The beach light wavered enchantingly across the shore, fading softly away beneath the lapping sea, and warming the sand. Theen wandered across it, head swiveling, looking for the rare bright grains the traders sought. Not the red ones, or the lovely yellow ones. Not the dull black ones his nest often sent him for. Only the bright green ones. The thread-like strap of his sack chafed, caught between abdomen and thorax.

Ah, there was one. He carefully picked it up in his mandibles and dropped it into the tiny sack.

He had found three, so it was time to go back. Experience had taught that any more than three grains became to hot, and caused the bag to start smoldering. But it was enough, the traders would give him more sticky-golden God food than he could eat or haul away for them. He shivered at the thought.

He had found that by basting sand with the thick, sweet reward, that a large ball could be stuck together. He could tumble this to the nest, to be enjoyed by all at leisure. Being industrious, he could make as many as twenty trips on a good day, as the nest was near the dead black hills of the trader station.

That was a lot of honey. His nest now had four gravid queens busily laying. With the new hatching, the nest would increase a hundredfold, dominating the entire area. The Reds would be crushed, next they came. Their raiding armies destroyed, the hills would belong to the blacks forever.

###

Randy scratched his half day stubble, and rechecked the UV meter. The levels waxed and waned under the pulsing collapse of the the dwarf star. It was a hot mini, one of only a handful of such anomalies ever discovered. It scorched the planet in a bath of high band radiation and ultraviolet, even at the distance this rock maintained.

He tried timing his collection runs with the lulls in the pulses. Even then, it was a near thing. The radiation shielding of his suit was barely adequate for a three minute exposure. It had cost a fortune to cart down enough clean lead and cadmium to shield the tiny station. The planet literally fluoresced under the beating, tiny sun. Far too hot to mine, but oh so rich in uranium and other heavy elements. Incredibly, it still supported some residual forms of life. Not so surprisingly, mutated insect life; thus this station.

Good as it's gonna get, he thought, squinting at the meter. The dull blue black radiation armor was cracked open and waiting. Randy stepped into it, set his three minute timer and buttoned up. The lock cycled open. He picked up the cad bottle, the honey jar, and stepped out. Oh god, he thought, caught the bugger making a delivery.

The bug looked like a giant ant, or a child's cootie toy. Two inches long, jet black, with compound eyes and and six legs. It was pulling the small carbon fiber sack off itself and putting it on the dished out, leaden feeding station. There were already five other sacks on it, one in each of the shallow wells of the tray.

That was frightening. Geeze! I've got to be more careful about pickups! The system was set up to keep too many fissionable grade substances from being gathered into a mass.

The container was already open, so using the two foot long tweezers propped beside the station, he quickly plucked up the bags, shoving each one carefully in its own cadmium tube. Then he sealed the heavy lead cylinder with its thick plug. The ant watched with its glittering multifaceted eyes as he poured out a thick dollop of honey into the grooved feeder runnel behind the pickup station. Using the tongs, he put out four new empty bags in place of the six he picked up. Better safe than sorry. The little bastard must have figured out how to carry off more than one bag at a time. Or maybe there was more than one bug, these days.

Of course, he could have just checked the station more often. Seven days into his shift, he was already getting lax. According to the exo-entomologist, the things lived in very deep nests. Almost totally self sufficient, the bugs farmed lichens and mutated fungus in deep tunnels lined with high lead content sand. The scavengers, a specially bred few like this one, culled the lead from the beach. This one was now busy building a sand ball with the honey, like a dung beetle. Usually only one or two short lived mutants were produced at a time by each nest, replaced only as they died, conserving what resources each nest, as a closed ecology, had.

Sweating, Randy turned the bulky suit and racked the cad container with the rest, then quickly reentered the station lock and cycled back inside. Decontaminated, showered and roentgen checked, he sat and retrieved the pickup schedule. He stared at it, even though he knew it by heart. Two more days. Extremely high pay and short work periods were barely worth it.

The bugs, operatively conditioned by experts long gone home, gathered grains of virtually pure reactor grade uranium. Almost a slug's worth, over a day's gleaning. Not some uraninite ore, either. It was a geologic impossibility, that just happened to exist on the deadly beaches of this place. Enough fissionables a day to power a fair sized reactor for a decade. No centrifuging or condensing needed. Picked up once every ten days, along with the station manager, who could then live high off of his contract pay for a year, if he liked. There was lots of other ores here too, and lead galore, from eons of series degradation. But as impossible to mine as the nearby dwarf star. It scared him, this whole, completely impossible place. It was like living on an undetonated nuclear bomb.

In point of fact, it was one. If the lead cadmium content of the sands were only a little less, or the distribution of the surface radioactives were only a little heavier, the place, this whole system, wouldn't be here at all. Just a cloud of radioactive vapor, apparently spun off from from a hyper-rotating dwarf that shouldn't exist either.

Nobody in the company really cared, it was strictly take the money and run.

****

Theen watched the giant pour out the golden elixir and shivering, clambered into the tray to drink his fill. Next, by carefully sopping up as much as he could with the sand, he built a ball so big he could barely roll it. Then it was off to the nest. The route was well traveled now, but no easier for that.

He raised up and pushed, carefully coddling and repacking the ball as he went, shepherding it along over inclines, keeping it from rolling off on the declines, until reaching the nest. Here he broke the ball into smaller ones, and with many trips, managed to get the bulk of it deep enough where other workers could get at it, and the food of the gods was quickly taken away.

A messenger approached, tangling antennae and passing pheromones until the note was passed. He was to visit a conclave of the queens! This was an unprecedented event. It was either a reward, or he was to be eaten. His work was good though, so likely he was to be honored.

The queens stroked him, climbed all over him, feeling, testing, smelling. A chamber opened, and fifty smaller replicas of himself emerged! They too, climbed all over him, and the process repeated. Never had a gatherer been so honored. He was to lead them to the sands, and gather all they might, then carry back as much God food as they could!

Theen knew his cycle was soon to end. Gatherers were short lived. His predecessor had mentored him as he would now mentor these. It was the peak event of a gatherer's cycle, but never, never so many! Pride and purpose washed over him. There would not be enough pouches to supply so many, but fifty could still carry many times more grains, even if one at a time. He proudly marched them all from the nest, and to the beach.

###

The entertainment chips were few, since the stints were only ten days long. A prison sentence more than a posting, really. Randy carded through the few available, selecting one he had not seen because he didn't care for the subject matter, but bored, popped it into the player anyway. Like most who take such work, he was a lazy man. Quick money in trade for tedium and danger. They had trained him well, he knew as much about radioactive geology as any matriculated geologist. But his point, was not to have to use it for anything. Just sit, make pickups, pour honey, get paid and get laid.

Two more Days. He only put out four sacks, so he could lay back for a while. To hell with the company. There were enough canned radioactives stacked outside to power a world for a year.

Two more days.

###

Trouble. Theen felt it through the pads of his legs. The beach was close,just over the scattered rocks of this last rise. Then they came. The reds. Out from behind the rocks. Raiders. Breakers of nests, devourers of children. More than a dozen of them. Jaws clacking,scurrying forward. Theen charged, fearless before his students, his legacy. Those following him picked up the hate, the challenge from his scent on the sand, and enraged, they too sped forward. The first red went down before him, head rolling off to the side as a second attacked, clamping on his third left leg, breaking it off, hoping to climb his back and slice him in two. But Theen's protege's swarmed the red, pulled it away and killed it.

Battles raged on every side, rolling clots of black and red washed around him. Triumph was inevitable, for his students were fresh and full of life, and he on his life mission's peak. In the end, Theen lost ten pupils. Ruefully, he eyed his sack's remains, tattered and ruined. But even with only five legs and no sack, he could still teach. They marched to the beach, victorious. They combed the sands and Theen carefully indicated which grains were required, though he was depressed that he could not yet demonstrate the use of the sacks. They picked through the sand for an hour, until every single student had a grain like his own, carefully held in mandible. Then they marched on to the trader's place.

###

The drama chip was every bit as horrible as he had expected. Randy decided to make one more collection then go to bed. Depressed, he got into the suit, grabbed up an empty can and the mostly depleted honey jar. When the lock bumped open, his eyes flew wide. There at the station, must have been thirty or forty of the buggers. A small pile of glowing grains carefully set on the lead plate, steadily brightening, and one last bug, a little bigger than the rest, dropped another grain on the pile, which then obtained critical Mass. Along the beach, a chain reaction started as sands fused, clumped and reacted.

The transport found only a highly radioactive cloud of gas circling out and around a dwarf so dense and old, that only UV, and high rad bands escaped it. The captain grouched at the crew, annoyed. There would be no percentage, and he had wasted a month in space for nothing. Randy had seemed like a good guy too. A service was said.