s, sir!"

St. Simon pushed himself over to the locker, took out his vacuum suit,
and climbed into it. After checking it thoroughly, he said: "Prepare to
evacuate main control room, Mr. Christian!"

"Aye, aye, Sir! All prepared and ready. I hope."

Captain St. Simon looked around to make sure he hadn't left a bottle of
coffee sitting somewhere. He'd done that once, and the stuff had boiled
out all over everywhere when he pulled the air out of the little room.
Nope, no coffee. No obstacles to turning on the pump. He thumbed the
button, and the pumps started to whine. The whine built up to a
crescendo, then began to die away until finally it could only be felt
through the walls or floor. The air was gone.

Then he checked the manometer to make sure that most of the air had
actually been pumped back into the reserve tanks. Satisfied, he touched
the button that would open the door. There was a faint jar as the
remaining wisps of air shot out into the vacuum of space.

St. Simon sat back down at the controls and carefully repositioned the
ship. It was now less than a meter from the surface. He pushed himself
over to the open door and looked out.

He clipped one end of his safety cable to the steel eye-bolt at the edge
of the door. "Fasten on carefully, Jules," he said. "We don't want to
lose anything."

"Like what, _mon capitain_?"

"Like this spaceship, _mon petit tete de mouton_."

"Ah, but no, my old and raw; we could not afford to lose the so-dear
_Nancy Bell_, could we?"

The other end of the long cable was connected to the belt of the suit.
Then St. Simon launched himself out the open door toward the surface of
the planetoid. The ship began to drift--very slowly, but not so slowly
as it had been falling--off in the other direction.

He had picked the spot he was aiming for. There was a jagged hunk of
rock sticking out that looked as though it would make a good handhold.
Right nearby, there was a fairly smooth spot that would do to brake his
"fall". He struck it with his palm and took up the slight shock with his
elbow while his other hand grasped the outcropping.

He had not pushed himself very hard. There is not much weathering on the
surface of an asteroid. Micro-meteorites soften the contours of the rock
a little over the millions of millennia, but not much, since the debris
in the Belt all has roughly the same velocity. Collisions do occur, but
they aren't the violent smashes that make the brilliant me