in the chair has to sit there and watch his brother
play basketball or jai alai, while he can't do anything himself. Like I
say, kind of rough on both of them."

"Yes, I suppose it must be. More coffee?"

"Thanks, honey. And another slice of toast, hunh?"

VIII

The two objects floating in space both looked like pitted pieces of rock.
The larger one, roughly pear-shaped and about a quarter of a mile in its
greatest dimension, was actually that--a hunk of rock. The smaller--_much_
smaller--of the two was a camouflaged spaceboat. The smaller was on a
near-collision course with reference to the larger, although their
relative velocities were not great.

At precisely the right time, the smaller drifted by the larger, only a few
hundred yards away. The weakness of the gravitational fields generated
between the two caused only a slight change of orbit on the part of both
bodies. Then they began to separate.

But, during the few seconds of their closest approach, a third body had
detached itself from the camouflaged spaceboat and shot rapidly across the
intervening distance to land on the surface of the floating mountain.

The third body was a man in a spacesuit. As soon as he landed, he sat
down, stock-still, and checked the instrument case he held in his hands.

No response. Thus far, then, he had succeeded.

He had had to pick his time precisely. The people who were already on this
small planetoid could not use their detection equipment while the
planetoid itself was within detection range of Beacon 971, only two
hundred and eighty miles away. Not if they wanted to keep from being
found. Radar pulses emanating from a presumably lifeless planetoid would
be a dead giveaway.

Other than that, they were mathematically safe--if they depended on the
laws of chance. No ship moving through the Asteroid Belt would dare to
move at any decent velocity without using radar, so the people on this
particular lump of planetary flotsam would be able to spot a ship's
approach easily, long before their own weak detection system would
register on the pick-ups of the approaching ship.

The power and range needed by a given detector depends on the relative
velocity--the greater that velocity, the more power, the greater range
needed. At one mile per second, a ship needs a range of only thirty miles
to spot an obstacle thirty seconds away; at ten miles per second, it needs
a range of three hundred miles.

The man who called himse