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You see, I know that anchor-setting could be made a great deal safer. I know that machines could be developed which would make the job so nearly automatic that the operator would never be exposed to any more danger than he would be in a ship on the Earth-Luna run. Perhaps that’s a little exaggerated, but not much.

What puzzled me was: Why? Why shouldn’t the Companies build these machines if they were more efficient? Why should every Belt man defend the system as it was? Why should men risk their necks when they could 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 scrimmaged with the team, and I’m glad to be able to sit on the side-lines and cheer even if I can’t carry the ball. (It just occurred to me that those metaphors might be a little cloudy to you, since you don’t have football in the Belt, but I think you see what I mean.) I imagine that most of the men who have no “space experience” feel the same way. They know they’d never make a go of it out in space, but they’re happy to be water boys.

I wish I could stay in the Belt. I’m enough of a spaceman to appreciate what it really is to be a member of a space society. But I also know that I’d never last. I’m not fitted for it, really. I’ve had a small taste of it, but I know I couldn’t take a full dose. I’ve worked hard for the influence and security I have in my job, and I couldn’t give it up. Maybe this brands me as a coward in your eyes, and maybe I am a coward, but that’s the way I’m built. I hope you’ll take that into account when you think of me.