Clair told him not to be silly, that we couldn't get along without his guitar playing anyway, and then I was busy turning us the few degrees which would bring us into orbital conjunction with 4270. Ahead and all around us the little sparks which were spaceships fanned out in all directions, hurtling for their homesteads out here beyond Mars. It was nice to know that in just a few hours--if luck held--we'd be setting up home, living in our own place instead of the crowded barracks they set up for transient workers back on Earth. Nice? Hell, that's all we'd been thinking about since the announcement came through six months ago. You really feel a small turn in an old Karden Cruiser rocketing outward at top speed. I could feel the gravity slamming me back down against the right-hand cushions of the pilot-chair, and I heard Gramps muttering something under his breath. With Clair, he had remained out of his bunk so that he could watch us blast in toward the asteroid, and now I could picture each of them grasping stanchions for all they were worth, peering out of the port. I couldn't turn around to watch, of course. This landing on a tiny asteroid is tricky business. You can't just come in and set her down as easy as all that, floating in on the cushion of a five-hundred mile atmosphere. The Karden came in slowly, at right angles to the orbit, and I saw that 4270 was an amorphous hunk of greenish rock, craggy and mountainous, if you call a ponderously turning rough-hewn slab of stone less than three thousand feet across mountainous. * * * * * I worked the studs slowly, feeling the breath go out of my lungs with each one, and soon we had executed a turn of almost ninety degrees, with 4270 tumbling along parallel to us now, just a few miles off in the void. You could feel its weak gravity, tugging like a child's fingers might tug at your overcoat as you ran in another direction. I pulled up all the studs together, and I could breathe again. For a moment it seemed that 4270 wouldn't be strong enough to grab us and hold us, to reel us in slowly like a fisherman with a whopper at the end of his line. But her distance didn't increase, either--and we went spinning along through the void with her like a lopsided dumbbell, the tiny planetoid and the smaller Karden. Soon 4270 grew in the fore-port, and quite suddenly she wasn't alongside us any longer, but down below. Every time you come in for planet-fall you get that sensation, but it never ceases to be strange--one moment you're heading toward something which is in front of you, the next you're hurtling down upon it headfirst. Only with 4270's light gravity, we didn't exactly hurtle. It was more like floating, slowly at first and then faster, and then I decided I'd better give one short blast from our forerockets to brake the fall. I pressed the stud and waited. There was nothing. Momentarily, the fore-tubes had jammed. Of all the times....