and others were looking in uneasy awe around the gloomy cavern, and at the solemn Lunarian statue.
ALBERT WISSLER, his thin face anxious inside his glassite helmet, stood superintending Grag’s removal. The scientist turned as Larsen King hastily entered the cavern from above. King’s hard face showed excitement, and his voice came sharply on the space-suit phone.
“So you holed through into this cave at last?” Larsen King exclaimed to Wissler.
Then his eye fell on the blocked fissure.
“What did that?” he demanded.
“Captain Future!” exclaimed Wissler. “He and his Futuremen were in this cave when we entered it. They escaped down that passage, setting off a blast to block it. One of them, this robot, was caught in the explosion.”
King uttered an angry curse.
“But the Planet Patrol said the Futuremen were trapped over in the Thompson Range, miles away!”
He swung angrily on Grag.
“How did you reach this cavern?”
“Why, we just wished we were here, and here we were,” Grag grunted sarcastically. “Isn’t it remarkable?”
King turned furiously from the jeering robot.
“They must have come through some other crack or fissure, he muttered. “And they’ve gone on down that fissure they blocked. Captain Future must figure it will lead him down to the radium. Well, we can follow that way, too!”
“I don’t know that I want to follow that way,” Wissler said agitatedly. “There’s a lot of wrong about all this. There’s air in this cavern. And look at that statue! It seems to indicate that the ancient Lunarians migrated into these depths long ago, to follow their dwindling atmosphere.”
“To the devil with the Lunarians!” snapped Larsen King.
His voice rang in sharp orders to the workmen.
“Get the boring machines down here and open that blocked fissure, then we’ll have a clear way on down.”
The motley planetary miners hesitated uneasily. Then the lanky Saturnian who was their spokesman answered King sullenly.
“We don’t want to go any deeper in the Moon! That statue and the air here make us sure that some of those Moon-devils still exist.”
“Yes, there’s a footprint of one of the things here!” cried another.
“That’s right, men!” Grag shouted loudly. “These caves are full of Moon-devils. We saw a couple of them ourselves.”
“Silence that robot!” roared Larsen King furiously. “You men pay no attention to his lies. There’s nothing down there to hurt you.”
The miners still remained sulkily unmoving. King cursed in a low voice. Then he tried another tack.
“All right, men. If you’re afraid of shadows, I’ll see that you are protected,” he told the planetary workmen. “I’ll arrange for a full company of Planet Patrol officers to come here and accompany us as a guard in the deeper caves. That’s a guarantee of your safety, isn’t it?”
“We wouldn’t mind going deeper with a Patrol company to guard us,” the Saturnian miner conceded. “But we don’t go on till if gets here.”
King nodded impatiently.
“The Patrol guard will be here as soon as I can get it here. In the meantime, you use the boring machines to open up this passage.”
Reluctantly the miners obeyed. Grag saw them bringing down the big, snouted atomic boring machines. The great revolving jaws were soon biting into the fallen mass of rock.
LARSEN KING’S voice was scornful. “They’re a pack of frightened children!” he told Wissler. “Now I’ve got to go back to Earth and prevail on the Government to send a company of the Patrol here to guard these scared sheep.”
“Will the Government detail a company for that?” Wissler asked.
King nodded brusquely.
“They will when I tell them Captain Future is down in those caves. They want Future badly!”
He gestured toward Grag.
“Keep that robot tied up — you can turn him over to the Patrol when they get here. And keep the men working until they’ve got that fissure open. I’ll have Gil
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