So Whitey started travelling again, living the lifestyle he preferred, even though he wasn't travelling very far. He developed it into a system—move into town a month after the first semester began, and by the time the School Board realized he was there, he was already packing up to move on. Then three months there, and the school year was almost over, so there was no point in starting—and, of course, by the time the next school year was beginning, he'd already put his apartment on the market and gone to contract on a new one in another town-asteroid.

And Lona learned. And learned. And learned.

By the time she was ten, she knew enough to be able to piece-together the sequence of events from the printout. Not that she needed the hard copy, of course—she was able to access it by herself as she explained it to Whitey in a flat, controlled, emotionless voice.

Only one force-field generator had blown. Only one, but all the force-domes interlocked—so when one went, it disrupted its six neighbors' fields badly enough so that all the air poured out of them into its sector—and gushed out into space in a swirl of snowflakes. Their generators all tried to strengthen their domes, and the whole system overloaded, fields weakening to the point where Terran sea level air pressure could rip through them, gusting in the first and only wind Homestead had ever known, howling around the eaves of all the houses the settlers had built in their cocksure confidence in their dome, around the eaves and down the streets and on into the fieldless sector, then out into space, leaving only vacuum behind.

And bodies.

And, in one house, a little girl whose silly, overprotective daddy had insisted on making his house airtight, even though everybody knew it wasn't necessary, because the dome enveloped the whole asteroid in a force field that could never be punctured by any meteor—a silly daddy and a silly mommy who had put their little girl to bed, then gone outside to hold hands and look at the stars.

Whitey held his face immobile, his heart swelling up with pride in his son, but squeezing in with pity for the little girl.

The little girl who had waked up to find everybody else dead, and no one nearby to tell her it wasn't her fault.

The little girl who sat looking at the computer screen with eighty-year-old eyes in a ten-year-old face, a little girl whose foolish grandfather could only stand beside her, wishing there were something he could do, and asking,

"But what made that first generator blow?"

"I don't know," Lona answered, "but I'm going to find out. And when I do, I'm going to make sure that it never, ever happens again."

But she didn't shed a single tear.

Whitey wished that she would.

So they hired a burro-boat and went out to Homestead. It wasn't hard to find a pressure suit in her size—children weren't all that rare in the Asteroid Belt. Not any more; not since the domes had been pronounced safe and fail-safe.

The ordinary domes, that is—the standard ones.

"Anybody who'd take a kid to live in an experiment has all the moral sensibility of a cuckoo," Whitey muttered—but it made him uneasy. Would his son have been a little less cocksure if Whitey had stayed with him?

"What did you say, Gran'pa?"

"Oh, nothing, Lona. Come on, let's go look." He fastened his helmet and checked her seals; she checked his. Then they stepped into the miniscule airlock.

"An hour and ten, standard," the pilot told him. "Any more than that, and I'm pushing an energy crisis."

"Back in forty-five," Whitey assured him, and sealed the inner hatch.

Bastard could wait, he thought—a burro-boat could run for a week or more on a block of ice. Of course, the reason old Herman had taken the charter was because he was down to frost, or so he said—but Whitey had to admit it was better to play safe. Still, he doubted the prospector was that low.

The patch turned green, and Whitey pushed it. The hatch swung open, and he reached out to clip his safety line to a ring bolt. Then he climbed out, moving slowly and smoothly in the negligible gravity, then turned back to take Lona's line, clip it to a ring bolt, and help her out.

She came out easily; free fall was nothing new to her (Whitey had made sure she took gymnastic lessons). But she was pale, her eyes huge. He felt a stab of guilt at having brought her back to the scene of the calamity, but steeled himself to it—the doctor had said it was okay, hadn't she? Still, he watched the child very carefully. "Over here, Lona— Herman did a very good job. It's only fifty yards away."

She nodded, looking all about her, face haunted, as she groped for his hand.

And no wonder, Whitey thought, looking around him at the empty houses and storage buildings. They were near a park with playground equipment, swing chains dangling from a central mast, pathetic in their loneliness. There was only an occasional broken window (windows on an asteroid! The gall, the audacity, the sheer overweening pride of these pioneers!). That was all, no other damage. Oh, here and there, the odd tile had broken loose from a roof, but only a few—when the wind had come, it hadn't had much force. It was vacuum that had killed this place, not hurricane.

It was a grim town, dead and forlorn, with memories of families and laughter and tears—a ghost town in space.

"Are there any—bodies?" Lona swallowed, hard.

"No—the disaster squad took them all away for burial." No need to add that the crypt was under the skin of the asteroid itself. "If it seems you've been here before, it's nothing to worry about. You have been."

"I know," she said, her voice flat in his helmet speakers, "but it's really creepy. It all looks the same, and it makes me feel like I'm little again—but it's all so different."

Yes, without life. Whitey reminded himself that the doctor had said this would strengthen her immensely, would banish any lingering ghosts of guilt, that there was almost no chance of another breakdown, she was a very strong little girl inside now. "Of course, we can't ever be completely sure, Mr. Whitey. The human brain is inconceivably complex."

"Is that the generator?" Lona stared at the hemisphere of metal honeycomb before them, in a fenced-off section of the park.

"No, just its antenna," Whitey answered. "The generator's underground."

Lona stared up at him. "Then how could it blow up?"

"We don't know it blew up," Whitey reminded her. "Come on, let's look."

He found the trapdoor set into the rock beside the antenna, punched in the combination. It had been a real job getting that set of numbers—they were classified material of the highest order, vital to public safety (never mind the fact that the people they were supposed to guard had died four years before). But finally, with a letter from the doctor testifying how important the expedition was for the child's mental health, a few bribes, and a flawless train of logic, the relevant bureaucrat had reluctantly agreed to let him have the combination. It was reassuring, in its way, giving you the feeling that the living were protected as well as the dead.

Whitey swung the lock handle and hauled the trapdoor open. They went down carefully, him first, flashlight probing the darkness around him. "Careful not to foul my line."

"I won't, Gran'pa." But she wasn't being sassy about it—that worried him.

Then he saw the generator.

He stopped stock still, just standing there, staring.

"Gran'pa," she said, "it's…"

"In perfect condition." Whitey nodded. "At least, it looks that way. Let's just check, child."

Then he brought out the toolkit, opened the access panels one by one, and took out the circuit checker. "What do I do with this thing?"

"Red lead to contact A, Gran'pa—there." Lona pointed. "And blue lead to contact D."