"I don't know how good it is, but my guess is we're running into an inner Asteroid Belt. I'll bet the first two flights ended here...."
"A what?"
"Inner Asteroid Belt," Dave stated. "A puny one, compared to the one outside Mars, but nonetheless a Belt. Uncharted, and deadly."
Tension spread along Hiller's back. "We've had no advance data on crap like that, not one bit."
"We have now," Dave shrugged.
"Why didn't one of the first trips miss this?"
"This Inner Belt orbits, too. Clustered minor particles with low reflectivity may be a phenomenon found only in scattered sections of the Belt. The first Marships happened to hit them, just like us. Certainly no light instrument on Earth I know of could pick them up. They'd move out too fast to register on a plate. So, they're our babies."
The commander remarked soberly, "You evidently already know what this means."
"It's a lousy break.... The first ships must have tried to get through...."
Hiller brought his palms together to bolster the searching of his mind. He was surprised to find them moist. "What about the size of the particles in these clusters?"