before daybreak, but woke with the sunrise and went down, to find the others already at breakfast. They greeted him with a word, all but Harb Land who maintained a stony, dangerous silence.

"We'll go out and show you our work, as soon as you have breakfast," Jonny said quietly.

Gramp Land was the only one in good spirits. The old man twitted Carlin.

"It's sure a good thing you got reasonable last night. I would have hated to blast you."

Marn smiled slightly. "You wouldn't have done it. You're too chicken-hearted even to kill a fly."

"Ho, what are you talking about?" exclaimed Gramp indignantly. "When I was young, they called me the toughest Earthman in space."

Carlin walked silently out to the workshop with Harb and Jonny. The lame youngster opened the building, and then gestured toward the tall, cylindrical machine.

"Take a look for yourself, first," he invited.

Carlin scanned the mechanism with trained eyes. Magnetic dredges were a little out of his line, yet the principle of the mechanism was clear enough.

"You understand the basic idea of Sun-mining?" Jonny was saying. "A ship approaches the photosphere or visible surface of the Sun as closely as possible, protected by heavy heat-screens from the radiation. The magnetic dredge is then turned on. The dredge generates a high-powered magnetic field concentrated into a beam. That beam drives down into the swirling super-hot gases of the solar surface.

"Those gases consist of dozens of metals and other elements in vaporized form—iron, copper, sodium, calcium and so on, all mixed together. The beam sucks a column of those solar gases up to the ship. For its magnetic pull powerfully attracts the iron vapor in the mixture, and so the whole mixture is rapidly sucked upward."

He pointed to the massive flared nozzles in the downward projector-face of the great machine.

"The gases are sucked in there, through Markheim filters which can be set to screen out the atoms of any desired element. The copper gases are screened out, solidified by cooling, and stored. The other gases go on through the filters."

Carlin nodded curtly. "And those unwanted gases are ejected into space, and more of the 

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