ls and Guerrera and Lavrenti and
Fats. And he wasn't forgetting Keesey, the rookie who'd replaced him.

Keesey would have a rough time for a while--rough as a cob. The pit was
no playground. The first time you went out of the station in a suit, the
pit got you. Everything was falling, and you fell, with it. Everything.
The skeletons of steel, the tire-shaped station, the spheres and docks
and nightmare shapes--all tied together by umbilical cables and flexible
tubes. Like some crazy sea-thing they seemed, floating in a black ocean
with its tentacles bound together by drifting strands in the dark tide
that bore it.

* * * * *

Everything was pain-bright or dead black, and it wheeled around you, and
you went nuts trying to figure which way was down. In fact, it took you
months to teach your body that _all_ ways were down and that the pit was
bottomless.

He became conscious of a plaintive sound in the wind, and froze to
listen.

It was a baby crying.

It was nearly a minute before he got the significance of it. It hit him
where he lived, and he began jerking frantically at his encased feet and
sobbing low in his throat. They'd hear him if he kept that up. He
stopped and covered his ears to close out the cry of his firstborn. A
light went on in the house, and when it went off again, the infant's cry
had ceased.

Another rocket went up from the station, and he cursed it. Space was a
disease, and he had it.

"Help!" he cried out suddenly. "I'm stuck! Help me, help me!"

He knew he was yelling hysterically at the sky and fighting the
relentless concrete that clutched his feet, and after a moment he
stopped.

The light was on in the house again, and he heard faint sounds. The
stirring-about woke the baby again, and once more the infant's wail came
on the breeze.

_Make the kid shut up, make the kid shut up ..._

But that was no good. It wasn't the kid's fault. It wasn't Marie's
fault. No fathers allowed in space, they said, but it wasn't their fault
either. They were right, and he had only himself to blame. The kid was
an accident, but that didn't change anything. Not a thing in the world.
It remained a tragedy.

A tumbler had no business with a family, but what was a man going to do?
Take a skinning knife, boy, and make yourself a eunuch. But that was no
good either. They needed bulls out there in the pit, not steers. And
when a man came down from a year's hitch, what was he go