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you move that thing out of the middle so people can get in and out?" And they hurried past him without another word.
    "Hmm," Evan said, and walked around to the front of the ship, where Joss was standing and running his hands over the rounded nose with a very aggrieved expression.
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    "Brand new," he was saying. "The mothers! That coating was hours old! Look at this!"
    Evan looked and saw a slight dent in the nose, and a wrinkled place where the paint had been cracked away. "It looks to me as if we were lucky not to have smashed like an eggshell," he said. "A little paint won't matter. We'll tell everyone we rammed someone broadside."
    Joss snorted, then looked over his shoulder as the third person, a man in his early twenties, very small and slight, went past them after the first two. "Excuse me," Joss said, "but would you please tell us if—"
    The young man took one look at them, spat immediately and copiously on the floor, and just kept going.
    Joss looked distastefully at the floor, then at Evan.
    "Not the welcoming committee, I take it," he said.
    "And they say you should move the ship out of the way," said Evan.
    "Like hell," said Joss. But he looked after the young man with a calculating expression. "Then again," he added, "no point in antagonizing the locals."
    "Yet," said Evan.
    It took a few minutes to get the ship moved. The ship belonging to the three people who had come in started to rise up on its jets as soon as Joss had finished moving. Their ship was typical of many others sitting around in the hangar, and was everything the patrol vessel wasn't: ugly, blocky, scarred, a sort of conglomeration of bolted-together metal boxes with an ancient nonreflective black coating on it. How nonreflective it was at all was in question, since the coating had flaked or been scraped or banged off in who knew what collisions with small asteroids or, for all Evan knew, other craft. The thing had crude jets on it, not vectorable, just fastened on at any angle; and there was what looked like a secondhand ion driver assembly at the rear end, held on with metal straps and probably prayer.
    Evan raised his eyebrows as he turned away. He might have been teasing Joss about old grizzled miners with don-SPACE COPS 19
    keys, but it struck him that those old men from the vids were probably safer in their environment than these people were—if they were in fact miners. Quite a few people who were not came to live out this way. They might like the freedom of the Belts, the way there was little of the control of the inner worlds.
    No one asked you for ID every five seconds; there was no need of the ID itself. People couldn't care less if you had a banking history, or a credit history, or whether it was a good history or not. In fact, there were always people who preferred that the histories of those they dealt with should not be too good. . . .
    Joss came back in a few moments, and stood with Evan to look after the ship that was leaving. "I built one like that in the back yard when I was six," he remarked. "But the boxes were cardboard. And it flew better."
    "It flew?"
    "Oh, yes," Joss said, as they walked off toward the largest of the blisters leading to the next dome over.
    "Once we pushed it off the garage roof."
    "I take it the pilot survived."
    "Sure. But ever since then I've been twitchy about any large object coming at me fast. Like the ground, or a set of landing bay doors."
    Evan smiled slightly as they walked through the airlock into the next dome. The airlock doors neither opened before them nor shut behind them, having been jammed open. Joss looked at the control panel, which had been sabotaged with a power tool of some kind, to judge by the cracks hi its front, and said,
    "These people don't look too worried about losing atmosphere, do they?"
    Evan shook his head. It was an almost unbelievable level of carelessness, unless you had just been through the docking they had, in which case belief became a lot more