apparent that the knob was part of a knee joint. The small bones of the feet of the two partial legs were scattered, but seemed to be complete. «When the crust of the planet was shattered,» Erin said, as Dent put the specimens into separate bags, «the break occurred just here.» Her voice was made slightly metallic by the radio. She indicated the jagged end of one leg bone. «The rest of him might be in one of the other asteroids,» Dent said. «I'm no expert,» she said, «but they look humanoid to me.» «Yep,» he said. «We'll have to watch very carefully.» «We could mark this one and move on.» «No. This is a rich ore field. Let's work it.» Once they were back inside the ship she had to insist that Dent go to bed. He took one last look at the fossils, grumbled a bit, went into the bath and stayed half an hour before closing off the partition around his bunk area. Mop leapt into Erin's lap and climbed up onto the console to take his place beside the main viewer. Erin scratched him behind the ears and whispered, «We have to keep quiet, Mr. Mop.» Mop curled up and closed his eyes. Erin began to hum softly. The hours passed. The weight of ore grew in Mother's storage areas. Denton emerged, pulling down his jumper, after only six hours. «Can't sleep?» she asked. «You're going to have to learn another tune.» «Oh?» She made a face. «If you're going to hum throughout your watch, you're going to have to learn a few more songs.» «Oh, hell,» she said. «I'm sorry. I didn't realize that I was doing it. It's habit, I guess.» «Not that I don't like music—» «All right,» she said. «You've made your point.» «Maybe I can insulate the partition.» «No, I'll be quiet.» «Maybe I could sleep in the other cabin.» «No,» she said quickly. Then, «Look, I'm sorry, Dent, but I have a thing about that. I think a bed is just about as personal as underwear.» «Your skivvies wouldn't fit me,» he said. «Much too small.» In the next week, Mother mined surface ore fields on three different asteroids. No more fossils were found. The relationship between Erin and Dent was unchanged. He had apparently adjusted to sleeping behind his partition while she was at work, and she remembered, most of the time, not to hum as she manipulated the biter and the extractor. It was Mop who brought about a change in the routine. The little dog's stub of a tail was the barometer of his feelings. Usually it was perky, a cocky little spike pointing stiffly upward and slightly forward. It was a sturdy stump of a tail, and it was lowered only when Mop was asleep. When he started carrying it tucked under, Erin was concerned. «Come to think of it, I haven't seen him punch out a nibble for himself lately,» Dent said. Erin pushed the button and offered Mop a tasty little artificial bone. He sniffed at it, lowered his head, lay down with his muzzle between his paws. «What's the matter, partner?» Erin asked, picking him up. He rolled onto his back in the crook of her arm, closed his eyes, sighed. Erin ran the tip of her finger over his nose. It was dry, sandpapery. «He's sick,» Erin said, looking at Dent with her eyes wide and full of concern. It took them a couple of days to figure out why the dog was under the weather. The first clue was that when Erin went to bed Mop was not content to lie down and keep her feet warm. Instead, he barked to be let out of the cabin. «Dr. Gale has the answer,» Denton announced one «morning» when Erin entered the mining room. «The problem is that Mr. Mop has no one to relieve him.» Erin was still feeling a bit sluggish from sleep. «Huh?» «You work twelve hours and rest twelve hours,» he said. «Ditto for me. Our little buddy here has to keep you company while you're on watch and then he goes to work immediately to keep me company.» He spread his hands. «Not even a superior pooch like Mr. Mop can be on duty twenty-four hours a day forever.» «Oh, pooh,» she said. «Now you think about it.» She thought. When she was alone on the ship, Mop had slept at her feet for the eight hours or more she was in bed. «I'll be damned,» she said. «Well, I'll just force him to stay in the cabin with me during your watch.» But Mop fretted, paced, leapt on and off the bed, begged politely to be let out the door. «He's a very conscientious canine,» Denton said. «You're keeping him from what he sees as his duty.» «One more night like last night,» Erin said, «and I'm going to pull his hairy ears off.» «The only solution,» Denton said, «is to work a normal day.» Actually, Erin had been thinking the same thing. Most of the time the work of extracting ore from the rock would go faster with two people at the controls in the mining room, one operating the biter and the laser, the other working with the extractor. «I'm thinking of myself, too,» Dent said. «I'll sleep a lot better with some peace and quiet.» Mop had a few fitful naps during the first watch under the new arrangement. With two people working, the ore poured into Mother's storage with pleasing swiftness. At the end of the watch Erin took Mop to bed with her. He showed the same pattern of behavior as he had exhibited previously, so she opened the door to her cabin and left him free to roam the ship, checking out the mining room and Denton's bed when he cared to do so. When he saw that the lights were off and that Dent was asleep, he returned to Erin's cabin, jumped up on the bed, rolled onto his back with his legs in the air and slept for ten hours without so much as moving. The stub of a tail was a flag of cheerfulness when he joined Erin and Dent for breakfast. Extracting ore was a repetitive job that had become a matter of routine. As they worked they made comments about the density and color of the rock, speculated on the method of destruction of the planet that had once followed the orbit that was now a huge ring of debris. Since Erin felt guilty for not reporting Old Smiley and The Legs to X&A, she never mentioned the fossils. Dent asked questions about her time in Service and she recounted the routine of life aboard the Rimfire. Like Erin, Denton had been born on New Earth. Unlike her, he was not widely traveled. Before shipping with her on the Mother Lode, he told her, he'd made one trip to Delos to take a course on how to recharge the Verbolt cloud chambers that were at the heart of most computers. His childhood had been a happy one, as had hers. His parents had died within the same year when he was twenty years old. He had never owned a dog. «My dad always used to give me dolls when I was a little girl,» she told him. «What I wanted was a bicycle, or a pellet gun. One Christmas he gave me a beautiful baby carriage lined in white silk. Charlie Frink and I were playing road construction and I filled it up with dirt, pretending it was an earth mover. It was very, very black dirt.» It was a comfortable, easy relationship. There were no demands made from either side. When the working watch ended, Erin went to her cabin or to the gym. Now and then they had a meal together or watched a holo-drama sitting in the comfortable control chairs on the bridge. Mop was more than happy with the new system. Once or twice a night he'd leave Erin's bed to check on Dent. The doors to both cabins were left open so that the dog could perform his duty of looking after both of them. It seemed logical, since production had actually increased, to continue the system of working together. It seemed safe. After all, during her first trip to the asteroid belt, she had been alone and had left Mother to look after herself during her sleep hours. Each «night» before retiring one of them would check the ship's detection system and set the audible alarms. While they slept, Mother's little electronic gadgets sent out beams to confirm that the neighboring asteroids were keeping their distance, chuckled their way through internal checks of the recycling plants, measured the sleeping power in the blink generator, probed the temperature in the food bins, and performed dozens of other tests, checks, and analyses. But the Mother Lode was not equipped with the latest detection gear which would have enabled her to warn Erin and Denton that stealthy search beams were playing on and through her metal hide, beams that told the man who operated the originating instruments that the routine had changed aboard the Mule, that now the Alpha patterns of the two-man crew showed that both slept at the same time. Nor could Mother see through the considerable mass of the asteroid on which she was currently perched. So it was that the sleek, fast, well equipped mining ship that had followed the Lode from the day that Erin first left Haven was able to wend her way through the belt and give an almost casual shove to a tumbling, roughly rectangular slab of stone that measured a hundred yards on its long axis. For a period of several hours the tombstone-shaped asteroid closed on Mother's blind side. When contact came, a small protrusion on the tumbling slab brushed across a distended node of stone on the asteroid contained in Mother's field. The two masses were traveling at the same speed in their orbital path around the sun. The differential in inertia was represented mainly by the slab's tumbling motion. As the slab came near, it was affected by the field being put out by Mother's generator. The brushing contact altered the vector of the large asteroid only slightly, and slowed the tumbling motion of the slab minutely. Now the slab was being drawn toward Mother's asteroid by the ship's field, and being impelled by its own motion. As it tumbled, it would have been apparent to an observer, had there been one, that the most massive end of the slab would impact solidly within a matter of minutes. Aboard Mother the first brushing contact sent a faint tremor through the ship. Sensors trembled, searched, sent signals to the computer. A quick search of near space showed the ship's systems nothing that was a cause for alarm. «Underneath» the ship the sensors found solid matter. All was well. But there happened to be a rather efficient biological sensor at work aboard the Mother Lode. Mop the dog had experienced every motion that was possible aboard a ship of Mother's size. When the very slight tremor of contact vibrated upward through the legs of Erin's bed, he rolled onto his feet and put all of his senses to work. When he was agitated, or doubtful about something, his neck seemed to get longer as he held his head high, perked up one ear. «Wurf,» he said softly. «Ummmf,» Erin said in her sleep. The hair on Mop's back rippled. He felt a difference in the ship's field, for it had strengthened itself to account for the additional bulk of the tumbling slab that was swinging slowly, so slowly, to smash its heaviest end directly into Mother's asteroid. Erin was galvanized into frenzied motion as Mop sounded off, «Yap-yap-yap-yap,» in a near-hysterical, high-pitched bark that brought her to her feet, standing up in bed, yelling, «What? What? What?» «What's going on?» Denton yelled, his voice carrying across the control bridge through Erin's open door. Erin leapt to the floor and dashed for the bridge. Since she'd been leaving her door open, she'd taken to sleeping in shortie gowns. The one she wore that night was blue and set off her ash blonde hair well. Lights came on automatically as she ran onto the bridge. She punched up the computer. There was something vaguely wrong. Mop was still yapping. Her hair seemed to want to stand on end. «The field,» Denton said, as he ran out of his cabin pulling on a pair of jeans. She noticed, although it didn't register at the moment, that he had a nice chest and that his arms were strong. He noticed, and it did register, that it was evident through the thin material of the gown that she was a natural ash blonde, and that her waist was even smaller than he'd thought. She punched instructions. The field was showing almost double the mass of the asteroid that they were mining. Mop was yapping warning. She had a feeling that the next few seconds were critical, but a quick search of near space showed no danger. She punched in an order and saw that the sensors had recorded a small tremor only four minutes ago. With a sudden chill running up her back she searched near space again, selected a vector, killed the ship's field and gave power to the flux drive. Mother jerked away from her rocky perch with a suddenness that sent Mop to his belly on the deck and caused both Dent and Erin to reach for support before the ship's gravity adjusted. Behind them, the tumbling slab smashed with all of the inertial mass of millions of tons into the asteroid just vacated by Mother. Rock shattered soundlessly in the vacuum of space. Erin found an opening in the belt and sent Mother soaring outward, racing away from chunks of rock that seemed to be pursuing her. At a safe distance, Erin stabilized the ship. «Keep an eye open,» she said, «in case some of the mothers come after us.» She motioned with one hand to indicate that she was talking about the shattered particles of the asteroids. «You wanta tell me what the hell happened?» Dent asked. «In a minute.» «What are you doing?» he asked. She was at the food dispensers. «I'm going to give Mr. Mop a full two ounces of our best and most tender steak.» Mop had a sensitive digestive system. He was, after all, a small dog. Giving him two ounces of steak was the equivalent of a man of Dent's size eating four pounds. Both Erin and Dent knew from experience that people food, as much as Mop loved it, upset his tummy, which cause him to have diarrhea, which tended to make him very messy and very smelly at the rear. «Two ounces?» Dent asked. «Yes.» «Well, he's your little dog.» «Yes, and if it upsets him I'll wash his rear end,» Erin said. «Because if it weren't for him, we'd be dead.» Denton adjusted a viewer, saw a growing cloud of rock particles behind him. «Think he'd want three ounces?» he asked. Erin bent over to give Mop his treat, felt a draft, realized that she was dressed only in her shortie gown, stood up quickly, saw Denton looking at her with a musing smile on his face. «Nice,» he said. «Son-of-a-bitch,» she said. «Give the dog his treat,» he said, as Mop danced around on his rear legs. Erin knelt and began feeding the dog the bits of savory meat. Denton's eyes on her seemed to generate warmth deep inside of her. CHAPTER SEVEN With her superior detection equipment the Murdoch Miner could keep track of the Mother Lode either from a distance or at close range if the Miner was hidden from Mother's sensors by intervening rock. For some time those aboard the rakishly designed ship were content to observe the actions of the converted Mule as she went about her work, although personal relations aboard the Murdoch Miner were not as congenial as aboard the Mule. Ordinarily the Miner operated with a four-man crew consisting of two married couples who got along very well together because the women were sisters who had an impartial regard for the cousins they had married. Over a period of several years the four had discovered that a certain amount of change and variety enlivened the dull routines of space mining. Into the smoothly working and cozy arrangement the boss, Murdoch Plough, had tossed a disruption that muddled things up as severely as if someone had dropped a piece of durasteel into the gears of a complicated machine. The disruption was named Gordon Plough, and since he was the little brother of the boss, thus making it necessary to put up a good front, the sisters had to keep to their own respective beds, wear more clothing than usual, and be careful of what they said. The situation was a pain in the hootchie, and it threatened to get worse before it got better, because little brother couldn't make up his mind what to do about the Mule that was keeping the Murdoch Miner from the richest gold deposits anyone aboard her had ever seen. In fairness to Gordon Plough it had never been simple being the younger brother to a self-made man. It hadn't even been easy when they were boys because Murdoch had always been big for his age and had taken great pleasure in making life as painful as possible for Gordon. Now that they were both men, Gordon thought that his older brother liked him well enough, but still looked upon him as a kid. He wasn't. He was twenty-nine years old and he'd always felt that if Murdoch would ever give him a real chance he could prove that he could do more for the Haven Refining Company and the mining interests than be some kind of errand boy. Gordon's chance had come when his brother put him in charge of following the Mother Lode to, it was clearly understood, if not stated openly, discover and take possession of one of the richest gold sources in the galaxy. Just how Gor