The Beast of Space

An asteroid prospector responds to a teleview distress and lands on Moira to find a maze of caves, an acid-smelling underground lake, and a graveyard of intact but deserted Earth ships. Accompanied by a telepathic spacehound called Digger, he discovers a lifelike robot woman marked as manufactured goods, a heavy-duty mining robot, and telecasters that suggest crews arrived to rescue a captive girl before vanishing. Strange music and hypnotic gases accompany clues of an unseen intelligence or mechanism responsible for the disappearances. The tale follows his methodical exploration and the mounting mystery of missing humans amid frontier isolation.