"You take it!" He removed one gently from his chest.

"It is defenseless. It can't even seek its own food very well. I understand that in its native state it is a benign parasite attaching itself to some more mobile animal-"

"If only they would quit attaching to me! And you look as if you were wearing a fur coat Let's put 'em in freeze!"

"Patience, dear. Probably it has somewhat the same pleasing effect on the host that ithas on us; consequently the host tolerates it and lets it pick up the crumbs. But its other char­acteristic it shares with almost anything Martian. It can last long periods in hibernation, or if that isn't necessary, in a state of lowered vitality and activity - say when there is no food available. But with any increase in the food supply, then at once - almost like throwing a switch - it expands, multiplies to the full extent of the food 'supply."

"I'll say it does!"

"Cut off the food supply and it simply waits for more good times. Pure theory, of course, since I am reasoning by analogy from other Martian life forms - but that's why I'm going to have to disappoint Lowell - Fuzzy Britches will have to go on very short rations."

Her husband frowned. "That won't be easy; he feeds it all the time. We'll just have to watch him - or there will be more little visitors from heaven. Honey, let's get busy. Right now."

"Yes, dear. I just had to get my thoughts straight"

Roger called them all to general quarters; Operation Round-up began. They shooed them aft and into the hold; they slithered back, purring and seeking companionship. Pollux got into the hold and tried to keep them herded together while the others scavenged through the ship. His father stuck his head in; tried to make out his son in a cloud of flat cats; 'How many have you got so far?"

"I can't count them - they keep moving around. Close the door!"

"How can I keep the door closed and still send them in to you?"

"How can I keep them in here if you keep opening the door?" Finally they all got into space suits - Lowell insisted on taking Fuzzy Britches inside with him, apparently not trusting even 'the code of the Galaxy' too far. Captain Stone reduced the temperature of the entire ship down to a chilly twenty below; the flat cats, frustrated by the space suits and left on their own resources, gave up and began forming themselves into balls, like fur-covered grape fruit. They were then easy to gather in, easy to count, easy to store in the hold.

Nevertheless the Stones kept finding and incarcerating fugi­tives for the next several days.

XV - "INTER JOVEM ET MARTEM PLANETAM INTERPOSUI"

The great astronomer Kepler wrote: "Between Mars and Jupi­ter I put a planet." His successors devised a rule for planetary distances, called 'Bode's Law', which seemed to require a planet at precisely two and eight/tenths the distance from Sun to Earth, 2.8 astro units.

On the first night of the new nineteenth century the Monk Giuseppe Piazzi discovered a new heavenly body. It was the Asteroid Ceres - just where a planet should have been. It was large for an Asteroid, the largest in fact - diameter 485 miles. In the ensuing two centuries hundreds and thousands more were discovered, down to size of rocks. "The Asteroids' proved a poor name; they were not little stars, nor were they precisely planetoids. It was early suggested that they were the remains of a once sizable planet and by the middle of the twentieth century mathematical investigation of their orbits seemed to prove it.

But it was not until the first men in the early days of the exploration of space actually went out to the lonely reaches between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and looked that we learned for certain that the Asteroids were indeed fragments of a greater planet - destroyed Lucifer, long dead brother of Earth.

As the Rolling Stone rose higher and ever higher above the Sun, sheslowed, curved her path in, and approached the point where she would start to fall back toward the Sun. She was then at the orbit of Ceres and not far in front of that lady. The Stone had been in the region of the Asteroids for the past fifty million miles. The ruins of Lucifer are scattered over a wide belt of space; the Hallelujah Node was near the middle of that belt.

The loose group of rocks, sand, random molecules, and microplanetoids known as the Hallelujah Node was travelling in company around the Sun at a speed of eleven miles per second. The Stone's vector was eight miles per, second and in the same direction. Captain Stone speeded up his ship to match in by a series of blasts during the last two days, coming by a radar beacon deep in the swarm and thereby sneaking up on the collection of floating masses at a low relative speed.

The final blast that positioned them dead with the swarm was a mere love tap; the Stone did clear her throat - and she was one with the other rolling space stones of space.

Captain Stone took a last look into the double eyepiece of the stereo radar, swung the sweep control fore and aft and all around; the masses of the Hallelujah, indistinguishable from the background of stars by naked eye, hung in greatly exaggerated perspective in the false 'space' of the stereo tank while the true stars showed not at all. None of them displayed the crawling trail of relative motion.

A point brighter than the rest glowed in a fluctuating pattern fairly close by and a few degrees out-orbit; it was the radar beacon on which he had homed. It too, seemed steady by stereo; he turned to Castor and said, "Take a doppler on City Hall."

"Just getting it, Captain." In a moment he added, "Uh, relative about ten miles an hour - nine point seven and a whisper. And just under seven hundred miles away."

"Vector?"

"Closing almost for it We ought to slide past maybe ten, fifteen miles south and in-orbit"

Roger Stone relaxed and grinned. "How's that for shooting? Your old man can still figure them, eh?"

"Pretty good, Dad - considering."

"Considering what?"

"Considering you used Pol's figures."

"When I figure out which one of us you are insulting, I'll answer that." He spoke to the mike: "All hands, secure from maneuvers. Power room, report when secure. Edith, how soon can we have dinner?"

"It's wrapped up, son," Hazel reported.

"About thirty minutes, dear," his wife answered.

"A fine thing! A man slaves over a hot control board and then has to wait thirty minutes for his dinner. What kind of a hotel is this?"

"Yes, dear. By the way, I'm cutting your calorie ration again."

"Mutiny! What would John Sterling do?"

"Daddy's getting fat! Daddy's getting fat!" Lowell chanted. "And strangle your child. Anybody want to come out with me while I set units?"

"I will, Daddy!"

"Meade, you're just trying to get out of helping with dinner."

"I can spare her, dear."

"Spare the child and spoil the fodder. Come with your fodder, baby."

"Not very funny, Daddy."

"And I'm not getting paid for it, either." Captain Stone went aft, whistling. The twins as well as Meade went out with him; they made quick work of setting jato units, the young people locking them in place and the Captain seeing to the wiring personally. They set a belt of them around the waist of the ship and matched pairs on the bow and quarter. Wired for trigger­ing to the piloting radar, set at minimum range, they would give the ship a sharp nudge in the unlikely event that any object came toward them on a collision course at a relative speed high enough to be dangerous.

Coming through the Asteroid Belt to their present location deep in it, they had simply taken their chances. Although one is inclined to think of the Belt as thick with sky junk, the statis­tical truth is that there is so enormously more space than rock that the chance of being hit is negligible. Inside a node the situation was somewhat different, the concentration of mass being several hundred times as great as in the ordinary reaches of the Belt. But most of the miners took no precautions even there, preferring to bet that this unending game of Russian roulette would always work out in their favor rather than go to the expense and trouble of setting up a meteor guard. This used up a few miners, but not often; the accident rate in Hallelujah node was about the same as that of Mexico City.