r high vack."

Rip and Koa stepped out and walked a little distance away. Santos and
Pederson cast the landing boat adrift and shoved it away from the
anchored boat. In a moment fire spurted from the bottom tube, spreading
over the dull metal and licking at the feet of the Planeteers.

Rip watched the boat rise upward to the great, sleek, dark bulk of the
_Scorpius_. The landing boat maneuvered into the air lock with brief
flares from its exhausts. In a few moments the sparkling blast of
auxiliary rocket tubes moved the spaceship away. O'Brine was putting a
little distance between his ship and the asteroid before turning on the
nuclear drive. The ship decreased in size until Rip saw it only as a
dark, oval silhouette against the Milky Way. Then the exhaust of the
nuclear drive grew into a mighty column of glowing blue, and the ship
flamed into space.

For a moment Rip had a wild impulse to yell for the ship to come back.
He had been in vacuum before, but only as a cadet, with an officer in
charge. Now, suddenly, he was the one responsible. The job was his. He
stiffened. Planeteer officers didn't worry about things like that.
He forced his mind to the job at hand.

The next step was to establish a base. The base would have to be on the
dark side of the asteroid, once it was in its new orbit. That meant a
temporary base now and a better one later, when they had blasted the
little planet into its new course. He estimated roughly the approximate
positions where he would place his charges, using the sun and the star
Canopus as visual guides.

"This will do for a temporary base," he announced. "Rig the boat
compartment. While two of you are doing that, you others break out the
rocket launcher and rocket racks and assemble the cutting torch. Koa will
make assignments."

While the sergeant major translated Rip's general instructions into
specific orders for each man, the young lieutenant walked to the edge
of the sun belt. There was no atmosphere, so the edge was a sharp line
between dark and light. There wasn't much light, either. They were too
far from the sun for that. But as they neared the sun, the darkness would
be their protection. They would get so close to Sol that the metal on the
sun side would get soft as butter.

He bent close to the uneven surface. It was clean metal, not oxidized
at all. The thorium had never been exposed to oxygen. Here and there,
pyramids of metal thrust up from the asteroid, sometimes