s place didn't have anything
excepting a lonely shack with paper-thin walls made of special
heat-insulating material. There wasn't a blade of grass; not a puff of
wind; no soil for violets; not even a symmetrical shape, it was lopsided
like a beaten-up baseball. Or at least that was what I thought until
something happened to the balance scales.

The idea of sending Jay Hayling, which is me, and ruddy Red Brewer to
Asteroid 57GM, was simply to check up on some figures which said that
this little 10-mile chunk of rock didn't have the right mass. Twice it
had been clocked on near passages to Jupiter and twice it had behaved
differently, as if it had suddenly lost some of its mass. So Red and I
had been sentenced to fifteen months alone in space on an asteroid just
to find out that somebody had made a mistake in arithmetic.

The sonar equipment showed what kind of rock it was--iron and basalt.
And I'd made borings which checked. We'd tested the speed of escape
which was a good push so we had to be careful, and its force of gravity,
which wasn't much. And then I'd discovered that the balance in the lab
had a habit of being 25 per cent wrong one way or the other every time
I tried to use it.

Red put away his razor and went through the little door leading to the
living quarters. The partition was crystal clear plastic so I could see
him pulling himself along by the hand rail toward the bookcase. I knew
he would presently find himself something to read while I worked.

* * * * *

We seldom walked in the laboratory. Our muscles, conditioned by
terrestrial gravity, were too strong for walking. We'd have bumped our
heads on the ceiling at every step and possibly we might even have
punched a hole in the roof, losing our air. So we sort of pulled
ourselves along by a system of hand rails on all of the anchored desks,
furniture and walls. It was like pulling yourself along the bottom of
the ocean by hanging onto rocks, since the air in the lab was dense
enough to support our almost weightless bodies.

I checked the scales every way I could and finally gave up. I'd tackle
the problem again tomorrow. Maybe something on the asteroid, some
magnetic rock or something, threw it off. I washed my hands in the
laboratory sink and then, while I wiped them on a towel, glanced at Red,
who was lying on his bunk reading. For the first time I noticed how
skinny he was getting. Lack of exercise, I presumed. We w