under the bed, waited until all was still to sneak quietly to lie at Erin's feet with his head against her leg. She patted her hand on a spot by her side and the little dog came to snuggle there, sighing in contentment as she let her hand rest lightly on him. A living ship in space is never silent. Servomechanisms hum quietly. Relays and thermocouples click as they do their work vigilantly. The life-support system mutters contentedly to itself. The sounds were familiar, so much a part of life that Erin didn't notice them until the hums, the clicks, the muttering ceased to be mechanical and seemed to become a confused babble of voices. She stiffened. Mop, feeling the change in her, lifted his head. «It's all right,» she whispered. «I'm just getting a bit space happy.» It was time to find a nice deposit of a certain yellow metal, top off Mother's cargo, and drain the big generator while making blinks as fast as they could be punched into the computer. She wanted to be past the Dead Worlds before laying by to charge. She longed to be near human populations on civilized planets where sleek, converted military spaceships did not sneak up and disgorge killers. She could not understand the words, but the voices were there. She told herself that it was all in her mind, pulled Mop to her, and hugged him. Denton slept on, making a soft little buzzing noise. Was it censure she sensed in the garbled voices? She angrily rejected it. She had defended her life. She had killed only to keep from being killed. The voices faded. «Space happy,» she whispered to Mop. Aside from the comforting, familiar little sounds made by Mother's housekeeping, it was quiet. Erin closed her eyes and tried to go back to sleep, but her lids flew open when Mop suddenly stiffened and came to his feet. «What?» she asked. He jumped down from the bed, ran to the door, and scratched. With chills chasing each other up and down her spine, Erin pulled on a robe and opened the door to the bridge. Lights came on. A quick check of critical instruments showed that Mother and the computer were healthy. «What?» she asked. Mop ran here and there as if looking for something. «You're scaring me, you little poof.» She sat in the control chair and ran a quick systems check. Everything was humming along nicely. Feeling very foolish, she activated Mother's rather primitive biological sensors. Cold, empty space seemed to laugh at her as the sensors registered—nothing, blankness, the void. Before going to bed they had positioned Mother over a good vein of ore in solid rock. She went to the mining room and began working. With luck, three more days of digging would fill the ship's cargo areas. She could feel the slight vibrations as the biter scraped against rock. No more voices. Mop had climbed from her lap to a space just behind the controls for the mining equipment. Now and then he opened one eye to watch the movement of her hand. When the vein of gold-carrying ore was exhausted, she looked at the clock. She'd been at it for eight hours. It was almost time for the scheduled work period to begin. She secured the equipment, went back to the cabin. Denton slept on as she showered and dried herself. She reached for a nightgown, shrugged. The need for modesty was gone. Thoughts of man and woman together heated her as she knelt on the bed and looked at his sleeping face. She smiled as she noted that the light coverlet was tented over his manhood. She eased herself under the sheet and moved with stealth to position herself, eased down, down, sighing. She sat very still for a long time before he turned his head to one side and made a sound in his throat. She began to move, put her hands on his shoulders, shuddered with pleasure as he awakened and thrust upward. After a timeless period of fusion she lay beside him, pleasantly expended, warm, core-soft. «I was having the damnedest dream,» he said. «Umm.» «There was this city, this fairyland city, and people were flying in panic and screaming—» «Running away?» «Flying,» he said. «As in, like, birds?» «Yep.» She shivered, remembering the voices. «And I was there and not there, because at the same time I was in a great room, like a courtroom but more magnificent, and someone was saying that defiance of the law leads to ruin.» «Ah, guilt feelings,» she said. «As you are fond of saying, you bet your sweet ass.» He held her close. «Two more days,» she said. She thought it best not to admit that she, too, had experienced remorse. «And how many more trips after that?» «Well, if you want to be poor, with only a million or so, we can turn the whole thing over to X&A when we get to Haven with this load.» «Haven?» She knew the intent of his question. The ship that they had blinked into the sun had been a Haven ship. «It would look suspicious, since I sold my first load there, if I went anywhere else.» He nodded. «All right. But I've never been a good liar, Erin.» She brushed his thick hair back from his forehead tenderly. «I don't think anyone will question us. If Murdoch Plough sent that ship after us, he wouldn't dare ask questions, for that would be admitting that he knew his men tried to kill us.» «As always, you're probably right,» he said. «But let's not make that decision right now. We've got a few weeks of travel before we get to Haven.» He held her close and was quiet for a long time before he said, «They had golden skin.» «Who?» «The people in the dream.» «They were suntanned?» «Bronzed. Golden.» «Make up your mind.» «I wonder what caused it.» «What?» «The blowup. Whatever it was that shattered a planet.» She shivered again, remembering Mop's actions and her own feeling that there was something out there in the asteroid belt. «Did they know? In my dream the sky was fire. I could sense the fear.» He shook his head. «Wow. To know that you're going to die—» «Everyone knows that. « «Yeah, we all know we're going to die someday. But to know that you're going to die in a matter of—what? Seconds? Minutes? Hours? Days? How much warning did they have? And to know that not only are you going to die but everyone you know, everyone you love, and everyone you don't know, and everyone you hate is going to die with you. Family, friends, lovers, children, the young, the old—» He sighed. «Pets? And every material thing is going to perish with you. Total destruction.» «You're being very negative,» she said, trying to sound as if she were teasing but not succeeding totally. «Yep.» He squeezed her. «Time to get up and about, lazybones.» «You get up. I just put in eight hours on the miner.» «Huh?» «Couldn't sleep.» «So you were bothered.» «I'm not totally insensitive.» «No. Sorry.» He slapped her playfully on the rump. Mop bounced up on the bed to get in on the fun. «Toes, Mop,» Denton said, removing the coverlet from Erin's feet. «Get those toes.» Mop attacked Erin's bare toes, gnawing carefully. He was a gentle little dog. Erin squealed. Denton held her legs down. «Toes,» he kept saying as Mop, stubby tail going in ecstatic circles, was urged on to greater efforts by Erin's laughing protest. Mop supervised from his usual perch on the console as Erin lifted the ship and started the search for one more deposit of the yellow metal. Several times the sensors gave heavy metal readings. «Since this is the last one,» she said, «let's make it good.» She set the detectors to the density of sedimentary rock of the type that had yielded pure gold in placer deposits. In such rock fossilized bones were found. Hours went by. They eased past hundreds of oddly shaped asteroids of the most common types. Most of the smooth-skinned rocks registered iron, and their contours seemed to indicate that they had solidified in cold space. Core material. The living heart of a planet, molten, fiery, bursting into the black emptiness through the fragile, solid crust, scattering the debris that had been a world. More than once the computer sang out that the sensors had found stone of the desired consistency with gold deposits near the surface, but for some reason that Erin did not try to explain, even to herself, she was not satisfied. Perhaps, since the next people to see the belt would be the crew of an X&A ship, she just wanted to explore as much of the belt as possible. Deep inside the tumbling, crowded belt the sensors located the largest slab of sedimentary rock they had seen. There were solid indications of gold. Erin ran an additional check, setting the sensors to detect the minerals present in fossil bone. Denton raised his eyebrows when the indicators registered a strong presence. «Are we mining or bone hunting?» he asked. «Little bit of both?» «Might as well,» he said. There was a perfect landing place directly atop the strongest readings for heavy metals. Erin locked Mother to the rock and stabilized the tumble. There was one final task to be performed before beginning mining operations. She put a slow spin on the entire asteroid so that once every hour Mother's detectors could scan all of the spaces separating her from the neighbors. Twice now danger had crept up on the ship's blind side. It would not happen again. Heavy gold nuggets had collected in a pocket. They had a rich, pure color. To the relief of both of them the work went on with riches being accumulated in the cargo space without the distraction of encountering fossilized humanoid remains. «That's it,» Dent said. The nugget pocket had been very productive. He swung the loader back into its pod after dumping one last load of gold-flecked sand into the cargo space. «Unless you want to pile some ore under your bunk.» «I'm not quite that greedy,» she said. He checked the clock. «We can be back on the established blink routes in half an hour.» She nodded. She was toying with the sensor controls, zeroing in on an area that gave the readings of fossilized organic material. «Dent?» «I don't think I want to hear this.» «Just look.» He checked the sensor gauges. «Ummm. Big.» «Bigger than anything we've seen.» He shrugged. «All right.» She used the remote panel to lift ship just far enough off the rock to move a few feet to the right. She used the biter carefully to nibble away the rock, postponing the time when they would have to climb into suits and go extravehicular. When the sensors showed only a thin layer of stone over fossil, she employed the laser and exposed a dome of grayish material. «Looks like another skull,» Denton said. «I'm afraid so.» «It was your crazy idea,» he said. «You don't have to go with me,» she said. «No, I don't have to.» He leaned to kiss her on the cheek. «But I will because you have such splendidly proportioned mammary glands.» «Hands off,» she said, as he fondled her breasts. «I can play with your bosom if I want to,» he said. «It's my bosom.» «If that's the way you're going to be, then you'll have to marry me,» he said. «In fact, as captain of this ship you can marry us and then what's mine is yours and vice-versa.» «Not my body,» she said. «Just half of it,» he said, putting both hands on her left breast, which was slightly larger than the right. «I'll take this half.» «I don't think you quite understand the legal concept of community property,» she said, pressing his hand against her breast. «And besides, it's not play time.» «Anything I hate it's a bossy female captain,» he said, moving off toward the suit closet. «You never get used to it,» she said, as they stood outside on barren rock. Dent led the way into the rather cramped space under the ship. He started using his hand-held laser at one end of the trench. She worked around the skull, freeing it from its encasing stone to look down into rock-clogged eye sockets. «Erin, come have a look at this,» Denton said. There was something in his voice that caused he