“You noticed a habit of mine once. I never make gestures. All Belters have that trait. It's because on a small mining ship you could hit something waving your arms around. Something like the airlock button.”

“Sometimes it's almost eerie. You don't move for minutes at a time.”

“There's always tension out in the rocks. Sometimes a miner would see too much danger and boredom and frustration, too much cramping inside and too much room outside, and he wouldn't get to a psychist in time. He'd pick a fight in a bar. I saw it happen once. The guy was using his hands like mallets.”

Steve had been looking far into the past. Now he turned back to Sue. She looked white and sick, like a novice nurse standing up to her first really bad case. His ears began to turn red. “Sorry,” he said miserably.

She felt like running; she was as embarrassed as he was. Instead she said, and tried to mean it, “It doesn't matter. So you think the people in the other ship might want to, uh, make war?”

He nodded.

“Did you have history-of-Earth courses?”

He smiled ruefully. “No, I couldn't qualify. Sometimes I wonder how many people do.”

“About one in twelve.”

“That's not many.”

“People in general have trouble assimilating the facts of life about their ancestors. You probably know that there used to be wars before hmmm — three hundred years ago, but do you know what war is? Can you visualize one? Can you see a fusion electric point deliberately built to explode in the middle of the city? Do you know what a concentration camp is? A limited action? You probably think murder ended with war. Well, it didn't. The last murder occurred in twenty-one something, just a hundred and sixty years ago.

“Anyone who says human nature can't be changed is out of his head. To make it stick, he's got to define human nature — and he can't.