"That's not the way it said in the manual!" she stated. Channok whooped. Then he sat down on the floor, bent over and yelled. When he got around to wiping the tears from his eyes, Peer was looking down at him disgustedly from the control chair. "It wasn't the way it said in the manual!" she repeated firmly. "We're going to have to have this old crate overhauled before she'll be safe to fly--and if you weren't my husband, I'd really let you have it now!" He stood up, muttering some sort of apology. "I've done some just as bad!" he assured her. "Hum!" said Peer coldly, studying Old Nameless in the screen below them. It seemed safe to pat her on the head then, but he kept his hand well out of biting range. "We'd better get back to that mountain and bury the _Ra-Twelve_ before it gets too dark to find the spot," he suggested. "It's still just in sight," said Peer. "You get the guns ready, and I'll run us past it slowly." Spaceships being what they were, there wasn't much ceremony about caching the _Ra-Twelve_. Channok got the bow-turret out; and as Peer ran the _Asteroid_ slowly along the mountainside a few hundred feet above the _Ra-Twelve_, he cut a jagged line into the rock with the gun's twin beams. A few dozen tons of rock came thundering down on the _Ra-Twelve_. They came back from the other side, a little higher up, and he loosened it some more. This time, it looked as if a sizable section of the mountain were descending; and when the dust had settled the _Ra-Twelve_ was fifty feet under a sloping pile of very natural-looking debris. To get her out again, they'd only have to cut a path down to her lock and start her drives. She'd come out of the stuff then, like a trout breaking water.... Satisfied, they went off and got the _Asteroid_ on an orbit around Old Nameless, not too far out. Peer had assured Channok that Santis' investigations had proved the planet safe for human beings, so it probably was. But he knew he'd feel more comfortable if they put in their sleep-periods outside its atmosphere. Bathed in the dismal light of its giant sun, Old Nameless looked like a desolate backyard of Hell. It was rocky, sandy, apparently waterless and lifeless and splotched with pale stretches of dry salt seas. Incongruously delicate auroras went crawling about its poles, like lopsided haloes circling a squat, brooding demon. It wasn't, Channok decided, the kind of planet he would have stopped at of his own accord, for any purpose. * * * * *