“Your animals are all trained?” said Terl.

“As well as can be expected.”

“Well, notice you've had a couple extra weeks.”

“They'll do.”

“All right, now. We have to come to the time to be real miners!” He rolled out the map. It was a patch-up of sectional running shots from a recon drone, and it condensed about two thousand square miles of the Rocky Mountains from Denver to the west. “You can read one of these?”

“Yes,” said Jonnie.

Terl snapped the head of a canyon with his talon. “It’s there.” Jonnie could almost feel the surge of greed in Terl. His voice was a conspiratorial mutter. “It’s a lode of white quartz with streamers of pure gold in it. It 's a freak. Exposed by a landslide in recent years.” And he took a large photograph out of the pack.

There it was, a diagonal slash of white in the red side of a canyon. Terl took a closer shot and showed it. Fingers of pure gold could be seen threading through the quartz.

Jonnie would have spoken but Terl held up his paw to stop him. “You fly over and take a close look at it. When you've seen it and gotten it oriented as a mining problem, you come back and see me and I will clarify any questions as to procedure.” He tapped the location on the larger map. “Memorize that spot.” Jonnie noted that the map bore no markings. Clever Terl. No clues if the map went adrift.

He sat there and let Jonnie study the map.

Jonnie knew these mountains, but he had never had a detailed picture of them from this angle: above.

Terl put all his papers away except the map. “Hold on to that.” He stood up.

“How long do we have to get it out?” said Jonnie.

“Day 91 of the coming year. That's six and a half months away.”

“That's also winter,” said Jonnie.

Terl shrugged. “It’s always winter up there. Ten months of winter and two months of fall.” He laughed. “Fly over and look at it, animal. Take a week or two to study it out. And then come over and we'll have a private meeting. And this is confidential, do you hear? Outside of your animals, say nothing."

Terl had gone off playing catch with the control box. His ground car roared away back to the compound.

A couple of hours later Jonnie's party was flying high above the Rockies.

“That's the first time,” said one of the Scots behind Jonnie, “that I knew Robbie Burns was toxic.”

Jonnie turned. He thought the sentry must have gotten aboard. “You speak

Psychlo that well?”

“Of course,” said the Scot and showed the ruler bruises on the back of his hand. He was one of the lads chosen because of his resemblance to Jonnie. “I was putting an ear to a window on the second floor above you. He can't understand English, can he?”

“One of our very few advantages,” said Jonnie. “I didn't get the uranium detector.”

“Well,” said Robert the Fox, “it's a very optimistic man that thinks he can win all the battles. What are all those villages down there?”

It was true. There were old towns here and there throughout this section of the mountains.

“They're deserted,” said Jonnie. "I’ve been to some of them. No population but rats. Mining ghost towns.”

"'Tis a sad thing” said Robert the Fox. “All this space and all kinds of food and no people. And over in Scotland there's little space that will grow anything and hardly any food at all. It 's a dark chapter in history we've been through.”

“We'll change it,” said a young Scot behind him.

“Aye,” said Robert the Fox. "If we have any luck. All this great broad world full of food and no people! What are the names of those grand peaks down there?”

“I don't know,” said Jonnie. "If you look on the mine map you'll see they just give them numbers. I think they had names once but people forgot. That one over there we just call 'Highpeak.' "

“Hey!” said a young Scot. “There's sheep down on that mountainside!” He was using a hand telescope.

“They're called bighorns,” said Jonnie. “It’s quite a feat to hunt one down. They can stand on a ledge not bigger than your hand and sail off and land on another one not wider than two fingers.”

“And there's a bear!” said the Scot. “What a big one!”

“The bears will go into hibernation soon,” said Jonnie. "I’m surprised one is out at this altitude.”

“Some wolves are following him,” said the Scot.

“Laddies,” said Robert the Fox, “we are hunting bigger game! Keep your eye out for the canyon.”

Jonnie spotted it shortly before one o'clock.

It was a startling sight. The grandeur of the scene in this thin, cold air made one feel small.

Out of a river, a thin, silver thread in the depths far below, reared a reddish, massive wall of rock rising sheer and raw. Narrowly across from it was its echoing face. Down through the eons the river, finding a softer strata between the two faces, had gnawed its turbulent way to make at last this gigantic knife slice in the all but impregnable stone. A thousand feet deep, a hundred yards wide, the enormous wound gaped.

All around it rose majestic peaks, hiding it from the world.

The sparkling white line of quartz, many feet thick, marked it with a brief, diagonal line. And in that quartz, imbedded and pure, gold shone and beckoned.

It had in its reality a much greater impact than any photograph. It was like a jewel band set upon the wrinkled skin of a hag.

One could see far below where a portion of the cliff face had fallen; the fragments lay like crashed pebbles in the depths. The river had eaten too deep under the cliff and an earthquake had shaken a slice of the face loose.

Snow had not fallen yet, for the year was dry, and there was nothing to impede the view. Jonnie dropped the plane lower.

And then the wind hit them.

Funneled up the long gorge, compressed and screaming to get free, the turbulent currents tore at the cliff.

With fingers racing across the overlarge keys of the console, Jonnie fought to keep the light personnel plane in position.

It was not a dazzling lode at that moment. It was a brutal, elemental wall that could crush them if they touched it.

Jonnie leaped the plane a thousand feet up, clear of the updrafts, and steadied it. He turned to one of the Scots, the one who looked like him and who had spoken of Burns. His name was Dunneldeen MacSwanson. “Can you handle this plane?”

Dunneldeen came forward. Robert the Fox went to a rear seat and strapped himself into the copilot seat.

In these teleportation drives, there were a number of corrections that had to be constantly watched. Some were built in to the computers; some were preprogrammed for any flight. Space itself was absolute and motionless, having no time, energy, or mass of its own. But to stay in one place relative to the mass around one, it was necessary to parallel the track of such mass. The world turned daily, and that was a near thousand-mile-an-hour correction. The earth orbited the sun and that required second-to-second correction. The solar system was precessing, and even if the correction was minute, it had to be compensated for. The whole solar system was en route to somewhere else at a blinding speed. The universe itself was twisting in relation to other universes. These factors and others made control of the ship a dicey business in normal times. Down there in that canyon it was a nightmare.

The irregular external buffetings of the wind upset the inertia of the motor housing and made instant shifts of coordination continual.

Dunneldeen had been schooled and trained in all this. But he had seen Jonnie's fingers flying over that console and knew it was no routine flight. In the first place the Psychlo keys allowed for wide talons and wider paws, and it required a snapping tension in the wrists to compensate for these spacings with human hands.