near the center of the drum.

The geophysicist set the cylinder on the ground mouth downward, pushing it into the soft earth far enough to assure its remaining upright. Then he turned to his controls and after a moment, with very little noise, the cylinder began to sink into the ground. In a few seconds it was out of sight, trailing its snaky neck after it.

The men watched it in silence. Perhaps thirty seconds after it disappeared, there was a minor convulsion in the neck, a momentarily rising hum from the machinery, and a plug of dirt about two centimeters in diameter and five long was ejected from a port in the center of the drum. This was seized by Lampert and examined briefly, then tossed aside. "The soil is pretty deep," he remarked.

"How far down did that come from?" asked Mitsuitei.

"One meter. That's the sampling interval I've set in it, for now. If it meets anything much harder or easier to penetrate, it will warn me and I'll grab them more frequently." Conversation lapsed while two more samples arrived and were inspected. Then a light flickered on the panel, and Lampert reset one of his knobs; and almost immediately a core of light gray limestone was produced.

"Apparently the same stuff as the cliffs," said Lampert after examining the specimen. "Do you want to go any deeper, or drill a few more holes to get an idea of the contour?"

"How fast will that thing go through limestone?"

"A couple of centimeters per minute. It's too small to pack a real power unit."

"Give it five minutes, just to make sure it isn't a building block."

"Ten centimeters wouldn't give you a whole building block."

"A sample from that far inside one would tell me what I want to know. You rock-chippers don't seem to think that archaeology is a science yet. Let me have that first core, too." Mitsuitei looked confident to the point of being cocky, and Lampert let the mole burrow on. The second core came in due time, and the little man set merrily to work with tiny chips from the two stone cylinders, a pinch of the lowest soil sample which had been acquired, a small comparison microscope and a kit full of tiny reagent bottles. Lampert used the time the tests consumed in reversing the mole and resetting the equipment on a new spot. By the time the little mechanism had gnawed its way once more to rock, 

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