He tossed his heat gun to one of the two pseudo-I.P. men and plunged
into the vault. Halfway the significance of Jimmy's words came home to
him. Gingerly, a step at a time, he began to work his way toward the
metal tube that lay in the light of his electric torch.
Now he stood directly above it. He reached down, let his fingers fasten
about the tube. With the greatest of care, he lifted it and began to
catwalk back to the door of the vault.
But at the threshold Jimmy uttered a cry of alarm and swept Linda
protectingly into his arms.
"What's the matter?" Garth demanded.
"The calibo-marset fire. Blue flame. It's started in the
setro-frenalot. It's going to go off."
Garth's eyes shot wide with fear. He looked down at the tube in his
hands, then abruptly swung and hurled it through the open doorway into
the vault.
There was a low roar, mounting to a crescendo report. A cloud of smoke
belched outward, and the ground beneath their feet trembled. At the
first indication of Garth's action, Jimmy, Linda, and Hanley had hurled
themselves backward, away from the vault door. Garth too had whirled
and leaped like a released spring to safety.
But the two I.P. men were caught. They had not heard Jimmy's
exclamation--hadn't time to guess what was coming. An avalanche of
rubble and huge stones washed forward to sweep relentlessly over
them. An instant later only a sound of dust-rising debris and masonry
fragments marked the spot where they had stood.
As the deafening reverberations rolled back into silence, Hamilton
Garth seemed to grasp the significance of the situation like a man
in a dream. For a moment he stood there, rigid, eyes narrowing, lips
quivering. Then with a snarl of profanity, he charged straight at Jimmy
Starr.
Jimmy's head was still reeling dizzily from a blow dealt him by a
flying chunk of rock, and he saw the onrushing Trust man through a
haze. Garth's fist bludgeoned into his jaw. Another blow drove into
his midsection, sent a wave of nausea sweeping through him. And then
a picture of his father lying helpless on the study floor shot into
his mind's eye; with it came a sudden realization of all that the
_superiors_ class--Garth's class--stood for. He snapped his fists
forward and began to hit with all the strength he possessed at the face
before him. He was still flailing his arms in and out, when Hanley
stepped in and pulled him back.
* * * * *
It was the following morning, and the tracto-car was speeding smoothly
down Canal Grand. In the driver's seat sat Jimmy Starr, a bandage on
his temple, a smile on his face.
Beside him was Linda Hall, and in the rear tonneau Phil Hanley held a
heat gun to cover the bound figure of Hamilton Garth.
"We did it," Jimmy said at length. "The figurine cache is destroyed
forever."
The girl nodded.
"And the canal project won't be abandoned either," Jimmy continued.
"That explosion opened up a shaft leading to a still lower crypt where
there's enough pure _pxar_ ingots stored to build all the canal locks
the engineers need. Pure _pxar_. Not the figurine kind."
Linda nodded again.
"What I want to know is this," she said. "I know that that tube
you threw into the vault didn't go off the first time because the
detonator-cap didn't hit. But what kind of explosive is setro-frenalot?
I never heard of it.
"Neither did I," Jimmy laughed. "It goes back to the juke box age of
the twentieth century. In other words, double talk."