half an hour.

"All right, Frank," he said after some further conversation. "It looks
good enough. I'll chip in. Whether they're sucker bait or not, these
things will sell. Only--could it be you're running away?"

"Perhaps," Nelsen answered. "Or following my nose--by a kind of natural
compulsion which others will display, too. Two hundred of these to
start. The men going with me will pay for theirs. I'll cover the rest of
this batch: You'll be better than I am at figuring out prices and terms
for later batches. Just on a hunch, I'll always want a considerable
oversupply. Post One's shops can turn them out fast. All they are,
mostly, is just stellene, arranged in a somewhat new way. The
fittings--whatever can't be supplied now, can follow."

Fifty asteroid-hoppers, ten of them accompanied by wives, went with
Nelsen as he started out with a loaded caravan toward an empty region
halfway between the orbits of Earth and Mars. Everyone in the group was
convinced by yearnings of his own.

Thinking of Nance Codiss, Nelsen planned to keep within beam range of
the Red Planet. He had called Nance quite often. She was still working
in the Survey Station hospital, which was swamped with injured from
Pallastown.

Nelsen could tag all of the fierce drives in him with single words.

Home was the first. After all his years away from Earth, the meaning of
the word would have been emphatic in him, even without the recurrent
spasms of hot-cold weakness, which, though fading, still legally denied
him the relief of going back to old familiar things. Besides, Earth
seemed insecure. So he could only try to make home possible in space.
Remembering his first trip, long ago, from the Moon to Mars, he knew how
gentle the Big Vacuum could sometimes seem, with just a skin of stellene
between it and himself. Home was a plain longing, too, in the hard,
level eyes around him.

Love. Well, wasn't that part of the first item he had tagged?

Wanderlust. The adventurous distance drive--part of any wild-blooded
vagabond male. Here in his idea, this other side of a human paradox
seemed possible to answer, too. You could go anywhere. Home went with
you. Your friends could go along, if they wished.

Freedom. In the billions of cubic miles could any system ever be big
enough to pen you in, tell you what to think or do, as long as you hurt
no one? Well--he thought not, but perhaps that remained to be seen.

Safety. Deployment was supposed to be the s