"Of course you can count on me," Zahooli says. "When do we start building this mechanical mole?" "In just two days," I says. "Our backers have purchased an extinct spaceship factory not far from Commonwealth Seven. Yeah, we will call our project 'Operation Earthworm,' pal." D'Ambrosia sits down and starts looking chicken. "We wouldn't get no astrogator in his right mind to go with us, Sep. How many times the thrust will we need over what we would use if we was just cutting space? We start out in about a foot of topsoil, then some hard rock and then more hard rock. Can we harness enough energy to last through the diggin'? Do you mind if I change my mind for a very good reason which is that I'm an awful coward?" "Of course not," I says. "It would be a coincidence if you quit though, my dear old friend, and right after Coordinator One found out who was sipping Jovian drambuie on a certain space bistro last Monday with his Venutian wife." "You have sold me," Zahooli says. "I wouldn't miss this trip for one of those four-legged turkey farms up in Maine. It is kind of frustratin' though, don't you think, Septimus? We are still not thirty and could live another hundred years what with the new arteries they are making out of Nucrolon and the new tickers they are replacing for the old ones." "Let us look over the model again," I says. "You are just moody today, D'Ambrosia." It still looks like it would work to me. It is just a rocket ship pointed toward terra firma instead of the other way, and has an auger fixed in place at the nose. It is about twenty feet long and four feet wide and made out of the strongest metal known to modern science, cryptoplutonite. It won't heat up or break off and it will start spinning around as soon as we cut loose with the tail blasts. "How much time do we need and how much energy for only four thousand kilometers?" I asks Zahooli. "We got enough stored up to go seventy million miles into space? We'll cross that bridge when we get to the river." "You mean the Styx?" "That is one thing I will not believe," I sniff. "We will never find Attila the Hun or Hitler down there. Or Beelzebub." All at once we hear a big rumbling noise and the plexidomed house we are in shakes and rattles and we are knocked out of our chairs and deposited on the seats of our corylon rompers. The viso-screen blacks out, I get to all fours and ask, "You think the Nougatines have gone to war again, D'Ambrosia?" "It was not mice," Zahooli gulps. "It is either a hydroradium plant backfired or a good old-fashioned earthquake." After a while we have the viso-screen working. The face of Coordinator Five appears. He says the worst earthquake in five centuries has happened. There is a crack in the real estate of Department X6 near the Rockies that makes the Grand Canyon look like a kid just scraped a stick through some mud. Infra-Red Cross units, he says, are rocketing to the area.