The metal sheet moved at last, its top swinging slowly outward. Its base was held by the gummy, hardening rock. Then it broke free and crashed to the floor, and the light of Dean's weapon showed through the black opening upon the blanched faces of men, where eyes were still wide in disbelief. Though they were looking at one of their own kind, it must have taken then a moment to realize that the naked body, clad only in a golden loin cloth, and the hands that held one of the fearful, green-flamed weapons, were those of a human. Then one of them broke from the others, sprang heedlessly across the still-glowing plate, and threw his arms about the barbaric figure. "Dean!" he choked. "Dean, it's really you! You're alive!" And Rawson's voice, too, was husky as he said: "Smithy, I thought you were gone. The radio said they had got you, old man." Then other khaki-clad bodies, a dozen of them, were crowding through the hot portal, and Rawson came suddenly to himself. "Quick!" he shouted. "They'll be after us in a second. Follow me." Loah was waiting. Her own flame-thrower spat a little jet of green; it was the only light. Rawson saw here she had gathered up the other weapons and had turned them off so that even their little light would not blind her as she kept watch down the dark passage. "Do we want them?" Dean shouted to the others. And Smithy echoed the question: "Do we want them, Colonel?" Colonel Culver, his face almost unrecognizable under its smears of powder stains and blood, snapped a quick answer: "No. We outrange them with our rifles. They're only flame-throwers, not ray projectors. Beat it! Run like the devil!" Rawson snatched Loah's weapon and threw it with the others. It would be hard going, ahead--she must not be uselessly burdened. But he kept his own. Then with his one free hand he swept her up till she was racing beside him as they led the way. "I should have kept the fire weapon," the girl protested; "I, too, can fight." Rawson, speaking between breaths, reassured her: "Too heavy. Their guns will protect us--" Behind them, a man's voice cried out once, a single, hoarse scream of agony; then the rock wall took the sharp crackle of rifle fire and threw the sound into crashing, thundering echoes. CHAPTER XXVI _Power!_ A girl whose creamy body was strangely unsoiled by smoke or grime, whose jeweled breast-plates flashed in the light of her torch while the loose wrappings about her waist whipped against her as she ran. And Rawson, naked but for the golden loin cloth, running beside her. Then Smithy, and ten others in the khaki uniform of the service--it was all that was left of the fifty who had dared the depths. And now all of them were harried and driven like helpless animals in the burrows and runways of that under-world.