Whatever it was the captain answered, Dane couldn't understand it. He pressed on: "There's just one way to save yourself, captain. That's to take me where I want to go. Because even if you hit me from behind--stun me, kill me--this grenade will still go off. The trigger's already free. This wrapping's the only thing that's holding it." The captain gulped--a hollow, dyseptic sound. "Wh-where do you want to go?" he asked finally. Dane grinned. "Callisto." "Callisto!" The grey hair was certainly sticking straight out now. "Mister, why don't you talk about Alpha Centauri or the Coalsack? They'd be every bit as easy!" "Oh?" "Security's got the Belt guarded like a vault. They'd brain-drain us before we were half-way through." "You could set the guides for Callisto before we hit the Belt, couldn't you?" "A computer-guide ramping on a satellite clear on the other side of the Asteroid Belt, with Jupiter's gravity pull to figure for?" Captain Helstrom shuddered. "Mister, you don't know what you're asking me for. Better to blow up your bomb now and be done with it!" "Fair enough, if that's the way you feel about it," Dane agreed. He started to unwrap the yat-stick. As if on springs, Helstrom sprang at him. "No, no, mister! I didn't mean it! We'll go; we'll go!" Bleakly, Dane nodded. "I thought you might see it that way. So let's get started. And just for safety's sake, to make sure you don't change your mind--I'll stay right in your astrogation chamber with you!" CHAPTER VII Ahead, the belt began to take form on the visiscreen--a patternless, ever-shifting array of hundreds of asteroids of every size and shape, all gleaming bright against the black-velvet backdrop of the void as they wheeled slowly through their far-flung orbits. The vastness of it brought a sense of awe to Clark Dane. Awe, mixed with despondency and depression. What chance did one man stand, trying to pick up the thin, tenuous thread of his destiny in this trackless chasm that was outer space? How could he hope to find identity, in a gulf so boundless that whole worlds were forever lost? He'd been mad even to think--to dream--of choosing such a course. Yet had he really chosen it? Was it truly his own will that had brought him to this moment? Bleakly, he wondered; and as he did so, the old, infuriating sense of being a pawn in all he did ... driven by another, larger will ... swept over him once more. Was he really a slave, thrall to the hairless man, the Being-Without-A-Name? Was it some darkly subtle conditioning, rather than his own impulses, that drove him? Again--always; forever--Dane wondered.... But now, abruptly, the ship's com-box came to life to interrupt him: "Cargo Vessel 214XB7! Cargo Vessel 214XB7!"