rtably". If Earth were to vanish
overnight, the people of the Belt would live, but they would be
seriously handicapped. On the other hand, the people of Earth could
survive--as they had for millennia--without the Belt Cities, and while
doing without Belt imports might be painful, it would by no means be
deadly.

But both the Belt Cities and the Earth knew that the destruction of
one would mean the collapse of the other as a civilization.

Earth needed iron. Belt iron was cheap. The big iron deposits of Earth
were worked out, and the metal had been widely scattered. The removal
of the asteroids as a cheap source would mean that iron would become
prohibitively expensive. Without cheap iron, Earth's civilization
would have to undergo a painfully drastic change--a collapse and
regeneration.

But the Belt Cities were handicapped by the fact that they had had as
yet neither the time nor the resources to manufacture anything but
absolute necessities. Cloth, for example, was imported from Earth. A
society that is still busy struggling for the bare necessities--such
as manufacturing its own air--has no time to build the huge looms
necessary to weave cloth ... or to make clothes, except on a minor
scale. Food? You can have hydroponic gardens on an asteroid, but
raising beef cattle, even on Ceres, was difficult. Eventually,
perhaps, but not yet.

The Belt Cities were populated by pioneers who still had not given up
the luxuries of civilization. Their one weakness was that they had
their cake and were happily eating it, too.

Not that Harry Morgan didn't realize that fact. A Belt man is, above
all, a realist, in that he must, of necessity, understand the Laws of
the Universe and deal with them. Or die.

Commodore Sir Harry Morgan was well aware of the stir he had created
in the lobby of the Grand Central Hotel. Word would leak out, and he
knew it. The scene had been created for just that purpose.

"_Grasshopper sittin' on a railroad track,
Singin' polly-wolly-doodle-alla-day!
A-pickin' his teeth with a carpet tack,
Singin' polly-wolly-doodle-alla-day!_"

He sang with gusto as the elevator lifted him up to the seventy-fourth
floor of the Grand Central Hotel. The other passengers in the car did
not look at him directly; they cast sidelong glances.

_This guy_, they seemed to think in unison, _is a nut. We will pay no
attention to him, since he probably does not really exist. Even if he
does, w