the freshening and re-oxygenation of air, was
getting slightly pale. The moisture-reclaimers were--by luck--not as bad
as some of the other vital parts.

Ramos touched his needled side. His wry grin showed some of his reckless
humor. "It's not utterly awful, yet," he said. "How do you feel?"

Nelsen's hip hurt. And he found that he had an awful hangover from the
knockout drug, and the slapping around he had received. "Bad enough," he
answered. "Maybe if we ate something..."

They took small, sealed packets of dehydrated food in through their
chest airlocks, unsleeved their arms, emptied the packets into plastic
squeeze bottles from the utensil racks before them, injected water from
the pipettes which led to their shoulder tanks, closed the bottles and
let the powdered gruel swell as it reabsorbed moisture. The gruel turned
out hot all by itself. For it was a new kind which contained an
exothermic ingredient. They ate, in the absence of gravity, by squeezing
the bottles.

"Guess we'll have to become asteroid-hoppers--miners--like the slob
said," Nelsen growled. "Well--I _did_ want to try everything..."

This was to become the pattern of their lives. But not right away. They
still had an incomplete conception of the vast distances. They hurtled
on, certainly decelerating considerably, for days, yet, before they were
in the Belt. Even that looked like enormous emptiness.

And the brightened speck of Pallas was too far to one side. Tovie Ceres
was too near on the other side--left, it would be, if they considered
the familiar northern hemisphere stars of Earth as showing "up"
position. The old instruments had put them off-course. Still, they had
to bear even farther left to try to match the direction and the average
orbital speed--about twelve miles per second--of the Belt. Otherwise,
small pieces of the old planet, hurtling in another direction--and/or at
a different velocity--than themselves, could smash them.

Maybe they thought that they would be located and picked up--the gang
that had robbed and dumped them had found them easily enough. But there,
again, was a paradox of enormity. Bands might wait for suckers somewhere
beyond Mars. Elsewhere, there could be nobody for millions of miles.

They saw their first asteroid--a pitted, mesoderm fragment of
nickel-iron from middle-deep in the blasted planet. It was just drifting
slightly before them. So they had achieved the correct orbital speed.
They ion-glided to th