Hans and Ndomi can have any fossils I find if that will make you happier—and if one of them says he has no use for fossils he didn't dig himself, I'll make him eat his words. I can identify, locate and report on anything that turns up in a rock as well as any of those jigsaw-puzzle people; and I can do it in mud, too, which is more than any of them could manage."

"Don't get hot under the collar. If you can help it on this planet. You sound as though one of the boys had been giving you a lecture on the importance of knowing what strata a given series of specimens represent."

"Not one of our boys—they have a little more sense. But there was a young paleontologist when I was covering the Antares worlds whose memory still makes my blood pressure go up. Never mind me; that's not important. But I want to make this dig."

"It will tie up machines, however freely we can spare time," Lampert said slowly. "I'll tell you: how about this? We spend the rest of the day getting cores from other points along these cracks. For one thing, we ought to know more about the structure of the hill, and for another, we might find more of your 'wires.' After all, the chance of our hitting the only one around is pretty remote. I can't quite see a single dropped piece of copper wire showing up in the first two days of a project like this."

"I neither said nor implied that this should be the only piece. I don't doubt for a moment that there are others, whether they are wires or worms."

"Sorry. Well, we take these cores back to camp this evening, together with any others we find of the same sort, and let Hans and Ndomi look them over. If they don't turn out to be something that the boys recognize and can classify right off the bat, we come back tomorrow with all the digging machinery you want, and dig until you either find all you want, satisfy yourself that there's nothing here or find something which obviously requires more specialized attention than we can give it. All right?"

"Nothing could be fairer. Let's go!"

The discussion in camp that evening was animated beyond anything the guide had heard. His original estimate of these men as relatively quiet specimens underwent a sharp revision. Mitsuitei's report of the day's activity at his site had, it is true, been delivered quite calmly; but from then on matters grew progressively livelier. This was not caused by opposition to the archaeologist's plans. The others were all in favor of 

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