The quartet gathered together near the door and watched with amazement
as six more of the huge diggers appeared, grunting and rooting at the
soil like mammoth pigs. Two crashed together with a terrific clank of
metal and their wheels dug up the ground as they hung locked together,
whirring thunderously.
The four went into the tower, down the metal corridors to the elevator
which took them to the floor with the control boards. Beta pressed a
combination on the buttons of the door which shut off the room with the
central boards. The door whined slowly open.
"The door's warped," Alpha observed. "There must have been an explosion
inside."
They entered the room and at first nothing seemed wrong. The great
metal vault in the center of the room seemed intact, the walls were
whole. Beta walked around the vault, which rose like a fat column from
the metal floor to the ceiling. Alpha came to his side when he heard
him exclaim.
"Look at the wall," Beta said.
* * * * *
There was a hole the size of a basketball in one side of the wall. The
metal about it was melted, bulging out in a fringe around the hole
and running down the wall to the floor. Alpha traced the probable
trajectory of the missile which had made the hole and found another
hole, much smaller, on the face of the vault. The walls of the vault
were buckled slightly inward.
The two Tindars stared from one hold to the other in amazement. The
Kantons came to their side.
"No meteor did that!" Miss Kanton's dupe said.
"It's hardly possible, unless ..." Beta paused. "Power was packed into
it, whatever it was!"
"It penetrated three feet of tension steel at the very least," Alpha
said. "Nothing as small as this meteor seems to me could have done
that."
"Unless ..." Beta paused again. "The momentum is what counted. Suppose
that the mass was terrific, the speed equally terrific?"
Alpha and Beta snapped their fingers at the same instant.
"Neutronium!" they said.
"We've found several bits of it already in space," Alpha added.
"Terrific mass. That's the only possible solution."
"A piece of neutronium, of high velocity, accelerated by the gravity of
Bolus, plus opposite velocities. That would have done it," Miss Kanton
said.
They were speaking quickly, their keen minds suddenly tearing the veil
from the problem with a scientific hunger.
"That's that, then," Alpha sighed as if it had been too easy.
"Wrong," Miss Kanton's dupe interposed. "Look at these meters!"
The other three went to her side. The meters were jumping crazily from
maximum to minimum, their needles bent and twisted. Another type was
rapidly clicking off numerals on its way down to zero. Miss Kanton
tapped it.
"That's the fuel tanks," she said.
"They're draining somewhere!" Alpha said.
"Down, naturally!" the girl-dupe said. "The engine room covers the
whole underground floor! If--"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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