be in research or exploration, and you know it. It's a crime to waste your talent in a dock job. You belong out on the Edge."

"Look, Betty—there are three sorts of Edge jobs: in the Patrol, on some sort of an expedition, or as a space-rat. The first two don't pay and, as for the third, even if I liked the idea of prospecting the planets, it takes money to outfit for it, and it took all I had to finish Tech."

"But you have the Aspera, and the Translunar prize would be enough to get her into shape again and buy supplies."

"I was given to understand this afternoon that it would be considered very unconventional to take the money and not take the job. And anyway, what would I do then—hunt for thorium in the asteroids? No thanks. I'll take the slug monkey job and the salary. And I think you ought to do the same. You could get a job closer in that would pay a lot more than going off to the Belt on a wild goose chase. When you graduate first in your class at Tech you can take your pick."

"Wild goose chase!" She sniffed. "We are going out to get data on the Warp at close range. We might even find out the way to get around it and open up the outer planets to exploration."

The Warp was supposed to be a sort of fourth-dimensional wrinkle in space somewhere beyond the asteroids that swallowed ships and accounted for the fact that out of three expeditions that had tried to reach Jupiter, three had not returned. I knew better.

"There isn't any Warp," I told her. "My father proved that eight years ago when he made the swing around Jupiter."

"But he never published any proof, Tom."

"No, all the proof he had was in his log book, and that went with him on his last trip. But I read the log. He sighted the pirate camp on Callisto, and would have had pictures to prove it if all his film hadn't been raystruck. Maybe he could have got somebody to listen to him anyway if he had tried a little harder, but he wanted to make a research job of it. He sold out all his claims and built the Astra and loaded it up with equipment to bring back all the proof that even the Patrol could ask for. Then he blasted off and no one ever heard of him again."

"But the idea of pirates doesn't make sense, Tom. There are no cargoes worth stealing beyond the Belt. On the Venus run, yes—but why should there be pirates out where there are no ships?"

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