Lucas Garner gasped and stopped his chair with a jerk. Alone among the pedestrians around him, who were behaving as if they had very bad headaches, Garner listened. There must be information buried in all that emotion! But Garner learned nothing. He felt the sense loss becoming his own, sapping his will to live until he felt he was drowning in a black tide.

"It doesn't hurt," said Kzanol/Greenberg in a calm, reassuring, very loud voice. The loudness, hopefully, would carry over Masney's screaming. "You can feel it but it doesn't hurt. Anyway, you have enormous courage, more than you have ever had in your whole life." Masney stopped screaming, but his face was a mask of suffering. "All right," said Kzanol/Greenberg. "Sleep." He brushed Masney's face with his fingertips. Masney collapsed. The car continued weightlessly across the concrete, riding its cushion of air, aiming itself at the cylindrical shell that was the Lazy Eight III. Kzanol/Greenberg let it go. He couldn't operate the controls from the back seat, and Masney was in no shape to help. He could have cut the air cushion, by stretching, but only if he wanted to die.

The mental scream ended. He put his hand on Masney's shoulder and said, "Stop the car, Lloyd." Masney took over with no sign, physical or mental, of panic. The car dropped gently to the ground two yards from the outer hull of the giant colony ship.

"Sleep," said Kzanol/Greenberg, and Masney slept. It would probably do him good. He was still under hypnosis, and would be deeper when he awakened. As for Kzanol/Greenberg, he didn't know what he wanted. To rest and think perhaps. Food wouldn't hurt him either, he decided. He had recognized the mind that screamed its pain over hail of Kansas, and he needed time to know that he was not Kzanol, thrint, lord of creation.

By and by there was a roar like a fusor exploding. Kzanol/Greenberg saw a wave of flaming smoke pour across the concrete, then gradually diminish. He couldn't imagine what it was. Cautiously he lowered his mind shield and found out.

Jato units. Kzanol was going after the second suit.

Ships and scopes and Confinement Asteroid- by these you may measure the Belt.

A century ago, when the Belt was first being settled, the ships used ion drives and fission batteries and restarting chemical attitude jets. Now they use fusion tubes, based on a method of forcing the inner surface of a crystal-zinc tube to reflect most forms of energy and matter. The compact air converter has replaced tanked air and hydroponics, at least for months-long hops, though the interstellar colony ships must grow plants for food. Ships have become smaller, more dependable, more versatile, cheaper, far faster, and infinitely more numerous. There are tens of thousands of ships in the Belt.

But there are millions of telescopes. Every ship carries at least one. Telescopes in the Trojan asteroids watch the stars, and Earth buys the films with seeds and water and manufactured products, since Earth's telescopes are too near the Sun to avoid distortion by gravity bend and solar wind. Telescopes watch Earth and Moon, and these films are secret. Telescopes watch each other, recomputing the orbit of each important asteroid as the planets pull it from its course.

Confinement Asteroid is unique.

Early explorers had run across a roughly cylindrical block of solid nickel-iron two miles long by a mile thick, orbiting not far from Ceres. They had marked its path and dubbed it 5-2376.

Those who came sixty years ago were workmen with a plan. They drilled a hole down the asteroid's axis, filled it with plastic bags of water, and closed both ends. Solid fuel jets spun S-2376 on its axis. As it spun, solar mirrors bathed it in light, slowly melted it from the surface to the center. When the water finished exploding, and the rock had cooled, the workmen had a cylindrical nickel-iron bubble twelve miles long by six in diameter.

It had been expensive already. Now it was more so. They rotated the bubble to provide half a gee of gravity, filled it with air and with tons of expensive water covered the interior with a mixture of pulverized stony meteorite material and garbage seeded with select bacteria. A fusion tube was run down the axis, three miles up from everywhere: a very special fusion tube, made permeable to certain wavelengths of light. A gentle bulge in the middle created the wedding-ring lake which now girdles the little inside-out world. Sunshades a mile across were set to guard the poles from light, so that snow could condense there, fall of its own weight, melt, and run in rivers to the lake.

The project took a quarter of a century to complete.

Thirty-five years ago Confinement freed the Belt of its most important tie to Earth. Women cannot have children in free fall. Confinement, with two hundred square miles of usable land, could house one hundred thousand in comfort; and one day it will. But the population of the Belt is only eight hundred thousand; Confinement's score hovers around twenty thousand, mostly women, mostly transient, mostly pregnant.

Lars held a raw carrot in one hand and the knob of a film scanner in the other. He was running six hours of film through the machine at a rate which would have finished the roll in fifteen minutes. The film had been taken through one of the Eros cameras, all of which now pointed at Earth.

For most of the next week, Eros would be the closest asteroid to Earth. The films would be running constantly.

Suddenly Lars stopped chewing. His hand moved. The film ran back a little. Stopped.

There it was. One frame was whited out almost to the corners.

Lars moved the film to a larger scanner and began running it through, slowly, starting several frames back. Twice he used the magnifying adjustment. Finally he muttered, "Idiots."

He crossed the room and began trying to find Ceres with a maser.

The duty man picked up the earphones with his usual air of weary patience. He listened silently, knowing that the source was light-minutes away. When the message began to repeat he thumbed a button and said, "Jerry, find Eros and send the following. Recording. Thank you, Eros, your message received in full. Well get right on it, Lars. Now I've got news for you." The man's colorless voice took on a note of relish. "From Tanya. The 'doc says in seven months you'll be the father of healthy twin girls. Repeat, twin girls…"

Carefully, with a constant tapping of fingers on at-thuds jet buttons, Lit Shaeffer brought his ship into dock at Confinement's pole. A constant thirty miles below, Ceres was a pitted boulder spotted with glassy-looking bubbles of flexible transparent plastic. He rested for a little- docking was always tricky, and Confinement's rotation was unsettling even at the axis- then climbed out the lock and jumped. He landed in the net above the nearest of the ten personnel airlocks. Like a spider on a web, he climbed down to the steel door and crawled in. Ten minutes later, after passing through twelve more doors, he reached the locker room.

A mark piece rented him a locker and he stowed his suit and jet pack inside, revealing himself as a scrawny giant with dark, curly hair and a mahogany tan confined strictly to his face and hands. He bought a paper coverall from a dispenser. Lit and Marda were among the several hundred Belters who did not become nudists in a shirtsleeve environment. It marked them as kooks, which was not a bad thing in the Belt.

The last door let him out behind the heat shield, still in free fall. A spring lift took him four miles down to where he could get a tricycle motor scooter. Even Belter couldn't keep a twowheeler upright against Confinement's shifting Coriolis force. The scooter took him down a steep gradient which leveled off into plowed fields, greenhouses, toiling farm machinery, woods streams and scattered cottages. In ten minutes he was home.