"

"That may be it," I said. I got to my feet, knowing I'd picked up all
there was from this man. "Thanks a lot for your cooperation," I said.

"Any time," he said. He stood and shook hands with me.

I went back out through the chatting prospectors and crossed the echoing
cavern that was level one, aiming to rent myself a scooter.

* * * * *

I don't like rockets. They're noisy as the dickens, they steer hard and
drive erratically, and you can never carry what _I_ would consider a
safe emergency excess of fuel. Nothing like the big steady-g
interplanetary liners. On those I feel almost human.

The appearance of the scooter I was shown at the rental agency didn't do
much to raise my opinion of this mode of transportation. The thing was a
good ten years old, the paint scraped and scratched all over its
egg-shaped, originally green-colored body, and the windshield--a silly
term, really, for the front window of a craft that spends most of its
time out where there isn't any wind--was scratched and pockmarked to the
point of translucency by years of exposure to the asteroidal dust.

The rental agent was a sharp-nosed thin-faced type who displayed this
refugee from a melting vat without a blush, and still didn't blush when
he told me the charges. Twenty credits a day, plus fuel.

I paid without a murmur--it was the company's money, not mine--and paid
an additional ten credits for the rental of a suit to go with it. I
worked my way awkwardly into the suit, and clambered into the driver's
seat of the relic. I attached the suit to the ship in all the necessary
places, and the agent closed and spun the door.

Most of the black paint had worn off the handles of the controls, and
insulation peeked through rips in the plastic siding here and there. I
wondered if the thing had any slow leaks and supposed fatalistically
that it had. The agent waved at me, stony-faced, the conveyor belt
trundled me outside the dome, and I kicked the weary rocket into life.

The scooter had a tendency to roll to the right. If I hadn't kept
fighting it back, it would have soon worked up a dandy little spin. I
was spending so much time juggling with the controls that I practically
missed a couple of my beacon rocks, and that would have been just too
bad. If I'd gotten off the course I had carefully outlined for myself,
I'd never have found my bearings again, and I would have just floated
around amid the scenery unti