Like many others, Wilding had dreamed of leaving the Solar System and plunging beyond the space barrier to find a new home among the stars. Unlike some, he had tried to implement his dream, turning the loot of his crime career to that purpose. But to head out beyond Pluto, a venturer needs more than a spaceship. He needs other people as desperate and as venturesome as himself to join his attempt. He needs a hardy crew to get to the nearer stars, and once there, a people strong and daring enough to seize a strange new world and colonize it.
Originally, Wilding had planned a raid on Alcatraz to pick up a likely complement of tough souls, but the authorities had short-circuited his scheme by sending him there. An opportunist and a realist, he had adjusted his plan to the circumstances.
"Just breaking out of here to go back to the familiar worlds would be useless. We need not freedom to go back to our old lives, but a new kind of freedom. None of us can ever fit into the neatly standardized social structures in the planets and moons we call our homes. We need new settings where the adventurous man is not an anachronism. We must start fresh and make a world over to our specifications. It will not be a safe world, but it will never be as dull as those into which we cannot fit.
"Who will go with me?"
Dead silence fell as Wilding finished. Even the most hardened convicts exchanged dubious glances as if Wilding's words had given them new perspectives on themselves and each other. Discussion started as a murmurous trickle, increasing quickly to a flood of confused sound.
"What about those who don't go?" someone asked.
"I don't know," admitted Wilding. "Probably the authorities will abandon the asteroid as a prison. They may remove all who stay behind to some safer preserve. The stay-behinds are no concern of mine. Make up your minds. As soon as the stores are aboard, we are leaving. Any delay will be fatal, since the lighter and supply ship must get away before the patrol ships can mine the likely orbits and establish a spaceblock. There are no formalities, nothing to sign. Just be aboard if you are going along...."
To the casual eye, the asteroid belt seemed as empty as the rest of space. True, some suspiciously feeble stars altered the familiar patterns of constellations, and several larger asteroids were clearly visible by their own reflection of sunlight. But for the most part the debris of a long-ago shattered planet was so widely distributed in its orbital ring around the sun that only a trained astrogator could realize the near approach to it.
Nearing the end of their long deceleration, the two ships seemed to hang, unmoving, in blank space. Mass-detectors and proximity alarms warned frequently of meteoric fragments, but the pair of fugitive ships had so far encountered nothing of formidable or even interesting size. Matter in the asteroid belt is so scattered, and most units so small, that the odds are heavily against even accidental collision. Finding one particle in a shower of dust motes is a matter of instruments and mathematical calculators, not luck.