"I'll be able to do some walking around outside in a few days," Asher declared as he cleaned a test tube and placed it in a rack. "I can locate several wells over that underground storage cavern, and you can recover that oil. But you can't mine this field. "Twenty years, perhaps, and you can. But it will take that long for those Petrolia to die out. We've got to get the oil out from below to a point where they can no longer spawn. We will apply mining in other fields--but not here!" "Not here," Johns repeated, shuddering. "It's up to you to see no one else tries it." Asher lit a cigarette and nodded at Johns. "Get control of the field--anything. Tell the oil men something. But don't tell then the truth. They wouldn't believe you. They would call you raving mad. "The world does not know. It would not believe. Can we do other than remain silent?" R. Briggs Johns, sick of thinking of the cavern world and horrible things below them, knew they could not. Brigands of the Moon (The Book of Gregg Haljan) CONCLUSION OF A FOUR PART NOVEL. _By Ray Cummings_ CHAPTER XXXIV _The First Encounters_ [Illustration: Like feathers we were blown with it.] [Sidenote: The besieged Earth-men wage grim, ultra-scientific war with Martian bandits in a last great struggle for their radium-ore--and their lives.] It seemed, with that first shot from the enemy, that a great relief came to me--an apprehension fallen away. We had anticipated this moment for so long, dreaded it. I think all our men felt it. A shout went up: "Harmless!" It was not that. But our building withstood it better than I had feared. It was a flash from a large electronic projector mounted on the deck of the brigand ship. It stabbed up from the shadows across the valley at the foot of the opposite crater-wall, a beam of vaguely fluorescent light. Simultaneously the search-light vanished. The stream of electrons caught the front face of our main building in a six-foot circle. It held a few seconds, vanished; then stabbed again, and still again. Three bolts. A total, I suppose, of nine or ten seconds. I was standing with Grantline at a front window. We had rigged an oblong of insulated fabric like a curtain: we stood peering, holding the curtain cautiously aside. The ray struck some twenty feet away from us. "Harmless!" The men in the room shouted it with derision. But Grantline swung on them. "Don't think that!" An interior signal-panel was beside Grantline. He called the duty-men in the instrument room. "It's over. What are your readings?" * * * * *