It wore nothing more than a vest with big pockets, a human-seeming garment as inappropriate as a snap-brim Fedora on Frankenstein’s monster. The swollen joints on its five-fingered hand felt like a score of ball bearings pressing into Brennan’s arm.

Thus, the Outsider. Not merely an obvious alien. A dolphin was an obvious alien, but a dolphin was not horrible. The Outsider was horrible. It looked like a cross between human and… something else. Man’s monsters have always been that. Grendel. The Minotaur. Mermaids were once considered horrors: all lovely enticing woman above, all scaly monster below. And that fitted too, for the Outsider was apparently sexless, with nothing but folds of armor-like skin between its legs.

The inset eyes, human as an octopus eye, looked deep into Brennan’s own.

Abruptly, before Brennan could make a move to fight back, the Outsider took two handfuls of Brennan’s rubberized suit and pulled them apart. The suit held, stretched, then ripped from crotch to chin. Air puffed. Brennan felt his ears pop.

No point in holding his breath. Several hundred feet of vacuum separated him from his own ship’s breathing air. Brennan sniffed cautiously.

The air was thin, and it carried a strange scent.

“You son of a bitch,” said Brennan. “I could have died.”

The Outsider didnt answer. It stripped off Brennan’s suit like peeling an orange, without unnecessary roughness but without excessive care. Brennan fought. One wrist was still manacled by the alien’s grip, but Brennan bruised his free fist against the alien’s face without causing it to do more than blink. Its skin was like leather armor. It finished stripping away the suit and held Brennan out for inspection. Brennan kicked it where its groin ought to be. The alien noticed and looked down, watched as Brennan kicked twice more, then returned to its inspection.

Its gaze moved over Brennan, head to feet, feet to head, insultingly familiar. In regions of the Belt where air and temperature were controlled, the Belters practiced nudity all their lives. Never before had Brennan felt naked. Not nude; naked. Defenseless. Alien fingers reached to probe his scalp along the sides of the Belter crest; massaged the knuckles of his hand, testing the joints beneath the skin. At first Brennan continued to fight. He couldn’t even distract the alien’s attention.

Then he waited, limp with embarrassment, enduring the examination.

Abruptly it was over. The knobby alien jumped across the room, dug briefly into a bin along one wall, came up with a folded rectangle of clear plastic. Brennan thought of escape; but his suit was in ribbons. The alien shook the thing open, ran fingers along one edge. The bag popped open as if he’d used a zipper.

The alien jumped at Brennan, and Brennan jumped away. It bought him a few seconds of relative freedom. Then knobby steel fingers closed on him and pushed him into the sack.

Brennan found that he couldn’t open it from inside. “I’ll suffocate!” he screamed. The alien made no response. It wouldn’t have understood him anyway. It was climbing back into its suit.

Oh, no. Brennan struggled to rip the sack.

The alien tucked him under an arm and moved out through the porthole. Brennan felt the clear plastic puff out around him, thinning the air inside even further. He felt ice-picks in his ears. He stopped struggling instantly. He waited with the fatalism of despair while the alien moved through vacuum, around the eyeball-shaped hull to where an inch-thick tow line stretched away toward the trailing pod.

There are few big cargo ships in the Belt. Most miners prefer to haul their own ore. The ships that haul large cargoes from asteroid to asteroid are not large; rather, they are furnished with a great many attachments. The crew string their payload out on spars and rigging, in nets or on lightweight grids. They spray foam plastic to protect fragile items, spread reflective foil underneath to ward off hot backlighting from the drive flame, and take off on low power.

The Blue Ox was a special case. She carried fluids and fine dusts; refined quicksilver and mined water, grain, seeds, impure tin scooped molten from lakes on dayside Mercury, mixed and dangerous chemicals from Jupiter’s atmosphere. Such loads were not always available for hauling. So the Ox was a huge tank with a small three-man lifesystem and a fusion tube running through her long axis; but since her tank must sometimes become a cargo hold for bulky objects, it had been designed with mooring gear and a big lid.

Einar Nilsson stood at the rim of the hold, looking in. He was seven feet tall, and overweight for a Belter; and that was overweight for anyone, for the fat had gone into his belly and the great round curve of second chin. He was all curves; there were no sharp edges on him anywhere. It had been a long time since he rode a singleship. He did not like the high gravity.

The device on his suit was a Viking ship with snarling dragon prow, floating half-submerged in the bright, milky swirl of a spiral galaxy.

Nilsson’s own small, ancient mining ship had become the Ox’s lifeboat. The slender length of its fusion tube, flared at the end, stretched almost the length of the hold. There was an Adzhubei 4-4 computer, almost new; there were machines intended to serve as the computer’s senses and speakers, radar and radio and sonics and monochromatic lights and hi-fi equipment. Each item was tethered separately, half a dozen ways, to hooks on the inner wall.

Nilsson nodded, satisfied, his graying blond Belter crest brushing the crown of his helmet. “Go ahead, Nate.”

Nathan La Pan began spraying fluid into the tank. In thirty seconds the tank was filled with foam which was already hardening.

“Close ’er up.”

Perhaps the foam crunched as the great lid swung down. The sound did not carry. Patroclus Port was in vacuum, open beneath the black sky.

“How much time we got, Nate?”

“Another twenty minutes to catch the optimum course,” said the young voice.

“Okay, get aboard. You too, Tina.”

“Sold.” The voice clicked off. Nathan was young, but he had already learned not to waste words over a phone. Einar had taken him on at the request of his father, an old friend.

The computer programmer was something else again. Einar watched her slender figure arcing toward the Ox’s airlock. Not a bad jump. Perhaps a touch too much muscle?

Tina Jordan was an expatriate flatlander. She was thirty-four years old, old enough to know what she was doing, and she loved ships. Probably she had sense enough to stay out of the way. But she had never flown a singleship. Einar tended to distrust people who did not trust themselves enough to fly alone. Well, there was no help for it; nobody else at Patroclus Base could run an Adzhubei 4-4.

The Ox would make a lateral run to put her in the path of the alien ship, then curve inward toward the sun. Einar looked away into diamond-studded darkness, in a direction almost opposite the sun. The sparse, dim points of the Trailing Trojans did not block his view. He did not expect to see the Outsider, and he didn’t. But it was there, falling to meet the Ox’s J-shaped orbit.

Three blobs in a line, a fourth hanging nearby. Nick stared at the screen, his eyes squinched almost shut so that strain lines showed like webs around his eyelids. Whatever had happened, it had happened now.

Other matters begged for the First Speaker’s attention. Dickerings with Earth on the funding of ramrobots and on apportionment of ramrobot cargoes among the four interstellar colonies. Trade matters regarding Mercurian tin. The extradition problem. He was spending too much time on this… but something kept telling him that it could be the most important event in human history.