Part 3

The thing that exploded must have been a mole-torpedo that drilled through rock and steel as fast as a man can walk. The walls of this vault did not break fully even under the Titanic force that hit them from outside. They bulged inward. A great section of the roof came down. Two of those huge jets were smashed. The whole chamber seemed to swing like a pendulum. A cable snapped in a flash of electric fire that consumed it.

Rick Mills hardly knew where he was now. He was too stunned. Lattimer was moveless beside him on the floor. Finden crawled on his elbows. Blood dribbled from his mouth. Rick had closed the main switch but the great apparatus here was not functioning. Maybe he dreamed it, but Rick was sure he heard Fane's bitter laugh.

"Just a few minutes more, Mills," he said. "Smart boy! We're all terribly smart, aren't we? We of the Survey Service. Sleep without dreams, Mills! Eternal sleep for fools like you and me!"

This was like the last act with the Martians and Xians. Almost a repetition. These were tortured seconds on which hung the future of Mercury as a Terran colony. Or was that already and badly decided? Must frozen silence and blazing heat continue, here? How many centuries must pass before Terrans would attempt to do for Mercury what the Martians had attempted? Or would they do so, ever? Silence. Silence and death would close in. Fane's robots were certainly aiming more mole-torpedoes.

It must not happen like that. Not again. Out of this thought in Rick's mind, an idea was squeezed. It challenged fate. It gave him the muscle power to arise. He staggered forward and grasped in his metal hands the fire-spitting end of the broken cable. The lining of the gloves was an insulation. He propped himself up with his steel-shod boot on the terminal that the cable was meant to reach. Heat oozed around him as the metal skin of his space suit took the cable's place as an electrical conductor.

Hell broke loose. Rick Mills and his companions felt a thunderous vibration, as of a million space ships blasting off, as all but two of those giant jet-tubes roared into life. Rick had propped himself well. Even when consciousness left him he maintained the electrical contact. Other mole-torpedoes, exploding, shook the chamber and bulged its walls. But the constructive fury that had started there, went on. It wasn't till half an hour later that those great tubes burned out.

No one ever saw the terrible blast of incandescence that they threw into space, like the jet of an old fashioned, Fourth-of-July pinwheel. Not even Fane, out there somewhere in the cold wilderness. Before he could glimpse what was happening, the glare charred his eyeballs. Then it charred him inside his space suit. Then a sea of slush engulfed him and his robots. A slush of liquid air and snow. Steam rose high and scattered to blank out the stars with an awful wind.

Five hours later the sun that had set here fifty million years ago, rose again. But the melting went on under the veil of fog. And across the furnace desert of Mercury, darkened now at last, rivers roared, hissing. Volcanoes blazed, for how can you cause a world to spin again, without poking up its internal fires with the strain?

But at last the fury of rebirth quieted. And down a murky river days later, a still dazed Rick Mills and his battered companions, paddled a crude metal boat to meet another party from the main camp. The air was thin and steamy, but rich in oxygen, and good to breathe. They had removed their space suit helmets.

Rick took out the picture of Anne Munson. He read the legend scrawled under her pert smile:

"_Find us a world, Rick!_"

"You thought you were pulling my leg, Miss Munson," Rick said solemnly. "But you'll be on Mercury, helping build things up, before you know it. Bet we'll even have a house...."

Young Finden's chuckle, and the twinkle in Lattimer's eyes, constituted another kind of leg-pull.