“Cut me some slack,” Gerald grumbled. “I know what I’m doing.”

The computer’s dynamical model agreed with Hachi, though. It still forecast no easy grab when the tether’s tip reached its brief rendezvous with… whatever piece of space junk lay in Gerald’s sights.

Another tooth-tap command, and night closed in around him more completely, simulating what he would see if he were up there, hundreds of klicks higher, at the tether’s speeding tip, where stars glittered more clearly. From that greater altitude, Earth seemed a much smaller disc, filling just a quarter of the sky.

Now, everything he heard, felt or saw came from the robotic cable. His lasso. A vine to swing upon, suspended from some distant constellation.

Once an ape… always an ape.

The tether became Gerald’s body. An electric tingle along his spine-a sleeting breeze-was the Van Allen radiation wind, caught in magnetic belts that made a lethal sizzle of the middle-orbit heights, from nine hundred kilometers all the way out to thirty thousand or so.

The Bermuda Triangle of outer space. No mere human could survive in that realm for more than an hour. The Apollo astronauts accumulated half of all their allotted radiation dosage during a few minutes sprinting across the belt, toward the relative calm and safety of the Moon. Expensive communications satellites suffered more damage just passing through those middle altitudes than they would in a decade, higher up in placid geosynchronous orbit.

Ever since that brief time of bold lunar missions-and the even-briefer Zheng He era-no astronaut had ventured beyond the radiation belt. Instead, they hunkered in safety, just above the atmosphere, while robots explored the solar system. This made Gerald the Far-Out Guy! With his bola for an arm, and the grabber for a hand, he reached beyond. Just a bit, into the maelstrom. No one else got as high.