r.

_When the tubes conk out, the fuel runs down,
The cold creeps in to where I lie._

Pierce was reciting as they went back into the globe for the second
corpse.

_I'll take the meteor's trail--go home to Earth
And make a Viking's funeral in the sky._

"This is too easy," Bryce complained as they watched the second corpse
fade from sight. "The trouble is, in space all corpses are delicti.
It's an incentive. Launch your enemies."

"Gaucho country did all right under that system," Pierce said
somberly, "and so did the American frontier." He floated motionless, a
spacesuited figure turned toward the gray-green misted globe of Earth
that shone against the black star-sprinkled sky as if he could have
reached out and touched it. The sun caught the planet on its day
hemisphere and reflected brilliantly from a shadowy blue glaze of
water that was the Mediterranean, turning half of it to white fire.

Bryce's earphones picked up Pierce's voice again. "Frontier-born
nations always look back and say that the first years were the best."

The words caught at something Bryce had felt before. He looked at
Earth hanging splendidly in space. It was beautiful and he was fond of
it, but--He said, "I don't think we'll ever go back." Nor would
mankind itself. Never again--through all conquests from this point in
time--would mankind go back down into the mesh of gravity to be a thin
film over the surface of a planet.

"Give old Earth a smile, Bryce, we've hatched."

For a moment longer Bryce hung, watching Earth turning below. The
management of UT was down there. He'd be damned if he'd let them get
away with thinking they could tell him what to do, or tell the Belt
where a line should be extended and a colony planted. The belt was his
country, not theirs. Space belonged to the people who lived in it.

"No taxation without representation," Pierce said irrelevantly, as if
he had been reading Bryce's thoughts. They jetted back to the ship and
into the spacelock.

"Frontier country--" Bryce said as he stepped into the cubical of the
revolving door. Gently tightening elastic bands drew him into position
within the man-shaped mold. "What's a frontier on your terms, Roy?"
When he was in place the other half of the rubbery, air-excluding mold
closed on him and the airtight cylinder rotated, delivering him into
the interior of the ship. He pushed the button impatiently to have it
revolve back for Pierce, but it remaine