When Terrans heard Martians crying enough, some of them became enraged. The concept of carrying capacity meant nothing before the sheer numbers, the images on the screens. Uneasily the Martian global government did what it could to deal with this anger. It explained that Mars with its thin new biosphere could not sustain as many people as the fat old Earth. It also set the Martian rocket industry into the shuttle business, and rapidly expanded a program to turn asteroids into floating cities. This program was an unexpected offshoot of what had been serving as part of their prison system. For many years now the punishment for conviction of serious crimes on Mars had been permanent exile from the planet, begun by some years of confinement and servitude on some new asteroid settlement. After they had served their sentence it was a matter of indifference to the Martian government where the exiles went, as long as they did not return to Mars. So inevitably a steady stream of people arrived on Hebe, shipped out and did their time, and then moved somewhere else, sometimes out to the still thinly populated outer satellites, sometimes back into the inner system; but often to one of the many hollowed-asteroid colonies that were being established. Da Vinci and several other co-ops made and distributed shareware for starting up these settlements, and many other organizations did the same, for in truth the program was simple. Surveying teams had found thousands of candidates in the asteroid belt for the treatment, and on the best of them they left behind the equipment to transform them. A team of self-reproducing digging robots went to work on one end of the asteroid, boring into the rock like dogs, tossing most of the rubble into space, and using the rest to make and fuel more diggers. When the rock was hollowed out, the open end was capped and the whole thing was spun, so that centrifugal force provided a gravity equivalent inside. Powerful lamps called sunlines or sunspots were fired up in the centers of these hollowed-out cylinders, and they provided light levels equivalent to the Terran or Martian day, with the g usually adjusted accordingly, so that there were little Mars-equivalent cities, and little Earth-equivalent cities, and cities all across the range in between, and beyond, at least to the light side; many of the little worlds were experimenting with quite low gs.