to where there's some parti-colored
cliffs, where the sea comes away inland. And when they got to that
place ... why ... there was a ship there. Then."

He paused, frowning.

"It would've been standing on an artificial shoal place, about thirty
yards from a shaft that was the mouth of a mine. Uranium. And there's
been a lot of uranium taken outta there! It was hauled right outta the
mine shaft across the beach to the ship that was waitin'. And there's
fresh work in that mine, but not a tool or a scrap of paper to tell who
was workin' it. It must've been cleaned up like that every time a ship
left after loadin' up. Humans wouldn't've done it. They wouldn't care.
Huks would. There's not supposed to be any of them left in these parts,
but I'm guessing the mine was dug by Huks, and the _Cerberus_ was taken
away by them because the humans on the _Cerberus_ found out there was
Huks around."

Patrolman Willis said: "The sergeant took a chance on the mine being
booby-trapped and went in, after sending me out of range."

The sergeant scowled at him and went on.

"How it happened don't matter. Maybe somebody spotted the ship from the
_Cerberus_ as it was comin' down. Maybe anything. But whoever run the
mine found out somebody knew they were there, so they rushed the
_Cerberus_--there prob'ly wasn't even a stun-pistol on board to fight
with--and they put new rockets on her."

* * * * *

The skipper of the salvage ship _Aldeb_ nodded wisely.

"A ship comin' to load up minerals where there wasn't any spaceport," he
observed, "would have a set of rockets to land on, empty, and a double
set to take off on, loaded. Yeah."

"They must've figured," said Sergeant Madden, "that we just couldn't
make any sense out of what we found. And if we hadn't turned up that
mine, maybe never would. But anyhow they sent the _Cerberus_ off and
covered everything up and went off to stay, themselves, until we gave up
and went home."

"I wonder," said the skipper of the _Aldeb_, "where they took the
_Cerberus_? That's my job!"

"Not far," grunted Sergeant Madden. "They had to be taking the
_Cerberus_ somewhere. If they just wanted to wipe it out, after they
rushed it, they coulda just set off its fuel like it'd happened in a bad
landing. And that landing was bad! If there'd been a fuel-explosion
crater at the end of that burnt line on the ground, nobody'd ever've
looked further. But there wasn't. So there's a pl