A heavy cloud, fat with rain, drifted over the Belt, reducing visibility to a few yards; the air it brought with it seemed exceptionally sour and thin.

Rees prowled around the cables that girdled his world, muscles working restlessly. He completed two full circuits, passing huts and cabins familiar since his childhood, hurrying past well-known faces. The damp cloud, the thin air, the confinement of the Belt seemed to come together somewhere inside his chest.

Questions chased around his skull. Why were human materials and building methods so inadequate to resist the forces of the world? Why were human bodies so feeble in the face of those forces?

His father used to say the mine was killing them all. Humans weren't meant to work down there, crawling around in wheelchairs at five gee.

Now his parents were dead.

Rees was still a boy. But he faced a prospect of nothing more than to labor in the kernel mines, to have his health broken by the monstrous gravity, to die young.

Shards of speculation glittered in the mud of his overtired thinking. His parents had had no better understanding of their circumstances than he had; there had been nothing but legends they could tell him before their sour deaths of overwork: children's tales, of a Ship, a Crew, of something called Bolder's Ring...

But his parents had had -- acceptance. They, and the rest of the Belt dwellers, accepted their lot.

Only Rees seemed plagued by questions, unanswered doubts. Why couldn't he be like everyone else? Why couldn't he just accept and be accepted?

His arms, punctured by hot metal, ached. A vague anger suffused him. Well, why should he accept this? Why should he die, broken-down by the five gee of the Star's kernel, without learning more, the truth of the world?

He had to find out more. And in all his universe there was only one place he could go to find it.

The Raft. Somehow he had to get to the Raft.

The shadow of the great tree slid over the Belt. A rope had uncoiled from the tree trunk and lay across the fifty yards to the Belt, brushing against the orbiting cabins. A man came shimmering confidently down the rope; he was scarred, old and muscular, almost a piece of the tree himself. The man dropped without hesitation across empty air to a cabin and began to make his way around the Belt.

A sudden determination crystallized in Rees. He hurried around the Belt to his cabin.

It took minutes to gather up some food, wrapping dried meat in bundles of cloth, filling cloth globes with water.

Then he climbed to the outer wall of his cabin.

Rees clung to his cabin by one hand. The rotation of the Belt carried the cabin steadily towards the tree's dangling rope.