"Then tell him again," Green snapped. He turned and, clinging to handholds, made his way to the car's small galley area.

Taft reclined comfortably in the drive chair. He was eating a small peach; gobbets of orange flesh clung to his beard. "I didn't realize your memory continues to fail, mystery boy--"

"Skip it, Taft," Green said casually.

Taft took another bite at his fruit. "Very well. Look, Paul, the surface on which the colony sits is utterly flat. The center of gravity of the Sugar Lump is somewhere beneath the center of the plane. The air we've been burning out of the meteorite material is attracted towards the center of gravity, so it clings to the middle of the plane as a kind of low dome. But now we've climbed away from the air and we're being pulled back to the center of gravity. So your chair swivels until it points straight down to the center -- but that means it's at an angle to the plane's local vertical. We seem to be climbing up an incline. By the time we get to the Edge we'll appear to be climbing at almost forty-five degrees. See?"

Paul twisted in his chair until he could look back the way the car had climbed. The twin cables were geometrically perfect lines laid over a shallow, glowing slope. Thousands of miles distant, covered by a blue dome of air, the brownish meteorite debris lay splashed over the unblemished plane.

It looked as if the whole arrangement should slide off into space.

Paul shuddered and turned away. Green stood awkwardly on the tilting floor, sipping a coffee. "How do you feel? Better?"

Paul shrugged. "How should I feel? Commander, the Sugar Lump has been strong enough to withstand a major meteorite impact. Without so much as a scratch. How am I going to get through it?"

Green ran a hand over his closely-cropped, graying hair. "Paul, the Xeelee always build big. And tough. I'll tell you about Bolder's Ring sometime... what I'm saying is that the awe you feel won't go away. But you'll get used to it.

"And remember, you're not a meteorite. You're not trying to blast your way through." He lowered his voice. "And that's been Taft's mistake. He's fired off lasers, projectiles, particle beams -- like a stream of little meteorites, yeah? And the success he's had is precisely zero.