He looked out a port at the crew members on the surface of the asteroid. Randy followed his eyes. The four other members of the Expedition, in bulky space suits, worked busily in a landscape--or an Eros-scape--too fantastic to be real. All of them now accepted the view that Eros was an explosion-created fragment of something much larger, and that that something must have been remarkable. Nine-tenths of the surface of Eros was solid metal such as forms the core of all the heavier planets. Now, metal rods stuck here and there out of drill holes in the raw, glistening crystalline mass. Between the drill rods ran cables holding nets under which objects were tethered. There were drone rockets by the dozen, and bales and boxes and tanks seemingly by the hundred. They would drift away to nowhere but for the nets which held them fast. They'd been held thus during two years of unaccompanied, uneventful cartage from the orbit of Earth out to the orbit of Mars. Most of the stuff needed only to be sorted and loaded on the drones, which would take off under control by the drone-master keyboard on the ship. There was an enormous mass of supplies. There could be a loss of up to fifty per cent in transit without irreparable damage being done to the Expedition's purposes. When Randy looked back from the laboring, space-suited figures outside, he was alone. McCauley had gone to the ship's small workshop, all of whose tools would be left in the base on Mars. Frowning, he connected a microphone and an audio amplifier and a headset and went back to explain to Randy. But Randy was no longer there. He'd gone outside to carry on as second-in-command. His business was largely finding things to worry about and telling McCauley, who made them turn out all right. McCauley went purposefully through the ship with his microphone-amplifier unit, touching it here and there against the fabric of the vessel. The idea was perfectly simple. If there was a thief on board, he would certainly not keep his loot on his person or in his locker. He'd have a hiding place for it. The loot included McCauley's watch, which would not run down for months. And solid things conduct sound much better than air does. The ticking of a watch which can't be heard at five feet, in air, can be heard through fifty feet of wood or metal if the watch is in contact with the farther end. So McCauley methodically listened for the ticking of a watch conducted through the metal of a spaceship. There was no one else on board. There was no operating machinery to make extraneous noises. Presently he heard the five-times-a-second click-click of his watch. He traced it to its loudest, unscrewed a floorplate, and found three watches, a very expensive gold pencil, and a luck-piece that was a gold coin some hundreds of years old. There were also three small and very expensive instruments that came from a smashed case on the asteroid.