ould demand better equipment? (I don't mean that the
equipment presently used is poor; I just mean that full
mechanization would do away with the present type of equipment and
replace it with a different type.)

Going through your course of instruction gave me the answer to
that, even though I didn't take the full treatment.

All my life, I've belonged to an organization of some kind--the
team, the crew, whatever it might be. But the Team was everything,
and I was recognized only as a member of the Team. I was a
replaceable plug-in unit, not an individual in my own right. I
don't know that I can explain the difference exactly, but it seems
to me that the Team is something outside of which the individual
has no existence, while the men of the Belt can form a team because
they know that each member is self-sufficient in his own right.

On Earth, we all depend on the Team, and, in the long run, that
means that we are depending on each other--but none of us feels he
can depend on himself. Every man hopes that, as a member of the
Team, he will be saved from his own errors, his own failures. But
he knows that everyone else is doing the same thing, and, deep down
inside, he knows that they are not deserving of his reliance. So he
puts his reliance in the Team, as if that were some sort of
separate entity in itself, and had magical, infallible powers that
were greater than the aggregate of the individuals that composed
it.

In a way, this is certainly so, since teamwork can accomplish
things that mobs cannot do. But the Team is a failure if each
member assumes that he, himself, is helpless and can do nothing,
but that the Team will do it for him.

Men who have gone through the Belt training program, men who have
"space experience," as you so euphemistically put it, are men who
can form a real team, one that will get things done because each
man knows he can rely on the others, not only as a team, but as
individuals. But to mechanize the anchor-setting phase would
destroy all that completely.

I don't want to see that destroyed, because I have felt what it is
to be a part of the Belt team, even though only a small and
unreliable part. Actually, I know I was not and could never be a
real member of that team, but I was and am proud to have scr