Once upon a time, the great harbors of Earth used rocket beacons to signal to ships entering and leaving port: ships that rounded the globe, sometimes, under no other power than that of wind and water waves. At the ports of Space, rocket fire moves the ships in and out; waves of sound carried silently on waves of electrons convey the signals now. Otherwise, harbors have always been much alike. Even four hundred miles above ground, men sweat in their pressure suits; swear at the intractable bulk of large masses (with or without “weight”); mill in apparent confusion, behind which incredible achievements of order and planned distribution move endlessly; roughhouse and rag and joke with the blood-and-gut humor (and good humor) of haulers and movers and handlers and drovers and drivers and sailors and truckers and spacers and all men who gain their daily bread conquering space-mass-time with their hands and backs. Relay Station is many things. Most ports are. It’s Earth’s eye on the sky and it’s the reflex nerve center of radio communication around the Earth. It is also a tunnelled labyrinth of intrigue and espionage. But first and foremost, it is Man’s greatest port to date. Every ship of all nations that lifts off of Earth stops here for inspection and servicing and then for safe-passage through the vicious rays of the Vanallens, infinitely multitudinous scyllas and charybdises of the Space odyssey. From Relay, the Belt Balloons, air filled and skin-charged, each with its central pit of a single shuttle ship, are flung up through the twin belts of darting electrons, to meet the great wheel of the _Messenger_ in orbit at its 12,000-mile perihelion. All passengers on U.S.A.A. ships have the option of sleeping through the two first legs of the trip, till the shuttle is safely inside the _Messenger_; but the more knowing ones come out of sedation at Relay, in hopes of traveling close enough to other Balloons to see for themselves the coruscating display of blue fire, as the wild electrons of the Belts are dashed off the charged thin skins of the bulleting spheres. John Wendt had never seen the Belt Balloons. When he lived and trained on the Moon, and took rare leaves on Earth, the _Messenger_, with its ion drive and thermal exchange power plant, was still a drawing-board dream. The thrice he had traveled by shuttle, via Balloon and the _Messenger_, he had made the whole voyage under sedation. His choice of minimum sleep this time out was not motivated by a desire to see the Balloons. He had avoided exposure to Space talk, Space news, Space views, so thoroughly in his twenty months on Earth that he did not even _know_ there was anything worth seeing. He simply meant to let Pete Christensen, and anybody else who noticed, know that he _could_ make the trip. _Wide awake._