As a matter of routine he tested the meteor which had been the innocent cause of all this strife--or had it been a bait?--and found it worthless iron. Also as routine he kept on working. He had almost enough metal now, even at Miners' Rest prices, for a royal binge, but he couldn't go in until his shoulder was well. And a couple of weeks later he got the shock of his life. * * * * * He had brought in a meteor; a mighty big one, over four feet in its smallest diameter. He sampled it, and as soon as he cut the Berg and flicked the sample experimentally from hand to hand, his skilled muscles told him that that metal was astoundingly dense. Heart racing, he locked the test-piece into the spee-gee; and that vital organ almost stopped beating entirely as the indicator needle went up and up and up--stopping at a full twenty-two, and the scale went only to twenty-four! "Klono's brazen hoofs and diamond-tipped horns!" he ejaculated. He whistled stridently through his teeth, then measured his find as accurately as he could. Then, speaking aloud, "Just about thirty thousand kilograms of something noticeably denser than pure platinum--thirty million credits or I'm a Zabriskan fontema's maiden aunt. What to do?" This find, as well it might, gave the Gray Lensman pause. It upset his calculations. It was unthinkable to take that meteor to such a fence's hide-out as Miners' Rest. Men had been murdered, and would be again, for a thousandth of its value. No matter where he took it, there would be publicity galore, and that wouldn't do. If he called a Patrol ship to take the white elephant off his hands he might be seen; and he had put in too much work on this identity to jeopardize it. He would have to bury it, he guessed--he had maps of the System, and the fourth planet was close by. He cut off a chunk of a few pounds' weight and made a nugget--a tiny meteor--of it, then headed for the planet, a plainly visible disk some fifteen degrees from the Sun. He had a fairly large-scale chart of the System, with notes. Borova IV was uninhabited, except by low forms of life, and by outposts. Cold. Atmosphere thin--good, that meant no clouds. No oceans. No volcanic activity. Very good! He'd look it over, and the first striking landmark he saw, from one diameter out, would be his cache. He circled the planet once at the equator, observing a formation of five mighty peaks arranged in a semicircle, cupped toward the world's north pole. He circled it again, seeing nothing as prominent, and nothing else resembling it at all closely. Scanning his plate narrowly, to be sure nothing was following him, he drove downward in a screaming dive toward the middle mountain.