y for
honesty as they approached. They got within twenty-five miles.

Even without the memory that Tiflin might make guesses about what they
meant to do, Nelsen and Ramos would have taken no chances. They had to
be brutal. Homing darts pierced armor. The four went to sleep.

VI

The asteroid, Pallas, was a chunk of rich core material, two
hundred-some miles in its greatest dimension. It had a mottled, pinkish
shine, partly from untarnished lead, osmium, considerable uranium, some
iron, nickel, silver, copper. The metals were alloyed, here; almost
pure, there. There was even a little rock. But thirty-five percent of
Pallas' roughly spherical mass was said to be gold.

Gold is not rare at the cores of the worlds, to which most of the heavy
elements must inevitably sink, during the molten stage of planetary
developments. On Earth it must be the same, though who could dig three
thousand miles into a zone of such heat and pressure? But the asteroid
world had exploded. Pallas was an exposed and cooled piece of its heart.

Pallas had a day of twenty-four hours because men, working with great
ion jets angling toward the stars, had adjusted its natural rate of
rotation for their own convenience to match the terrestrial. A greater
change was Pallastown.

Frank Nelsen and Miguel Ramos made the considerable journey to it
without further incident. Because he was tense with hurry, Nelsen's
impressions were superficial: Something like Serene, but bigger and more
fantastic. A man weighed only a few ounces, here. Spidery guidance
towers could loom impossibly high. There were great storage bins for raw
metal brought in from all over the Belt. There were rows of water tanks.
As on the Moon, the water came mostly from gypsum rock or occasionally
from soil frost, both found on nearby crustal asteroids. Beyond the
refineries bulged the domes of the city itself, housing factories,
gardens, recreation centers, and sections that got considerably lost and
divergent trying to imitate the apartment house areas of Earth.

Frank Nelsen's wonder was hurried and dulled.

Gimp Hines and David Lester were waiting inside the stellene reception
dome when Nelsen and Ramos landed lightly at the port on their own feet,
with no more braking assistance than their own shoulder-ionics.

Greetings were curiously breathless yet casual, but without any
backslapping.

"We'd about given you two up," Gimp said. "But an hour ago Joe Kuzak
beamed me,