wasn't
even anything to put in his coffin..."

The luxurious interlude passed, and they reverted mostly to Spartan
meals of space-gruel, except for some fresh-grown lettuce. Mars became
an agate bead, then a hazy sphere with those swirled, almost fluid
markings, where the spores of a perhaps