‘But the whole town is migratory. They have to move sometime.’
‘Oh, I imagine you could move that hulk with a few jato units, if you were gentle about it and weren’t in any hurry. I think I’d decompress it before I tried it, though.’
XVI — ROCK CITY
The Asteroid Belt is a flattened torus ring or doughnut in space encompassing thirteen thousand five hundred thousand million trillion cubic miles. This very conservative figure is arrived at by casting out of the family the vagrant blacksheep who wander in down to Mars and farther — even down close, to Sun itself — and by ignoring those which strayed too far out and became slaves to mighty Jove, such as the Trojan Asteroids which make him a guard of honor sixty degrees ahead and behind him, in orbit. Even those that swing too far north or south are excluded; an arbitrary limit of six degrees deviation from ecliptic has been assumed.
13,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 cubic miles of space.
Yet the entire human race could be tucked into one corner of a single cubic mile; the average human body is about two cubic feet in bulk.
Even Hazel’s dauntless hero ‘Captain John Sterling’ would he hard put to police such a beat. He would need to be twins, at least.
Write the figure as 1.35 x 1025 cubic miles; that makes it easier to see if no easier to grasp. At the time the Rolling Stone arrived among the Rolling Stones of Rock City the Belt had a population density of one human soul for every two billion trillion cubic miles — read 2 x 1021. About half of these six thousand-odd lived on the larger planetoids. Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, Juno; one of the few pleasant surprises in the exploration of our system was the discovery that the largest Asteroids were unbelievably dense and thus had respectable surface gravitations. Ceres, with a diameter of only 485 miles, has an average density five times that of Earth and a surface gravity about the same as Mars. These large planetoids are believed to be mainly core material of lost Lucifer, covered with a few miles of lighter debris.
The other three thousand inhabitants constitute the Belt’s floating population in a most literal sense; they live and work in free fall. Almost all of them are gathered into half a dozen loose communities working the nodes or clusters of the Belt. The nodes are several hundred times as dense as the main body of the Belt — if ‘dense’ is the proper word; a transport for Ganymede could have ploughed through the Hallelujah node and Rock City and never noticed it except by radar. The chance that such a liner would hit anything is extremely small.
The miners worked the nodes for uranium, transuranics, and core material, selling their high grade at the most conveniently positioned large Asteroid and occasionally moving on to some other node. Before the strike in the Hallelujah the group calling themselves Rock City had been working Kaiser Wilhelm node behind Ceres in orbit; at the good news they moved, speeding up a trifle and passing in-orbit of Ceres, a ragtag caravan nudged through the sky by scooters, chemical rocket engines, jato units, and faith. Theirs was the only community well placed to migrate. Grogan’s Boys were in the same orbit but in Heartbreak node beyond the Sun, half a billion miles away. New Joburg was not far away but was working the node known as Reynolds Number Two, which rode the Themis orbital pattern, inconveniently far out.
None of these cities in the sky was truly self-supporting, nor perhaps ever would be; but the ravenous appetite of Earth’s industries for power metal and for the even more valuable planetary-core materials for such uses as jet throats and radiation shields — this insatiable demand for what the Asteroids could yield — made certain that the miners could swap what they had for what they needed. Yet in many ways they were almost self-supporting; uranium refined no further away than Ceres gave them heat and light and power; all of their vegetables and much of their protein came from their own hydroponic tanks and yeast vats, Single-H and oxygen came from Ceres or Pallas.