rked fine. I was sick as a dog.

By the time we got to Atronics City, my insides had grown resigned to
their fate. As long as I didn't try to eat, my stomach would leave me
alone.

Atronics City was about as depressing as a Turkish bath with all the
lights on. It stood on a chunk of rock a couple of miles thick, and it
looked like nothing more in this world than a welder's practice range.

From the outside, Atronics City is just a derby-shaped dome of
nickel-iron, black and kind of dirty-looking. I suppose a transparent
dome would have been more fun, but the builders of the company cities in
the asteroids were businessmen, and they weren't concerned with having
fun. There's nothing to look at outside the dome but chunks of rock and
the blackness of space anyway, and you've got all this cheap iron
floating around in the vicinity, and all a dome's supposed to do is keep
the air in. Besides, though the Belt isn't as crowded as a lot of people
think, there _is_ quite a lot of debris rushing here and there, bumping
into things, and a transparent dome would just get all scratched up, not
to mention punctured.

From the inside, Atronics City is even jollier. There's the top level,
directly under the dome, which is mainly parking area for scooters and
tuggers of various kinds, plus the office shacks of the Assayer's
Office, the Entry Authority, the Industry Troopers and so on. The next
three levels have all been burned into the bowels of the planetoid.

Level two is the Atronics plant, and a noisy plant it is. Level three is
the shopping and entertainment area--grocery stores and clothing stores
and movie theaters and bars--and level four is housing, two rooms and
kitchen for the unmarried, four rooms and kitchen plus one room for each
child for the married.

All of these levels have one thing in common. Square corners, painted
olive drab. The total effect of the place is suffocating. You feel like
you're stuck in the middle of a stack of packing crates.

Most of the people living in Atronics City work, of course, for
International Atronics, Incorporated. The rest of them work in the
service occupations--running the bars and grocery stores and so on--that
keep the company employees alive and relatively happy.

Wages come high in the places like Atronics City. Why not, the raw
materials come practically for free. And as for working conditions,
well, take a for instance. How do you make a vacuum tube? You fiddle
with the