ship over the phones and all that came in answer were giggles. Miss Kanton quietly replaced the microphone and stared straight ahead on her course with a slightly red face.

Twenty hours later they were circling Bolus preparatory to landing. As was the policy when dropping down upon open land, they switched on the anti-gravity fields, blasted themselves to a dead stop and sank slowly down onto the furrowed land of the asteroid mine.

The ships thumped down within three hundred feet of one another. Miss Kanton hurriedly snapped on her oxygen helmet, and Alpha followed her through the air-lock. Instead of going towards the control tower, which rose from the blue land like a pale yellow candle, Miss Kanton ran to the other ship and pounded on the door until Beta Tindar and the girl-dupe opened it and stepped out.

"What have you been doing, Katherine?" Miss Kanton asked over the helmet radio.

"Telling secrets to each other, granny," the dupe laughed. Alpha Tindar was a trifle envious of the smile on Beta's face.

Miss Kanton flushed and turned away towards the Central Tower. The other three caught up with her and four abreast they walked lightly over the rough plain. Through the thin atmosphere and over the helmet phones they heard the crashing drone of the mine in operation. To the Tindars it did not sound right. There was too much noise. The robot-diggers and refiners were supposedly working far below the ground.

Ahead of them, over the close horizon, sprang a great, looming metal shape that filled the air with the roar of its engines. It rushed towards them with a flat, toothed platform lowered slightly into the ground. The platform was nearly twenty feet in length, with a thousand metal claws above it hungrily scooping the soil up into the black maw of the storage bin that swelled from it like a monstrous belly.

"It's a digger!" Alpha cried. "Get out of the way!"

In the weak gravity they were able to move by bounds out of the path of the mining machine. It roared past them, tearing up the ground in a dumb frenzy.

"The ships!" Miss Kanton shouted, screaming above the roar of the Digger.

"Too late!" Beta gasped. "It has one!"

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