CHAPTER VII
Ahead, the belt began to take form on the visiscreen—a patternless, ever-shifting array of hundreds of asteroids of every size and shape, all gleaming bright against the black-velvet backdrop of the void as they wheeled slowly through their far-flung orbits.
The vastness of it brought a sense of awe to Clark Dane.
Awe, mixed with despondency and depression.
What chance did one man stand, trying to pick up the thin, tenuous thread of his destiny in this trackless chasm that was outer space? How could he hope to find identity, in a gulf so boundless that whole worlds were forever lost?
He'd been mad even to think—to dream—of choosing such a course.
Yet had he really chosen it? Was it truly his own will that had brought him to this moment?
Bleakly, he wondered; and as he did so, the old, infuriating sense of being a pawn in all he did ... driven by another, larger will ... swept over him once more.
Was he really a slave, thrall to the hairless man, the Being-Without-A-Name? Was it some darkly subtle conditioning, rather than his own impulses, that drove him?