Space Oasis

Space-weary rocketmen dreamed of an asteroid Earth. But power-mad Norman Haynes had other plans—and he spread his control lines in a doom-net for that oasis in space.
I found Nick Mavrocordatus scanning the bulletin board at the Haynes Shipping Office on Enterprize Asteroid, when I came back with a load of ore from the meteor swarms.
He looked at me with that funny curve on his lips, that might have been called a smile, and said, Hi, Chet, as casually as though we'd seen each other within the last twenty-four hours.... Queer laws they got in the Space Code, eh? The one that insists on the posting of casualty lists, for instance. You'd think the Haynes Company would like to keep such things dark.
I didn't say anything for a moment, as my eyes went down those narrow, typed columns on the bulletin board: Joe Tiffany—dead—space armor defect.... Hermann Schmidt and Lan Harool—missing—vicinity of Pallas.... Irvin Davidson—hospitalized—space blindness....
There was a score of names of men I didn't know, in that space-blindness column. And beneath, there was a much longer line of common Earth-born and Martian John-Henrys, with the laconic tag added at the top— hospitalized — mental . Ditto marks saved the trouble of retyping the tag itself, after each name.
One name caught my eye.
Ted Bradley was listed there. Ted Bradley from St. Louis, my and Nick Mavrocordatus' home town. It gave me a little jolt, and a momentary lump somewhere under my Adam's Apple. I knew the state Bradley would be in. Not a man any more—no longer keen and sure of himself. A year out here among the asteroids had changed all that forever.
Shoving from one drifting, meteoric lump to another, in a tiny space boat. Chipping at those huge, grey masses with a test hammer that makes no sound in the voidal vacuum. Crawling over jagged surfaces, looking for ores of radium and tantalum and carium—stuff fabulously costly enough to be worth collecting, for shipment back to the industries of Earth, at fabulous freight rates, on rocket craft whose pay-load is so small, and where every gram of mass is at premium.