The Scot officer was trying to find pieces of the exploded Bolbod, picking up items of bloody cloth. He seemed to find something. He put it in a bag and waved to the forklift. They now put the huge Bolbod bodies into the plane with the forklift. The lift came back and put the punchcraft inside.

The plane took off and went back north. The terrestrial group went into the powerhouse and vanished from sight.

The faces on the viewscreens were hard to read. They were grappling with this situation.

They didn't have too much time to ponder for their second probe was now in progress, and infrabeams shifted to the snowy crest of Mount Elgon which gleamed above the clouds far below.

It had annoyed them to see an old device they took to be an ancient radio telescope mounted up there. It seemed to be tracking them as they orbited.

A Hockner probe ship with five Hockners had been assigned to disable the device. And there was the Hockner probe now, nearing its destination. A Hockner probe carried no artillery itself but the men did. The noseless, overly ornamented crew members were visible under the probe canopy. It was little more than a sled and was jet-powered. There seemed to be very high winds and it was having

trouble setting down on a broad, icy shoulder of the peak. There was a precipice there that dropped down into the clouds. Yes, it was a high wind; plumes of snow were blowing away from the peak. Just ahead of them but set well back from the edge was the offending radio telescope. Beyond that object, out of the view of the probecraft, a glacier fell away.

The faces watching it on their separate screens were quite different in reactions. It was taking the probecraft so long to get down to a landing, going out and back again time after time, that their attention was drifting.

The Tolnep half-captain was doing some calculations about slave prices. He knew an air planet where you could get a thousand credits a slave if you could get them there alive. He estimated that he had a potential here of about fifteen thousand, landed live, out of maybe thirty thousand shipped. That was fifteen million Galactic credits. His nineteen percent of that, the prize money he would get personally, would be two million, eight hundred fifty thousand credits. His loaners were owed fifty-two thousand, eight hundred sixty credits in gambling debts (the reason he was happy to undertake a very long cruise) and this left him two million, seven hundred ninety-seven thousand, one hundred forty credits.

He could retire!

The Hawvin was thinking about all the silver and copper coins that must be in the ruins of old banks– the Psychlos valued neither metal but he knew a market for it.

The Bolbod had been thinking about all the Psychlo machinery down there up until the time his punchcraft was captured. Now he was thinking about punching terrestrials.

The Jambitchow commander was wondering how he could do the rest of these aliens out of slaves, metal and machinery.

Finally the probecraft made it and sat down on the ledge and their attention riveted on it.

The five Hockners got out, bulky in their fancy space suits and clumsy in swinging their blast rifle straps off their shoulders.

Suddenly the voice of the Hockner landing control officer in orbit crackled out of their radios down there and came back up the infrabeam.

“Alert to the battle plane!”

There was a battle plane up at about two hundred thousand feet. But it had been there for an hour, doing nothing. And it was doing nothing now. The five Hockners were looking at it way up there, a tiny speck to them, hard to find in the blue sky they saw.

“No, no!” barked the Hockner landing control officer. “Around the corner from you! Coming up the glacier!”

Only then did the watching faces see it. From their viewpoint it was just a line on the glacier, just the top of its body showing, the rest cut off by the jutting crag above the telescope. The battle plane had hugged the glacier all the way up! It was almost a hundred yards back of the telescope when it stopped. No one here could see whether anyone got out of it. It must be holding in that position on its motors. The glacier was steep.

The five Hockners, alert now but seeing no one yet, crouched, guns ready. Then they sprinted forward.

A hammering burst of blast guns flared just behind the telescope.

One Hockner, near the edge, was hit, thrown out into space, and went spinning down through the clouds.

The Hockner sled, struck by a burst, slithered backward, teetered, and dropped into empty space.

The four remaining Hockners charged through the snow and wind, guns going.

The relentless pounding of blast rifles racketed up the infrabeam. The whole area under the telescope seemed to be erupting continuous, green gouts of thundering energy.

One Hockner down. Two down. Three down! The fourth almost reached the telescope and then thudded into the snow.

The only sound now was the whistle of wind around the peak.

Several terrestrials sprang into view from beyond the radio telescope. They rushed forward, their red and white high-altitude suits looking like splashes of blood against the snow. They turned over the Hockners, took their weapons. One terrestrial looked over the edge where the fifth Hockner and the probecraft had fallen but the only cushion down there was the tops of the clouds far below.

The Hockners were picked up and lugged off by the terrestrials. Using safety lines and slipping and sliding down the glacier, they loaded the Hockners into the marine attack plane which was now more visible.

One terrestrial came back and checked over the radio telescope and then he went sliding down the glacier, grabbed the door of the plane, and swung aboard.

The plane took off and went down through the clouds. The infrabeam shifted to penetrate the overcast and followed it back to the minesite.

“That proves it,” said the Tolnep half-captain. “It was just as I thought all along.”

He ignored the comments to the effect that he had favored the probes.

“It was a lure,” he continued. “It is quite obvious that at the dam yesterday they went down and made

a harmless eruption of trees to intrigue us. Then they lay in wait and succeeded in capturing two Bolbod crewmen.

“The radio telescope,” he went on, “is just a dummy as I suspected. They have not been used for centuries. Everyone uses infrabeams to pick up faint signals and broadcasts. So they put it there in an elaborate charade to attract down a probe. None of the Hockner crew besides the one so clumsy as to fall off the cliff were killed. The guns were all on 'stun.' Thus they succeeded in luring four Hockners."

“Should you be talking so plainly?” said the Jambitchow commander, stroking his polished scales. “They may have us on monitor.”

“Nonsense,” said the Tolnep. “Our detectors show no infrabeams and we are just on local. I tell you no one has used radio telescopes since...since...the Hambon Sun War! They have far too much clutter; they are too bulky. That's just a dummy down there. And did you notice the cute way that officer came back and ‘adjusted' it. They're just hoping we'll try again.”

“I shouldn't think they need to,” said the Hawvin. “They now have two Bolbod crew and four Hockners to interrogate at leisure. Knowing Psychlo methods of interrogation, I shouldn't care to be those crewmen!”

“They're not Psychlos!" said the Hockner super-lieutenant, covering up the fact that he was aghast at the fate of his crewmen.

“Yes, they are,” said the Bolbod. “You saw that Psychlo with the terrestrials the other day down by the lake. The Psychlos are using aliens as a subject race. They've done it before. I vote we go down in an actual mass attack and pound out any installation they have, now! Before they are further prepared.”