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“No, no, no, Mr. Danley! You are not crawling, Mr. Danley, you are climbing! Do you understand that? Climbing! You have to climb an asteroid, just as you would climb a cliff on Earth. You have to hold on every second of the time, or you will fall off!” St. Simon’s voice sounded harsh in Danley’s earphones, and he felt irritatingly helpless poised floatingly above the ground that way.

His instructors were well anchored by metal eyes set into the rocky surface for just that purpose. Although Pallas was mostly nickel-iron, this end of it was stony, which was why it had been selected as a training ground.

“Well?” snapped St. Simon. “What do you do now? If this were a small rock, you’d be drifting a long ways away by now. Think, Mr. Danley, think.”

“Then shut up and let me think!” Danley snarled.

“If small things distract you from thinking about the vital necessity of saving your own life, Mr. Danley, you would not live long in the Belt.”

Danley reached out an arm to see if he could touch the ground. When he had pushed himself upwards with a thrust of his knee, he hadn’t given himself too hard a shove. He had reached the apex of his slow flight, and was drifting downward again. He grasped a jutting rock and pulled himself back to the surface.

“Very good, Mr. Danley–but that wouldn’t work on a small rock. You took too long. What would you have done on a rock with a millionth of a gee of pull?”

Danley was silent.

“Well?” St. Simon barked. “What would you do?”

“I … I don’t know,” Danley admitted.

“Ye gods and little fishhooks!” This was Kerry Brand’s voice. It was supposed to be St. Simon’s turn to give the verbal instructions, but Brand allowed himself an occasional remark when it was appropriate.

St. Simon’s voice was bitingly sweet. “What do you think those safety lines are for, Mr. Danley? Do you think they are for decorative purposes?”

“Well … I thought I was supposed to think of some other way. I mean, that’s so obvious–“

“Mr. Danley,” St. Simon said with sudden patience, “we are not here to give you riddles to solve. We’re here to teach you how to stay alive in the Belt. And one of the first rules you must learn is that you will never leave your boat without a safety line. Never!

“An anchor man, Mr. Danley, is called that for more than one reason. You cannot anchor your boat to a rock unless there is an eye-bolt set in it. And if it already has an eye-bolt, you would have no purpose on that rock. In a way, you will be the anchor of your boat, since you will be tied to it by your safety line. If the boat drifts too far from your rock while you are working, it will pull you off the surface, since it has more mass than you do. That shouldn’t be allowed to happen, but, if it does, you are still with your boat, rather than deserted on a rock for the rest of your life–which wouldn’t be very long. When the power unit in your suit ran out of energy, it would stop breaking your exhaled carbon dioxide down into carbon and oxygen, and you would suffocate. Even with emergency tanks of oxygen, you would soon find yourself freezing to death. That sun up there isn’t very warm, Mr. Danley.”

Peter Danley was silent, but it was an effort to remain so. He wanted to remind St. Simon that he, Danley, had been a spaceman for nearly fifteen years. But he was also aware that he was learning things that weren’t taught at Earthside schools. Most of his professional life had been spent aboard big, comfortable ships that made the short Earth-Luna hop. He could probably count the total hours he had spent in a spacesuit on the fingers of his two hands.