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“It feels heavier. And this crystal looks almost dead.” She regarded Kai for an explanation.

He shrugged. “Gaber saw the echoes on the recorder, thought you’d mucked it up, Portegin . . .” He grinned as the mechanic growled at the cartographer. “But I decided we’d better check. This was what we found.”

Margit made a guttural noise, deep in her throat, of disgust and irritation. “You mean, we’ve spent hours doing what has been done! You wit-heads could have saved us time and useless energy by rigging that screen right off.”

“According to our computer banks, this planet had never been surveyed,” Kai said in a soothing drawl.

“Well, obviously it has been.” Margit glowered at the screen. “And you know, we’ve paralleled their line almost perfectly. Not bad for a first working expedition, is it,” she added, talking herself into a better frame of mind. “Hey,” she said in a much louder, less happy tone of voice, “no wonder we couldn’t find anything worth the looking. It’d been got already. How far does the old survey coring go?”

“Stops at the edge of the shield, my dear girl,” said Portegin, “and now that we know from the old cores where the shield ends, we can start hitting some pay dirt for a change. I don’t think we’ve done too much duplication—except perhaps in the north and northeast.”

Kai thanked the compassionate computer that had put those two on this team with him—they might complain a bit, but they’d already talked themselves into a positive frame over the duplicated effort.

“I feel a lot better now, knowing there was a good reason we couldn’t find any pay dirt at all!” Margit studied the screen and then pointed at several areas. “There’s nothing here and here. Should be!”

“Signals are very faint,” Portegin said. “Some may have just given up the ghost. If everything else there is worked out, is there any point in setting new cores, Kai?”

“None.”

Aulia and Dimenon entered the cartography dome, closely followed by the other four geologists.

“Guess what Kai and Gaber found?” Margit asked. Expressions of surprise and displeasure greeted her question. “They found out why we couldn’t find anything . . . yet!”

So Kai and Gaber repeated the account of their afternoon’s activities, and the relief that spread throughout the room was reassuring to the team leader. Everyone had a turn at examining the old device, comparing it with those they were setting, joking about ghosts and echoes.

“We can set up secondary camps right on the edges of the shield,” Triv was saying excitedly. “Can we start tomorrow, Kai?”

“Surely, I’ll reassign everyone to more profitable areas hopefully. Let me work it out. And Bakkun, I’ll be out with you tomorrow.”

The meal gong sounded, reverberating under the force-screen, so he dismissed them all, staying behind briefly to reschedule flights for the next day. They would have to set up secondary camps, as Triv suggested, but Kai wasn’t all that keen to dissipate their complement. Varian hadn’t yet had a chance to catalogue the worst of the predators and, despite the personal force-screens, a team could be caught too far away for help to arrive in time. That predator he’d seen today wouldn’t be stopped by a puny personal force-screen. He also couldn’t hold the teams back from finding deposits; they got credit bonuses based on the assays of their individual discoveries. That was one reason why the lack of finds so far had had such a serious effect on their morale. He couldn’t risk a further check to their spirits and ambitions. He also couldn’t risk sending them out against predators like those he’d seen today. So he must have a chat with Varian.

He emerged into an insect-noisy night. The force-screen, arcing over the encampment, was aglow with blue spits of light as nocturnal creatures tried to reach the tantalizing floodlights which illuminated the compound.

Had that other survey party, millennia ago, camped here? Would another group, millennia hence, return when his cores emitted shallow ghost blips on another screen?

Had they