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their fabulous discovery. Which was correct, except that their discovery wasn’t fabulous. Rich, perhaps, but by no means unprecedented.
    Again and again the pickup ship’s large lock opened, and a man or men brought out oxygen tanks and water-containers and food-stores and mining supplies and the like. They towed them, floating, to their ships. One went inside and a lock-door opened. The supplies went in. The ships went away. This sequence of happenings went on steadily. But the ships didn’t really go away—at any rate, not all of them. Somehow the destruction of Dunne’s donkeyship increased their belief that the Big Rock Candy Mountain had been found. Dunne must make a bargain with somebody to take him back to it. Those he didn’t bargain with would follow and make their own decisions. They lingered, tens or scores of miles from Outlook, hidden in the golden glowing mist. Because Dunne had to do something. He had to deal with someone. The others would combine—perhaps!—against whoever he made a deal with.
    He’d already decided on the beginning of a course of action, but he went tramping about the place from which his ship had been blasted as if unable to believe in his disaster.
    A donkeyship lifted off and went away into the all-concealing haze. Only one thing about it was certain. It wasn’t going far. And it wasn’t heading in the direction in which it had been searching for—or working—abyssal, crystal-containing matrix. Dunne tramped around the oxidation smear on the bright metal, apparently looking for evidence. Another ship took off. Another.
    A voice from the pickup ship’s communicator, booming in the headphones of Dunne’s helmet.
    “Calling Dunne! Calling Dunne! Come in, Dunne!”
    “What is it?” growled Dunne.
    “How’s your oxygen?” asked the ship curtly, “You’ve been out there a long time.”
    Dunne checked his oxygen tank. In the vacuum of space a man doesn’t carry a tankful of air to breathe. He carries oxygen. He breathes oxygen at three pounds pressure instead of air at fourteen point seven, and he saves the weight of the useless four-fifths of nitrogen that ordinary air contains.
    “I’m all right,” growled Dunne. “I’ll come in presently. I’m thinking, right now.”
    The carrier-wave from the ship clicked off. A moment later it hummed again in his headphones. The voice boomed once more.
    “Dunne?”
    “What?”
    “Miss Keyes asks if you’ll pay for a donkeyship team to go and pick up her brother, since you can’t do it with your ship destroyed, and he’ll die if nobody does. Will you pay?”
    Dunne could have groaned. Now everybody knew there was a girl on the pickup ship.
    “Tell her no,” he snapped. “I’ll take care of the situation!”
    A donkeyship released its magnetic grapples and floated away. It put on power and vanished. More objects came out of the pickup ship. Wire-wound oxygen tanks. Foodstuffs. Mining equipment. Fuel. Reaction drills. Bazooka-shells to split a moon fragment with their shaped charges and so allow the inside to be examined.
    A figure in a space-suit came out, towing the mass of stuff. The towing figure swaggered a little, even with magnetic soles to induce a plodding gait instead. Dunne noted it. It was Haney. Haney got his supplies to his ship. His partner took charge of stowing them. Haney himself swaggered to Dunne and ostentatiously turned off his space-phone. He grinned at Dunne through the helmet face-plate. He beckoned.
    Dunne irritably accepted the signal. Ordinarily, speech in emptiness goes by space-phone, radiating microwaves from a tiny antenna. Such speech can be picked up for miles. Here there was no air to carry sound, but it was still possible to speak direct. As in a liquid ocean, helmets touched together conveyed sounds by solid conduction. The quality of the sound was not remarkable, but at least it would not be overheard.
    The helmets clanked into contact.
    “A bad business!” said Haney. “Do you