I could see at once that there was going to be an awful lot of digging.

Hound said, "No, no, no! You can't dig in that suit you're wearing and if you think Shatter and I are going to do all the digging, you've got another think coming, young Monte." He called to the herdsman. "Haven't you got a village around here?"

The herdsman spat liquidly in a northerly direction. "Just on the other side of them biggest black rocks."

I asked Corsa's brother to unload the camping equipment and set it up and then scrambled after Hound, who had gone lumbering off in the indicated direction. With many an admonition to not scuff my shoes and not fall in any obviously gaping holes, Hound led me around the mammoth pile of stones, and after about fifteen minutes of walking we came to the "village."

It wasn't a village at all. The rocks seemed to have a lot of holes in them that could be said to be caves and there were women and kids visible.

Hound, with a lot of questions to blank or wide-eyed faces, located the headman in a cavity that was mainly furnished with odors. He was gnarled and twisted and toothless, 190 if he was a day.

Aha! I thought. These were some of the prisoners that escaped during the earthquake and they stayed around!

"This tribe?" said the old man. "We're herders. We drifted in here about fifty year ago, found grass and settled down." No, he didn't know this had once been a castle.

Hound said to me, "How many holes are you going to dig?"

"How should I know how many holes I'm going to dig?"

"Well, I better make plans for a lot of holes if your record in Kid Sandpiles is any gauge. How much money have you got on you?"

I said, "Why should I have any money on me?"

Hound said, "Because I'm going to hire these men to do the digging."

"Oh."

He struck up some kind of a crass commercial bargain in which the fifty men of the village would dig.

Cautioned numerous times not to catch the cuffs of my pants on thorns, we got back to the air-wagon.

There was no sign of any pitched shelters. A bang in the distance told me that Corsa's brother was utilizing the remaining light to shoot songbirds. Corsa was busy discussing animal husbandry with the herdsman.

Hound said, "I'm going to take the air-wagon back to town and get an advance on your next month's allowance. And I'm going to get you some digging clothes. You should have told me what you were up to. Sit right there on that rock until I come back."

He and Shafter threw the camping gear out and Hound took off. I sat on the rock and wondered what it would be like to live an unmanaged life. I was certain that Bob Hoodward didn't ever have such obstacles to overcome. Shafter was going around pushing a fuel rod in the ground and tapping it. Finally he said to me, "Young Monte, I can't tap the rod and read a meter at the same time. When I tap the rod, you walk around me fifteen or twenty feet away and watch the meter."

I did as he suggested. Almost at once I got a huge surge. Excitedly I began to tear out grass by the roots and scoop away sand. Shafter was right with me. We looked like a couple of sporting animals going down a varmint hole for the kill. Grass tufts were flying through the moonlight in one direction and sand in another.

"What are you doing?" said Corsa.

"We're going after buried treasure," said Shatter.

"Well, you shouldn't be digging this grassland up like that. You'll ruin their pasturage. Fill that hole up at once and replace the turf."

"Oh, we will, we will," I said. "Let's see what's down here first."

"Monte," she said severely, "I can see right now that you have a terrible amount to learn. When you dig up pasturage that way, you get erosion. I really sigh when I realize the terrible time I will have making an acceptable farmer out of you. You have no finer sensibilities. Cease and desist at once!"

Of course we had to stop. I went back and sat down on the rock, mourning. What the Devils had been down underneath there, giving that read on the analyzer?

The moons were well up when Hound came back. He had brought two footmen, a cook and a maid for Corsa. I got scolded because my lounge suit was now turf-stained.

They found a spring, erected inflatable shelters and belatedly we had a dinner they had brought from town.

But I was very cunning. You are lucky that I was, dear reader, for we never would have found out what happened after the Gris narrative left us in midair.

I waited until everybody was asleep. I crept out of my shelter and went back to the hole and began to dig. I was very quiet. I dug and scraped and brushed and wore my fingers to the bone.

And then, there in the green moonlight, I knelt there looking at it.

A CANNON WHEEL!

It was corroded and twisted. The rim was partially melted as from a flaming blast.

Clearly there had been a battle here!

My hopes soared.

Clearly I could put an end to the overmanagement of my life. Fame beckoned!

I came out of my trance. I rolled it over onto flat ground. I carefully filled the hole in although I couldn't find the turf.

I rolled the clumsy, battered wheel into my shelter and at last went to sleep. A blasting bustle awoke me. I couldn't find out what it was right away because Hound had to shave me and get me into some sport clothes and proper boots and even insisted I have breakfast. At last I got out of the shelter. The area was teeming with men from the village. They all had digging tools. They were standing around Corsa. My hopes soared. Maybe she was on my side. Then I overheard what she was saying.

She was telling them that the grazing area could be quadrupled ! if they dug certain trenches that would stop erosion and enlarge the spring. Certain actions, it seemed, would then create ponds from the occasional runoff of the rains.

"There's far too much spill into that chasm," she told them. "So here is your map. Now get to work."

They all went trudging off and she came over to me. "Now, I've , taken care of that for you, Monte. Why don't you go find my brother and help him shoot these songbirds. They're terrible for crops."

It was my turn to raise my eyes to the sky but, of course, I didn't. Not in front of her. Shafter and I had no choice but to follow the diggers about and hope they would hit something by accident. Almost at once we began to hit paydirt! (That's a mining term.) A digger threw some dirt aside and Shafter saw something glitter and was in there like a shot. He picked up something round and then said, "Blast, I thought it was a coin!" He threw it away and I picked it up quickly. A button! It had a symbol on it that looked like a bottle—no, a fat paddle with an upside-down handle! , THE APPARATUS!

Aha! The Gris confession was no myth! All that day I tagged around collecting things. Odds and ends of metal were evidently not unusual in this place. One of the men said they appeared on the ground every time it rained. This had been a vast encampment!

By evening I had a hoard that even included the remains of an electric whip!

Oh, I was getting warm. I didn't even mind a lecture by Corsa's brother, as he sorted out a mound of plumage, on what kind of songbird you had to get rid of first if you ever expected to get a wink of sleep. I wondered sourly to myself if Gris' ancestors had come from Modon. I wondered if my sanity could stand up to much more association with this pair. About midnight the conspiratorial voice of Shafter woke me up. "If we're ever going to find any buried treasure," he whispered, "we're going to have to work at night. Come along. I need somebody to read the meter."

We stealthily crept out of camp. "Now, today when I went into town to get a load of grass seed," he said, "I took a look at this place from the air. If this was ever a castle, when the earthquake knocked it over, it fell due west. There's a pattern of fallen stone that looks just like a tower when you see it from above. My hunch is that if you root around over there and if it ever had a strongroom, it would lie in that mess. So let's go."