The big fellow gave Steel a shove and followed him and the girl past the generators toward the far end of the room. When they got there, Steel saw there wasn't any wall at the room's end. The room ended abruptly at a two hundred foot drop. The exit here was only a hole in the wall of a vast cavern, big as a city block. The place had been hollowed out of the earth's ice crust. Its slick green walls glistened brightly under thousands of heat arcs that melted, dried, held back the constantly encroaching cold. On the floor of the cavern, Steel saw what appeared to be a monster space ship, a smooth egg-like thing with a small platform on top. So this was what they planned to escape in! Pile in, melt the ice lid off the cavern, take off! He didn't see _them_ at first--they were the same color as the frozen floor. Then he caught sight of the restlessly moving creatures around the ship. The cavern's floor was alive with ice-bears, thousands of them, gigantic males, grizzly females, pink-clawed cubs, a living moat around the precious ship. Not only had _The_ Bear chained science to her grim purpose. Here were nature's cruelest watchdogs on guard. "Okay," Steel said at last. "So I'm impressed. Now will you tell me where you plan to _go_ in that ship?" "Ship?" The girl's smile grew perplexed. "What ship?" Steel motioned toward the egg-shaped thing below. "That. That's the space ship you plan to get away in, isn't it?" The girl burst out laughing. Her laughter echoed out across the cavern, tinkling mirth in a place that Hell couldn't have rivaled in Steel's eyes. "Well," she said finally, "you might call it something we plan to escape with. That object is an antigrav projector, Mr. Steel. We'll escape with it all right, but we're going to take the Earth along with us...." During his career as a detective, Steel had heard doomed convicts call the Devil's curse upon mankind; he'd heard dope-crazed crones in the upper levels shriek the curse of witches upon their neighbors; he'd heard cornered gangsters swear dark vengeance--but he'd never before heard words of such raw horror. And the girl said them as a simple statement of fact--with a laugh. "_We're going to take the Earth along with us...._" This could have been just an insane threat. Cornered, the gang was trying to destroy the world in its own suicide. But Steel had seen the gang's ultra science here, he'd seen their banks of electrotubes--they weren't up to anything as simple as destroying the world by suffo-gas. He couldn't miss the real meaning of Lois Harmon's words. Taking the Earth with _them_ meant _moving_ it. Which was still madness! Still suicide! But they didn't think so. They were right now making frantic preparations.