So I did. And the answer was encouraging. It seemed the little feller himself _chwee-fweeple-twee_--meaning he owned some property a few miles outside the capital city--and he'd be glad to sell us this patch of ground for _chirp-furdle-foo_-- I translated. Cap Hanson turned crimson with rage. "Four thousand Earth credits! For a hunk of ground you could cover with a handkerchief? Ridiculous! We won't pay any such price--" "It's no skin off our nose, Skipper," I reminded him. "The Corporation's paying for it." Hanson nodded slowly. "We-e-ell, maybe you got something there. We can't do no diggin' for soap without something to dig in. O.Q. Go ahead and make the deal, Sparks." "And I," chimed in Biggs, "will organize the men and get to work on the digging--" "No!" said Hanson hastily. "You mustn't exert yourself like that, boy. Remember your--" He stopped abruptly. Lancelot glanced at him. "What? Remember my _what_, Dad?" "Nothin'. You stay here and direct the men; I'll get 'em onto the job." So we became possessors of a bit of Iris terrain and set forth on the adventure which--we hoped--was to bring an end to Otto Steichner's rule over the tiny planetoid. * * * * * Of course you know that Iris is only a little hunk of cosmic debris, about three hundred miles in diameter, busting along in the planetoid Belt, just one of myriad specks which are all that remain of what was once upon a time a planet like Earth in the space-sector between Mars and Jupiter. It has no atmosphere of its own, so when you leave the domed cities and villages you have to wear your bulger, and since its gravitational attraction is about as strong as a two-day old kitten, you have to wear clinch-plates in your sandals. But our boys are a tough crew, accustomed to working under even worse conditions than these, and I'm not bragging too much when I say that in two shakes of a rocket's tail we had staked out our property and buckled down to our task. Our "task" was, of course, just plain digging. From that grayish-looking topsoil we had to peel away the crumbling layers which would lead us to the basaltic depths beneath. From this substratum we must extract a quantity of the pumice which was to justify our presence here. A simple thing. Only it didn't turn out that way. It took us three days to scrape off the detritus layer. Then we reached rock. But it wasn't exactly the sort of rock we had expected to find: obsidian or basalt, lava flow. It was sandstone. Gray shale. Lancelot Biggs looked at samples of this rock and shook his head. He said, "Hmmm! That's funny! Sandstone is not an igneous formation. You know--" "I don't know nothin'," said the Old Man, "except we ain't got too much time to spare. Let's get on with our job." So we kept on digging. We had to use atomotors. The rock layer was tougher than a blue-plate steak, but slowly our blaster chunked its way through ... to a layer of slate!