too.

On another occasion, they almost believed that they had their rescue
made. Even their worn-out direction and distance finders could place the
ten or so voices as originating not much over a hundred miles away. But
they checked their trembling enthusiasm just in time. That was sheerest
luck. The curses, and the savage, frightened snarls were all wrong. "If
we don't catch us somebody, soon..."

Out here, the needs could get truly primitive. Oxygen, water, food,
repair parts for vital equipment. Cannibalism and blood-drinking could
also be part of blunt necessity.

Nelsen and Ramos were fortunate. Twenty miles off was a haze against the
stars--a cluster of small mesoderm fragments. Drawing power for their
shoulder-ionics from their almost spent nuclear batteries, they glided
toward the cluster, and got into its midst, doubling themselves up to
look as much like the other chunks as possible. They were like hiding
rats for hours, until long after the distant specks moved past.

While he waited, Frank Nelsen's mind fumbled back to the lost phantom of
Jarviston, Minnesota, again. To a man named Jig Hollins who had got
married, stayed home. Yellow? Hell...! Nelsen imagined the comforts he
might have had in the Space Force. He coaxed up a dream girl--blonde,
dark, red-headed--with an awful wistfulness. He thought of Nance Codiss,
the neighbor kid. He fumbled at the edge of a vast, foggy vision, where
the wanderlust and spacelust of a man, and needs of the expanding race,
seemed to blend with his home-love and love-love, and to become,
impossibly, a balanced unit...

Later--much later--he heard young, green asteroid-hoppers yakking
happily about girls and about how magnificent it was, out here.

"Haw-haw," he heard Ramos mock.

"Yeah," Nelsen said thickly. "Lucky for them that they aren't near
us--being careless with their beams, that way..."

Frank Nelsen sneered, despising these innocent novices, sure that he
could have beaten and robbed them without compunction. That far he had
come toward understanding the outlaws, the twisted men of the Belt.

Ramos and he seemed to go on for an indefinite period longer. In a
sense, they toughened. But toward the last they seemed to blunder
slowly in the mind-shadows of their weakening body forces. They had a
little food left, and water from the moisture-reclaimers. At
zero-gravity, where physical exertion is slight, men can get along on
small quantities of food. The sweetis