ful there, no breeze stirred the leaves. Twenty feet
above, fixed in the air on clear spokes of lucite, the crystal globe
that was the sun for this small world gave forth its warming flood of
light, sunlight borrowed from the sunlight outside and led in on the
lucite spokes.

He had an interest in its manufacture, and had anchored his globe here
as a commercial sample of a spaceglobe for the viewing of likely
settlers. It was slightly better and more compact, since it was a
newer model, contained in an ovoid hull that was only forty-six by
sixty-six feet, but in essence it was like any of the farms and homes
of the asteroid belt, and there was nothing like it on any planet in
the universe.

VII

Behind the silver door a bell rang suddenly. A spaceship was
approaching.

It was still early. They would see the globe alone and assume that
Bryce had not yet arrived. The spaceship itself might be armed
illegally, but those within would not blast the globe without checking
its interior. Bryce glanced up at the silver door in the cliff and
arranged his position so as to be lounging on one elbow, with his gun
hand lying relaxed under a thin curtain of leaves. The magnomatic was
pointing up towards the corridor door.

There were a few tall bushes between the base of the cliff and
himself, but the silver central door was five feet up a flight of
steps and in clear view.

Four flights of steps radiated away from the circular door to the
hull, like spokes from an axle, all of them leading "down" to the
inside surface of the globe. As he waited he heard the faint clang of
magnetic soles hitting the metal of the airlock, and then the door
chimes that announced that the airlock was being used. Someone was
coming in.

He could follow their actions in his mind, timing them. Now they would
be floating in the vestibule, facing a circular wall with a door, the
wall spinning silently and rapidly, and the door in its center turning
slowly end over end. The door marked the axis of rotation. There was a
turning bar with handles running through the center of the airlock.
They would float up to that and grip it to pick up spin, until the
vestibule seemed to be rotating around them and only the circular wall
and the central door seemed to be steady. Beyond it would be the
corridor, and then the silver door.

The door in the cliff dilated silently. Two spacesuited men stood in
it.

It was incredible that he had let them come in with