The cable they didn't have to worry about. Each strand was a fine wire of two-phase material--the harder phase being borazon, the softer being tungsten carbide. Winding these fine wires into a cable made a flexible rope that was essentially a three-phase material--with the vacuum of space acting as the third phase. With a tensile strength above a hundred million pounds per square inch, a half inch cable could easily apply more pressure to that anchor than it could take. There was a need for that strong cable: a snapping cable that is suddenly released from a tension of many millions of pounds can be dangerous in the extreme, forming a writhing whip that can lash through a spacesuit as though it did not exist. What damage it did to flesh and bone after that was of minor importance; a man who loses all his air in explosive decompression certainly has very little use for flesh and bone thereafter. "All O.K. here," Jack's voice came over Harry's headphones. "And here," Harry said. The strain gauges showed nothing out of the ordinary. "O.K. Let's see if we can flip this monster over," Harry said, satisfied that the equipment would take the stress that would be applied to it. He did not suspect the kind of stress that would be applied to him within a few short months. II The hotel manager was a small-minded man with a narrow-minded outlook and a brain that was almost totally unable to learn. He was, in short, a "normal" Earthman. He took one look at the card that had been dropped on his desk from the chute of the registration computer and reacted. His thin gray brows drew down over his cobralike brown eyes, and he muttered, "Ridiculous!" under his breath. The registration computer wouldn't have sent him the card if there hadn't been something odd about it, and odd things happened so rarely that the manager took immediate notice of it. One look at the title before the name told him everything he needed to know. Or so he thought. The registration robot handled routine things routinely. If they were not routine, the card was dropped on the manager's desk. It was then the manager's job to fit everything back into the routine. He grasped the card firmly between thumb and forefinger and stalked out of his office. He took an elevator down to the registration desk. His trouble was that he had seized upon the first thing he saw wrong with the card and saw nothing thereafter. To him, "out of the ordinary" meant "wrong"--which was where he made his mistake. There was a man waiting impatiently at the desk. He had put the card that had been given him by the registration robot on the desk and was tapping his fingers on it. The manager walked over to him. "Morgan, Harry?" he asked with a firm but not arrogant voice.