Morguma. "We found this divine female human being's picture and enlarged it as you see. She is an entrancing thing!"

"You talk the truth," O'Dea agreed. "But that won't change the fact that I don't like you. What happens now?"

Morguma looked mildly apologetic. "Now we must perform labor! The great task for which this ship has been fitted!"

The Centaur seated himself at the rear of the control room, produced an instrument that looked like a whip. It looked like a whip because it was one. He flicked it experimentally.

"Oh how devastated I would be," he told them, "if I should be forced to use this! You will take off and fly to our asteroid belt, following the intelligent directions I shall give you. We will find a substantial piece of some agreeable material and bring it back to Avignon."

The two men looked at each other and then at the whip. The alien snapped it lightly a few times as if nervous. They turned to the control board.

A few hours later they were in Alpha Centauri's asteroid belt, dodging debris. For a while they were nervous. It was here, in this field of small flying particles that was worse even than their Solar System's, that a baseball-sized rock had eluded their detectors and knifed through their vessel, passing through all three fuel chambers in its line of flight and taking a long stream of rocket fuel for its wake.

But the Centaurs evidently had perfected asteroid navigation; and when they saw several pieces of matter that were about to strike them deflected, they stopped worrying.

O'Dea manned a board lined with instruments the Centaurs had installed. They were simple to operate. He merely moved a telescope lens until a piece of cosmic scrap was in the cross hair, then he read a dial. The telescope was synchronized with a Centaur version of a spectroscope, and its reading was given in figures on the dial.

He felt the Centaur looking over his shoulder, checking up on him, so he had to do his work properly. Not that it made much difference. Whether he and Hawthorne played the game was of little importance as far as the Centaur's plans went, except that the creatures liked the symbolism created by having two humans work on the project.

"Morguma," he said. "Those spaceships on Avignon can't all be engaged in this work. There are types there that can be of no use."

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