Moran gathered a double handful. He slipped it in a pocket of his space-suit. He went clambering back to the lock. He heard the roaring of a flame-torch. He found Harper playing it squeamishly on the wriggling fragments of another yard-long ant. It had explored the trench burned out of the fungus soil and down to the rock. Harper'd killed it as it neared him. "That's three of them I've killed," said Harper in a dogged voice. "There seem to be more." "Did you hear my news?" asked Moran sardonically. "Yes," said Harper. "How'll we get back to the _Nadine_?" "Oh, we'll fight our way through," said Moran, as sardonically as before. "We'll practice splendid heroism, giving battle to ants who think we're other ants trying to rob them of some fragments of an over-sized dead centipede. A splendid cause to fight for, Harper!" He felt an almost overpowering sense of irony. The quantity of bessendium he'd seen was riches incalculable. The mere pocketfull of crystals in his pocket would make any man wealthy if he could get to a settled planet and sell them. And there was much, much more back in the cargo-hold of the wreck. He'd seen it. But his own situation was unchanged. Bessendium could be hidden somehow,--perhaps between the inner and outer hulls of the _Nadine_. But it was not possible to land the _Nadine_ at any space-port with an extra man aboard her. In a sense, Moran might be one of the richest men in the galaxy in his salvagers' right to the treasure in the wrecked _Malabar's_ hold. But he could not use that treasure to buy his way to a landing on a colonized world. Carol's voice; she was frightened. "_Something's coming! It's--terribly big! It's coming out of the mist!_" * * * * * Moran pushed past Harper in the trench that ended at the wreck's lock-door. He moved on until he could see over the edge of that trench as it shallowed. Now there were not less than forty of the giant ants about the remnants of the monstrous centipede Moran had killed. They moved about in great agitation. There was squabbling. Angry, whining stridulations filled the air beneath the louder and more gruesome sounds from fartheraway places. It appeared that scouts and foragers from two different ant-cities had come upon the treasure of dead--if twitching--meat of Moran's providing. They differed about where the noisesome booty should be taken. Some ants pulled angrily against each other, whining shrilly. He saw individual ants running frantically away in two different directions. They would be couriers, carrying news of what amounted to a frontier incident in the city-state civilization of the ants.