The oval face of Sheen floated before him, intelligent, skeptical and pragmatic.

He felt a flush burn up through his cheeks and he was suddenly glad that his descent was hidden by the mist.

He dropped out of the mist arid the star kernel was revealed. It was a porous ball of iron fifty yards wide, visibly scarred by the hands and the machines of men. The guide cable — and its siblings, spread evenly around the Belt — scraped along the iron equator at a speed of a few feet each second.

His descent slowed; he imagined the winch four hundred yards above him straining to hold him against the star's clutching pull. Weight built up more rapidly now, climbing to its chest-crushing peak of five gees. The wheels of the chair began to rotate, whirring; then, cautiously, they kissed the moving iron surface. There was a bump which knocked the breath out of him. The cable disengaged rapidly, whipping backwards and away through the mist. The chair rolled slowly to a halt, carrying Rees a few yards from the trail of the cable.

For a few minutes Rees sat in the silence of the deserted star, allowing his breathing to adjust. His neck, back and legs all seemed comfortable in their deep padding, with no circulation-cutting folds of flesh or cloth. He lifted his right hand cautiously; it felt as if bands of iron encased his forearm, but he could reach the small control pad set into the chair arm.

He turned his head a few degrees to left and right. His chair sat isolated in the center of an iron landscape. Thick rust covered the surface, scoured by valleys a few inches deep and pitted by tiny craters. The horizon was no more than a dozen yards away; it was as if he sat at the crest of a dome. The Belt, glimpsed through the layer of cloud around the star, was a chain of boxes rolling through the sky, its cables hauling the cabins and workshops through a full rotation every five minutes.

Rees had often worked through in his head the sequence of events which had brought this spectacle into being.