Rees prowled around the cables that girdled his world, muscles working restlessly. He completed two full circuits, passing huts and cabins familiar since his childhood, hurrying past well-known faces. The damp cloud, the thin air, the confinement of the Belt seemed to come together somewhere inside his chest. Questions chased around his skull. Why were human materials and building methods so inadequate to resist the forces of the world? Why were human bodies so feeble in the face of those forces?

Why had Ms parents had to die, without answering the questions that had haunted him since childhood?

Shards of rationality glittered in the mud of his overtired thinking. His parents had had no better understanding of their circumstances than he had; there had been nothing but legends they could tell him before their sour deaths. Children's tales of a Ship, a Crew, of something called Bolder's Ring… But his parents had had — acceptance. They, and the rest of the Belt dwellers — even the sparkiest, like Sheen — seemed implicitly to accept their lot. Only Rees seemed plagued by questions, unanswered doubts.

Why couldn't he be like everyone else? Why couldn't he just accept and be accepted?

He let himself drift to rest, arms aching, cloud mist spattering his face. In all his universe there was only one entity which he could talk to about this — which would respond in any meaningful way to his questions.

And that was a digging machine.

With a sudden impulse he looked about. He was perhaps a hundred yards from the nearest mine elevator station; his arms and legs carried him to it with renewed vigor.

Cloud mist swirled after Rees as he entered the station. The place was deserted, as Rees had expected. The whole shift would be lost to mourning; not for another two or three hours would the bleary-eyed workers of the next shift begin to arrive.