"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.
The cliff against which they had buried the Ra-Twelve was the loftiest section of an almost unbroken chain of mountains, surrounding the roughly circular hundred-mile plain, which was littered with beds of boulders and sand-hills, like a moon crater. What Peer had referred to as the "Mound" lay approximately at the center of the plain. It turned out, next morning, to be a heavily weathered, dome-shaped structure half a mile high and five miles across, which gave the impression that all but the top tenth of a giant's skull had been buried in the sand, dented here and there with massive hammers, and sprinkled thickly with rock dust. It was obviously an artifact—constructed with hundred-foot bricks! As the Asteroid drifted down closer to it, Channok became interested.
"Who built it?" he asked.