After a dozen tries, Angus became convinced it must be a spent cartridge. He switched it on in front of his face and promptly turned blue with coughing. No, it wasn't a spent cartridge. They went down in pits. They scrambled into drifts long since unsafe.

They used up five cartridges of breathe-gas.

No explosions.

Jonnie felt a bit disheartened. He let Angus and the pilot go on with the experiments while he wandered around through the ruins. It was all so badly decayed there was difficulty in recognizing what the buildings had been used for. How Angus had found paper simply added up to Angus: it must have been protected by being preserved under something.

Then Jonnie started to get suspicious. In all this area he had only found one pitiful remnant that might have been a body, merely teeth fillings and buttons lying in a certain pattern in a room.

No remains of file cabinets. No distinguishable remains of machinery aside from some decayed hoists. But no bodies save that one.

He went back to the plane and sat down. This place had been mined out before the Psychlo attack. And it had been mined out with such care that the waste dumps weren't even hot.

Angus came streaming back shouting: “It works! It works!” He was carrying something that had been framed.

Jonnie got out and looked at it. One corner of the ancient frame was not charred. Inset into the dilapidated mounting was a piece of ore. It had a brass plate under it, mostly undecipherable. There must have been a leaded glass face on the frame once, for a scrap of it remained in a corner.

He carried it over to a rock and sat down and studied it. The ore was brown and black. It had been mounted as an exhibit on a lead background. He held the inscription this way and that. He couldn't make out more than that it was the “first” something. And then a person's name he couldn't make out either. He turned the plate in another way and then saw the letters at the top more plainly. They said

"PITCHBLENDE."

“Look!” said Angus. “Let me show you.” He took the frame from Jonnie and put it about thirty feet away. He pointed the breathe-gas cartridge at it and came back to Jonnie. He flipped on a remote switch. The breathe-gas emission exploded!

"I’ll do it again,” yelped Angus. He turned the switch full on and left it on. He wouldn't have had time to turn it off any way.

The bottle, its emitting snout flaming like a rocket engine, took off and went about ten feet. The pilot and Angus shouted with delight.

“Pitchblende,” said Jonnie, who had done a lot of homework. “That's uranite ore. It's the source of a lot of radioactive isotopes. Where'd you get it?”

They dragged him off to the broken shambles of a building that was so collapsed they had to tug and pull at a lot of roof to get at anything else in it.

Covered with dust and hot from work despite the chill air, Jonnie at last went out and sat down on what had once been a porch.

A museum. A small museum it had been. Other specimens were there. Rose quartz, hematite, things that weren't from this immediate place. There wasn't even any evidence that the pitchblende had been from here. “The test for breathe-gas works!” said the irrepressible Angus.

Jonnie felt depressed. He knew it worked. He had seen a blade scraper canopy blow up and kill a Psychlo long ago when some radioactive dust hit it.

"I’m glad it works,” he said. “But even if there is any uranium left under us it's too deep for us to get to. Collect some more lead and wrap that specimen up. We'll take it home.”

“Let's look around here some more!” said Angus.

Jonnie had to wait out the storm to the east anyway. “Go ahead,” he said.

But he knew it was mined out. Only one body and a museum.

Where in heaven's name was he going to find uranium– lots of it? Where.

Jonnie gazed with horror into the deep canyon. There was a flying drill platform down there, close to the river, and it was in real trouble.

It was the day after their return from Uravan. The storm had blown over, leaving a sparkling, white-coated day. But at these altitudes it was bitterly cold, and the canyon, as ever, was funneling winds into torrents of turbulence.

Two Scots, one of them Dunneldeen, the other a black-haired youth named Andrew, were down on that platform trying to recover the staircase, which had fallen nine hundred feet down into the frozen river. Sixty feet long and built of rods, it had pierced the river ice, leaving an end on the bank.

They had grappled the end with a hook lowered from the flying drill platform and had tried to fly the staircase up and out of the river. It was caught underwater. Now sprays coming up through the broken ice were coating the platform with water that instantly froze, increasing the platform's weight by the moment.

He knew what they were trying to do. They were trying to look busy for the benefit of the recon drone that would be there in a moment or two. The rest of the shift crew were strung out along the chasm's edge untangling the masses of cables and drums that had been scrambled by the storm. Dunneldeen and Andrew had gone down there to look busy salvaging the staircase.

Jonnie had been returning in the small passenger plane to work out some new method of getting the gold. He didn't have a copilot. He had only old Doctor MacDermott, the historian, who had begged a ride so that he could come up to the lode and write the saga of the storm. The ancient Scot, who had considered himself expendable at the recruiting, was a very wise and valued dean of literature, but he was not in the slightest bit trained in their work and frail beyond estimation, with hardly the muscle and skill one needed. There was no time at all to drop down and pick up a trained and agile Scot from the site on the cliff.

They were using local radios. All the items of equipment had them built in, for their range and the range of mine intercoms was only a mile. The transmissions were also masked by the mountains to the east. The radio down there on the platform was evidently open.

“Throw off the reel brakes, Andrew!” Dunneldeen was saying tensely. “The motors are overheating.”

“They wilna disengage. 'Tis this spray!”

“Andrew! Disengage the hooks to that staircase!”

“They wilna budge, Dunneldeen! And the thing is stuck under the ice!”

The whine of the overloaded motors was also coming through the open mikes.

Jonnie knew what was going to happen. They couldn't fly the platform free. They couldn't drop down into the rolling, freezing water. And that platform was going to go up in flames any moment.

Such a platform had rudimentary flying controls, usually covered by a lead glass canopy. But the humans didn't use the canopies and Dunneldeen was down there in the midst of flying spray that was coating not only himself but also the controls with instant ice.

The recon drone would be by in another second or two. It must see efforts to mine, not disaster. Jonnie could hear its nearing rumble outside his open side port.

Its hypersonic explosion would occur any moment now. The instant it went by he would have to somehow get those two off that platform.

“Doctor Mac,” shouted Jonnie into the rear of the plane. “Get ready. You're about to be a hero!”

“Oh my goodness,” said Doctor MacDermott.

“Open the side door and throw out two life lines!” shouted Jonnie. “Make sure our ends are secure to this ship.”

The old man scrambled about, grabbing at unfamiliar coils and tangles of cables in the rear. “Hold on!” shouted Jonnie.

He sent the passenger craft plummeting a thousand feet into the racketing, wind-blasting roar of the chasm. The walls flashed by.