IX

Barathrum was a grim land, naked black and gray. Spines and crags of

bare rock jutted up, lava-flows like black glaciers twisting among

them. It was split by faults and fissures, pimpled with ash-cones.

Except for the seabirds that nested among the cliffs and the few thin

patches of green where seeds windblown from the mainland had taken

root, it was as lifeless as when some ancient convulsion had thrust it

up from the sea, Barathrum was a dead Inferno, untenanted even by the

damned; by comparison, the Badlands seemed lushly fertile.

The four craft crossed above the line of white breakers that marked

the division of sea and land; the gunboat _Goblin_ in the lead, her

sisters, _Vampire_ and _Dragon_ to right and left and a little behind,

and the _Lester Dawes_ a few miles in the rear. Fred Karski was at the

_Goblin's_ controls; Conn, beside him, was peering ahead into the

teleview screen and shifting his eyes from it to the map and back

again.

Somebody behind him was saying that it would be a nice place to be

air-wrecked. Somebody else was telling him not to joke about it. From

the radio, his father was asking: "Can you see it, yet?"

"Not yet. We're on the right map-and-compass direction; we should

before long."

"We're picking up radiation," Fred Karski said. "Way above normal

count. I hope the place isn't hot."

"We're getting that, too," Rodney Maxwell said. "Looks like power

radiation; something must be on there."

After forty years, that didn't seem likely. He leaned over to look at

the omnigeiger, then whistled. If that was normal leakage from

inactive power units, there must be enough of them to power ten towns

the size of Litchfield.

"Something's operating there," he said, and then realized what that

meant. Somebody had beaten them to the spaceport. That would be one of

the new companies formed after the opening of Force Command. He was

wishing, now, that he hadn't let himself be talked out of coming here

first. Older and wiser heads indeed!

Fred Karski whistled shrilly into his radio phone. "Attention

everybody! General alert. Prepare for combat; prepare to take

immediate evasive action. We must assume that the spaceport is

occupied, and that the occupants are hostile. Captain Poole, will you

please make ready aboard your ship? Reduce both speed and altitude,

and ready your guns and missiles at once."

"Well, now, wait a minute, young fellow," Poole began to argue. "You

don't know--"

"No. I don't. And I want all of us alive after we find out, too,"

Karski replied.

Rodney Maxwell's voice, in the background, said something

indistinguishable. Poole said ungraciously, "Well, all right, if you

think so...."

The _Lester Dawes_ began dropping to the rear and going down toward

the ground. Conn returned to the teleview screen in time to see the

truncated cone of the extinct volcano rise on the horizon, dwarfing

everything around it. Fred Karski was talking to Colonel Zareff, back

at Force Command, giving him the radiation count.

"That's occupied," the old soldier replied. "Mass-energy converter

going. Now, Fred, don't start any shooting unless you have to, but

don't get yourself blown to MC waiting on them to fire the first

shot."

The dark cone bulked higher and higher in the screen. It must be seven

miles around the crater, and a mile deep; when that thing blew out,

ten or fifteen thousand years ago, it must have been something to see,

preferably from a ship a thousand miles off-planet. It was so huge

that it was hard to realize that the jumbled foothills around it were

themselves respectably lofty mountains.

When they were within five miles of it, something twinkled slightly

near the summit. An instant later, the missileman, in his turret

overhead, shouted:

"Missile coming up; counter-missile off!"

"Grab onto something, everybody!" Karski yelled, bracing himself in

his seat.

Conn, on his feet, flung his arms around an upright stanchion and hung

on. Fred's hand gave a twisting jerk on the steering handle; the

_Goblin_ went corkscrewing upward. In the rearview screen, Conn saw a

pink fireball blossom far below. The sound and the shock-wave never

reached them; the _Goblin_ outran them. _Dragon_ and _Vampire_ were

spiraling away in opposite directions. The radio was loud with voices,

and a few of the words were almost printable. A gong began clanging

from the command post on top of the mesa on the mainland.

"Be quiet, all of you!" Klem Zareff was bellowing. "And get back from

there. Back three or four miles; close enough so they won't dare use

thermonuclears. Take cover behind one of those ridges, where they

can't detect you. Then we can start figuring what the Gehenna to do

next."

That made sense. And get it settled who's in command of this

Donnybrook, while we're at it, Conn thought. He looked into the rear

and sideview screens, and taking cover immediately made even more

sense. Two more fireballs blossomed, one dangerously close to the

_Dragon_. Guns were firing from the mountaintop, too, big ones,

and shells were bursting close to them. He saw a shell land on and

another beside one of the enemy gun positions--115-mm's from the

_Lester Dawes_, he supposed. He continued to cling to the

stanchion, and the _Goblin_ shot straight up, and he was expecting

to see the sky blacken and the stars come out when the gunboat leveled

and started circling down again. The mountainside, he saw, was sending

up a lightning-crackling tower of smoke and dust that swelled into a

mushroom top.

Klem Zareff, on the radio, was demanding to know who'd launched that.

"We did, sir; _Dragon_," Stefan Jorisson was replying. "We had to get

rid of it. We took a hit. Gun turret's smashed, Milt Hennant's dead,

and Abe Samuels probably will be before I'm done talking, and if we

get this crate down in one piece, it'll do for a miracle till a real

one happens."

"Well, be careful how you shoot those things off," his father

implored, from the _Lester Dawes_. "Get one inside the crater and we

won't have any spaceport."

The _Lester Dawes_ vanished behind a mountain range a few miles from

the volcano. The _Dragon_, still airborne but in obvious difficulties,

was limping after her, and the _Vampire_ was covering the withdrawal,

firing rapidly but with doubtful effect with her single 90-mm and

tossing out counter-missiles. There was another fireball between her

and the mountain. Then, when the _Dragon_ had followed the _Lester

Dawes_ to safety, she turned tail and bolted, the _Goblin_ following.

As they approached the mountains, something the shape of a recon-car

and about half the size passed them going in the opposite direction.

As they dropped into the chasm on the other side, another nuclear went

off at the volcano.

When Conn and Fred left the _Goblin_ and boarded the ship, they found

Rodney Maxwell, Captain Poole, and a couple of others on the bridge.

Charley Gatworth, the skipper of the _Vampire_, Morgan Gatworth's son,

was with them, and, imaged in a screen, so was Klem Zareff. One of the

other screens, from a pickup on the _Vampire_, showed the _Dragon_

lying on her side, her turret crushed and her gun, with the

muzzle-brake gone, bent upward. A couple of lorries from the _Lester

Dawes_ were alongside; as Conn watched, a blanket-wrapped body, and

then another, were lowered from the disabled gunboat.

"Fred, how are you and Charley fixed for counter-missiles?" Zareff was

asking. "Get loaded up with them off the ship, as many as you can

carry. Charley, you go up on top of this ridge above, and take cover

where you can watch the mountain. Transmit what you see back to the

ship. Fred, you take a position about a quarter way around from where

you are now. Don't let them send anything over, but don't start

anything yourselves. I'm coming out with everything I can gather up

here; I'll be along myself in a couple of hours, and the rest will be

stringing in after me. In the meantime, Rodney, you're in command."

Well, that settled that. There was one other point, though.

"Colonel," Conn said, "I assume that this spaceport is occupied by one

of these new prospecting companies. We have no right to take it away

from them, have we?"

"They fired on us without warning," Karski said. "They killed Milt,

and it's ten to one Abe won't live either. We owe them something for

that."

"We do, and we'll pay off. Conn, you assume wrong. This gang's been at

the spaceport long enough to get the detection system working and put

the defense batteries on ready. They didn't do that since this

morning, and up to last evening they neglected to file claim. I'll

assume they're on the wrong side of the law. They're outlaws, Conn.

All the raids along the east coast; everybody's blamed them on the

Badlands gangs. I'll admit they're responsible for some of it, but

I'll bet this gang at the spaceport is doing most of it."

That was reasonable. Barathrum was closer to the scene of the worst

outlaw depredations than the Badlands, not more than an hour at Mach

Two. And nobody ever thought of Barathrum as an outlaw hangout. People

rarely thought of Barathrum at all. He liked the idea. The only thing

against it was that he wanted so badly to believe it.

They brought the body of Milt Hennant aboard, and Abe Samuels, swathed

in bandages and immobilized by narcotic injections. A few more of the

_Dragon_'s six-man crew had been injured. Jorrisson, the skipper, had

one trouser leg slit to the belt and his right thigh splinted and

bandaged; he took over the _Lester Dawes_' missile controls, which he

could manage sitting in one place. Fred Karski and Charley Gatworth

went aboard their craft and lifted out.

For a long time, nothing happened. Conn got out the plans of the

volcano spaceport and the photomaps of the surrounding area. The

principal entrance, the front door of the spaceport, was the crater of

the extinct volcano itself. It was ringed, outside, with

launching-sites and gun positions, and according to the data he had,

some of the guns were as big as 250-mm. How many outlaws there were to

man them was a question a lot of people could get killed trying to

answer. The ship docks and shops were down on the level of the crater

floor, in caverns, both natural and excavated, that extended far back

into the mountain. There were two galleries, one above the other,

extending entirely around the inside of the crater near the top;

passages from them gave access to the outside gun and missile

positions.

With a dozen ships the size of the _Lester Dawes_, about five thousand

men, and a CO who wasn't concerned with trivialities like casualties,

they could have taken the place in half an hour. With what they had,

trying to fight their way in at the top was out of the question.

There was another way in. He had known about it from the beginning,

and he was trying desperately to think of a way not to utilize it. It

was a tunnel two miles long, running into some of the bottom workshops

and storerooms back of the ship berths from a big blowhole or small

crater at the foot of the mountain. According to the fifty-year-old

plans, it was big enough to take a gunboat in, and on paper it looked

like a royal highway straight to the heart of the enemy's stronghold.

To Conn, it looked like a wonderful place to commit suicide. He'd only

had a short introductory course, in one semester, in military and

protective robotics, just enough to give him a foundation if he wanted

to go into that branch of the subject later. It was also enough to

give him an idea of the sort of booby-traps that tunnel could be

filled with. He knew what he'd have put into it if he'd been defending

that place.

Colonel Zareff had sent one last message from Force Command when he

lifted off with a flight of recon-cars. After that, he maintained a

communication blackout. It was an hour and a half before he got close

enough to be detected from the outlaw stronghold. Immediately, the

volcano began spewing out missiles. Poole hastily took the _Lester

Dawes_ ten miles down the rift-valley in sixty seconds, while Stefan

Jorisson put out a nuclear-warhead missile and left it circling about

where the ship had been. From their respective positions, Fred Karski

and Charley Gatworth filled the airspace midway to the volcano with

counter-missiles, each loaded with four rockets. There were

explosions, fireballs in the air and rising cumulus clouds of

varicolored smoke and dust. Only about half the enemy missiles reached

the _Lester Dawes'_ former position.

When their controllers, back at the volcano, couldn't see the ship in

their screens, the missiles bunched together. Immediately, Jorisson

sent his missile up to join them and detonated it. Including his own,

eight nuclear weapons went off together in a single blast that shook

the ground like an earthquake and churned the air like a hurricane.

Klem Zareff came on-screen at once.

"Now what did you do?" he demanded. "Blew the whole place up, didn't

you?"

Rodney Maxwell told him. Zareff laughed. "They might just think they

got the ship; all the pickups would be smashed before they could see

what really happened. You're about ten miles south of that? Be with

you in a few minutes."

They got a screen on for his rearview pickup. Zareff had with him a

dozen recon-cars, some of them under robo-control; six gunboats

followed, and behind them, to the horizon, other craft were strung

out--airboats, troop carriers, and freight-scows. They could see enemy

missiles approaching in Zareff's front screen; counter-missiles got

most of them, and a couple of pilotless recon-cars were sacrificed.

The _Lester Dawes_ blasted more missiles as they crossed the top of

the mountain range. Then Zareff's car was circling in and entering at

one of the ship's open cargo-ports. Zareff and Anse Dawes got out.

"Gunboats are only half an hour behind," Zareff said. "Get some

screens on to them, Anse; you know the combinations. Now let's see

what kind of a mess we're in here."

It was almost a miracle, the way the tottering old man Conn had seen

on the dock at Litchfield when he had arrived from Terra had been

rejuvenated.

The rest of the reinforcements arrived slowly, sending missiles and

counter-missiles out ahead of them. Zareff began worrying about the

supply; the enemy didn't seem to be running short. By 1300--Conn noted

the time incredulously; the battle seemed to have been going on

forever, instead of just four hours--the _Lester Dawes_ had moved

halfway around the volcano and was almost due west of it, and the

eight gunboats were spaced all around the perimeter. Then one stopped

transmitting; in the other screens, there was a rising fireball where

she had been. The radio was loud with verbal reports.

"_Poltergeist_," Zareff said, naming half a dozen names. One or two of

them had been schoolmates of Conn's at the Academy; he knew how he'd

feel about it later, but now it simply didn't register.

"They're launching missiles faster than we can shoot them down," he

said.

"That's usually the beginning of the end," Zareff said. "I saw it

happen too often during the War. We've got to get inside that place.

It's a lot of harmless fun to send contragravity robots out to smash

each other, but it doesn't win battles. Battles are won by men,

standing with their feet on the ground, using personal weapons."

"We'll have to win this one pretty soon," Rodney Maxwell said. "The

amount of nuclear energy we've been releasing will be detectable

anywhere on the planet by now. The Government has a ship like the

_Lester Dawes_ in commission; if this keeps on, she'll be coming out

for a look."

"Then we'll have help," Captain Poole said.

"We need Government help like we need the polka-dot fever," Rodney

Maxwell said. "If they get in it, they'll claim the spaceport

themselves, and we'll have fought a battle for nothing."

Well, that was it, then. The spaceport was essential to the Maxwell

Plan. He'd gotten seven men killed--eight, if the recon-car that was

taking Abe Samuels to the hospital in Litchfield didn't make it in

time--and it was up to him to see that they hadn't died for nothing.

He spread the photo-map and the spaceport plans on the chart table.

"Look at this," he said.

Klem Zareff looked at it. He didn't like it any better than Conn had.

He studied the plan for a moment, chewing his cigar.

"You know, it's possible they don't know that thing exists," he said,

without too much conviction. "You'll be betting the lives of at least

twenty men; fewer than that couldn't accomplish anything."

"I'll be putting mine on the table along with them," Conn said. "I'll

lead them in."

He was wishing he hadn't had to say that. He did, though. It was the

only thing he could say.

"You better pick the men to go with me, Colonel," he continued. "You

know them better than I do. We'll need working equipment, too; I have

no idea what we may have to take out of the way, inside."

"I won't call for volunteers," Zareff said. "I'll pick Home Guards;

they did their volunteering when they joined."

"Let me pick one man, Colonel," Anse Dawes said. "I'll pick me."

X

They sent a snooper in first; it picked up faint radiation leakage

from inactive power units of overhead lights, and nothing else. The

tunnel stretched ahead of it, empty, and dark beyond its infrared

vision. After it had gone a mile without triggering anything, the jeep

followed, Anse Dawes piloting and Conn at the snooper controls

watching what it transmitted back. The two lorries followed, loaded

with men and equipment, and another jeep brought up the rear. They had

cut screen-and-radio communication with the outside; they weren't even

using inter-vehicle communication.

At length, the snooper emerged into a big cavern, swinging slowly to

scan it. The walls and ceiling were rough and irregular; it was

natural instead of excavated. Only the floor had been leveled smooth.

There were a lot of things in it, machinery and vehicles, all battered

and in poor condition, dusty and cobwebbed: the spaceport junkheap. A

passage, still large enough for one of the gunboats, led deeper into

the mountain toward the crater. They sent the snooper in and, after a

while, followed.

They came to other rectangular, excavated caverns. On the plans, they

were marked as storerooms. Cases and crates, indeterminate shrouded

objects; some had never been disturbed, but here and there they found

evidence of recent investigation.

Beyond was another passage, almost as wide as the Mall in Litchfield;

even the _Lester Dawes_ could have negotiated it. According to the

plans, it ran straight out to the ship docks and the open crater

beyond. Anse turned the jeep into a side passage, and Conn recalled

the snooper and sent it ahead. On the plan, it led to another natural

cavern, half its width shown as level with the entrance. The other

half was a pit, marked as sixty feet deep; above this and just under

the ceiling, several passages branched out in different directions.

The snooper reported visible light ahead; fluoroelectric light from

one of the upper passages, and firelight from the pit. The

air-analyzer reported woodsmoke and a faint odor of burning oil. He

sent the snooper ahead, tilting it to look down into the pit.

A small fire was burning in the center; around it, in a circle, some

hundred and fifty people, including a few women and children, sat,

squatted or reclined. A low hum of voices came out of the soundbox.

"Who the blazes are they?" Anse whispered. "I can't see any way they

could have gotten down there."

They were in rags, and they weren't armed; there wasn't so much as a

knife or a pistol among them. Conn motioned the lorries and the other

jeep forward.

"Prisoners," he said. "I think they were hauled down here on a scow,

shoved off, and left when the fighting started. Cover me," he told the

men in the lorries. "I'm going down and talk to them."

Somebody below must have heard something. As Anse took the jeep over

and started floating it down, the circle around the fire began moving,

the women and children being pushed to the rear and the men gathering

up clubs and other chance weapons. By the time the jeep grounded, the

men in the pit were standing defensively in front of the women and

children.

They were all dirty and ragged; the men were unshaven. There was a

tall man with a grizzled beard, in greasy coveralls; another man with

a black beard and an old Space Navy uniform, his head bandaged with a

dirty and blood-caked rag; another in the same uniform, wearing a cap

on which the Terran Federation insignia had been replaced by the

emblem of Transcontinent & Overseas Shiplines and the words CHIEF.

And beside the tall man with the gray beard, was a girl

in baggy trousers and a torn smock. Like the others, she was dirty,

but in spite of the rags and filth, Conn saw that she was beautiful.

Black hair, dark eyes, an impudently tilted nose.

They all looked at him in hostility that gradually changed to

perplexity and then hope.

"Who are you?" the tall man with the gray beard asked. "You're none of

this gang here."

"Litchfield Exploration & Salvage; I'm Conn Maxwell."

That meant nothing; none of them had been near a news-screen lately.

"What's going on topside?" the man with the bandaged head and the four

stripes on his sleeve asked. "There was firing, artillery and

nuclears, and they herded us down here. Have you cleaned the bloody

murderers out?"

"We're working on it," Conn said. "I take it they aren't friends of

yours?"

Foolish Question of the Year; they all made that evident.

"They took my ship; they murdered my first officer and half my crew

and passengers...."

"They burned our home and killed our servants," the girl said. "They

kidnapped my father and me...."

"They've been keeping us here as slaves."

"It's the Blackie Perales gang," the tall man with the gray beard

said. "They've been making us work for them, converting a blasted tub

of a contragravity ship into a spacecraft. I beg your pardon, Captain

Nichols; she was a fine ship--for her intended purpose."

"You're Captain Nichols?" Anse Dawes exclaimed. "Of the _Harriet

Barne_?"

"That's right. The _Harriet Barne's_ here; they've been making us work

on her, to convert her to an interplanetary craft, of all idiotic

things."

"My name's Yves Jacquemont," the man with the gray beard said. "I'm a

retired hyperspace maintenance engineer; I had a little business at

Waterville, buying, selling and rebuilding agricultural machinery.

This gang found out about me; they raided and burned our village and

carried me and my daughter, Sylvie, away. We've been working for them

for the last four months, tearing Captain Nichols' ship down and

armoring her with collapsium."

"How many pirates are there here?"

That started an argument. Nobody was quite sure; two hundred and fifty

seemed to be the highest estimate, which Conn decided to play safe by

accepting.

"You get us out of here," Yves Jacquemont was saying. "All we want is

a chance at them."

"How about arms? You can't do much with clubs and fists."

"Don't worry about that; we know where to get arms. The treasure

house, where they store their loot. There's plenty of arms and

ammunition, and anything else you can think of. They've used us to

help stow the stuff; we know where it is."

"Anse, you remember those scows we saw, in the big room before we came

to the broad passage? Take four men in the jeep; have them lift two of

them and bring them here. Then, you get out to the end of the tunnel

and call the _Lester Dawes_. Tell them what's happened, tell them they

can get gunboats all the way in, and wait to guide them when they

arrive."

When Anse turned and climbed into the jeep, he asked Yves Jacquemont:

"Why does this Perales want an interplanetary ship?"

"He's crazy!" Jacquemont swore. "Paranoid; megalomaniac. He talks of

organizing all the pirates and outlaws on the planet into one band and

making himself king. He's heard that there are Space Navy superweapons

on Koshchei--I suppose there are, at that--and he wants to get a lot

of planetbusters and hellburners and annihilators." He lowered his

voice. "Captain Nichols and I were going to fix up something that'd

blow the _Harriet Barne_ up as soon as he got her out of atmosphere."

He talked for a while to Jacquemont and his daughter Sylvie, and to

Nichols and the chief engineer, whose name was Vibart. There was

evidently nothing else at the spaceport of which a spaceship could be

built, but there were foundries and rolling-mills and a

collapsed-matter producer. The _Harriet Barne_ was gutted, half torn

down, and half armored with new collapsium-plated sheet steel. It

might be possible to continue the work on her and take her to space.

Then the two scows floated over the top of the pit and began letting

down. They got the prisoners into them, the combat-effective men in

one and the women and children in the other. At the top, he took over

the remaining jeep, getting Jacquemont, his daughter, and the two

contragravityship officers in with him.

"Up to the top," Jacquemont said. "Take the middle passage, and turn

right at the next intersection."

As they approached the section where the pirates stored their loot,

the sound of guns and explosions grew louder, and they began picking

up radio and screen signals, all of which were scrambled and

incomprehensible. The pirates, in different positions, talking among

themselves. With all that, it ought to be safe to use their own

communication equipment; nobody would notice it.

The treasure room looked like a giant pack rat's nest. Cases and

crates of merchandise, bales, boxes, barrels. Machinery. Household and

industrial robots. The prisoners piled out of the two scows and began

rummaging. Somebody found a case of cigarettes and smashed it open; in

a moment, cartons were being tossed around and opened, and everybody

was smoking. The pirates evidently hadn't issued any tobacco rations

to their prisoners.

And they found arms and ammunition, began ripping open cases, handing

out rifles, pistols, submachine guns. The prisoners grabbed them even

more hungrily than the cigarettes. Sylvie Jacquemont took charge of

the ammunition; she had three men opening boxes for her, while she

passed out boxes of cartridges and made sure that everybody had

ammunition to fit their weapons. A ragged man who might have been a

farm-tramp or a rich planter before his capture had gotten a bale of

cloth open and was tossing rags around while the chief engineer

inspected weapons and showed people how to clean out the cosmoline and

fill their spare magazines.

Conn collected a few of his own party.

"Let's look these robots over," he said. "Find about half a dozen we

can load with blasting explosive and send ahead of us on

contragravity."

They found several--an electric-light servicer, a couple of

wall-and-window washers, a serving-robot that looked as if it had come

from a restaurant, and an all-purpose robo-janitor. In the passage

outside, they began loading the lorries with bricks of ionite and

packages of cataclysmite, packing all the scrap-iron and other junk

around the explosives that they could. As soon as they had weapons,

the prisoners came swarming out, making more noise than was necessary

and a good deal more than was safe. Sylvie Jacquemont, with a

submachine gun slung from one shoulder and a canvas bag of spare

magazines from the other, came over to see what he was doing.

"Well, look what you're doing to him!" she mock-reproached. "That's a

dirty trick to play on a little robot!"

He grinned at her. "You and my mother would get along. She always

treats robots like people."

"Well, they are, sort of. They aren't alive--at least, I don't think

they are--but they do what you tell them, and they learn tricks, and

they have personalities."

That was true. He didn't think robots were alive, either, though

biophysics professors tended to become glibly evasive when pinned down

to defining life. Robots could learn, if you used the term loosely

enough. And any robot with more than five hundred hours service picked

up a definite and often exasperating personality.

"I've been working with them, and tearing them down and fixing them,

ever since I was in pigtails," she added.

The half-dozen natural leaders among the prisoners--Jacquemont and his

daughter, the two _Harriet Barne_ officers, and a couple of

others--bent over the photoprinted plans Conn had, located their

position, and told him as much as they could about what lay ahead.

Sylvie Jacquemont could handle robots; she would ride in the front

seat of the jeep while he piloted. Vibart, the chief engineer, and

Yves Jacquemont would ride behind. Nichols would ride in the scow with

the fighting men. One lorry of his own party would follow the jeep;

the other would bring up the rear.

He snapped on the screen and punched the ship combination. Stefan

Jorisson appeared in it.

"Hi, Conn! You all right?" He raised his voice. "Conn's on-screen!"

His father appeared at Jorisson's shoulder and, a moment later, Klem

Zareff.

"Well, we're in, all right," he said. "We just picked up an army,

too." He swung the jeep to get the crowd in the pickup, explaining who

they were. "Did you hear from Anse?"

"Yes, he just screened in," Rodney Maxwell said. "He said a gunboat

can get in."

"That's right; clear into the crater."

"Well, we're going to put three of them inside," Zareff told him.

"_Werewolf_, _Zombi_, and _Dero_. And a troop carrier with fifty men;

flamethrowers, portable machine guns, bomb-launchers; regular

special-weapons section. What can you do where you are?"

"Here? Nothing. We're going to work around to the other side of the

crater, and then find a vertical shaft and go up topside and make as

much disturbance as we can."

"That's it!" Zareff approved. "Pull them off balance; as soon as we

get in, we'll go straight to the top. Look for us in about an hour;

it's going to take time getting to the tunnel-mouth without being

spotted from above."

He lifted the jeep and started off; the lorry, and the scows and the

other lorry, followed; the snooper and the bomb-robots went ahead like

a pack of hunting dogs. They went through great chambers, dark and

silent and bulking with dusty machines. Jacquemont explained that the

prisoners had never gotten into this section; the _Harriet Barne_ was

a mile or so to their right. Conn turned left, when the noise of

firing from outside became plainer. A foundry. A machine-shop which

seemed to have been abandoned in the middle of some rush job that

hadn't really been necessary. They came to a place even the snooper

couldn't enter, choked to the ceiling with dead vegetation, hydroponic

seed-plants that had been left untended to grow wild and die. They

emerged into outside light, in vast caves a mile high and open onto

the crater, and looked across the floor that had been leveled and

vitrified to the other side, three and a half miles away.

He didn't know whether to be more awed by the original eruption that

had formed the crater or by the engineering feat of carving these

docks and ship-berths, big enough for the hugest hyperspaceship, into

it.

At first, he had been afraid of getting into position too soon before

the task force from outside could profit by the diversion. Then he

began to worry about the time it was taking to get halfway around the

crater. He could hear artillery thundering continuously above. Except

at the very beginning of the battle, there had been little gunfire. He

wondered if both sides were running out of lift-and-drive missiles, or

if the fighting had gotten too close for anybody to risk using nuclear

weapons.

He was also worrying about the women and children among the released

prisoners.

"Why did the pirates bother with them?" he asked Sylvie.

"They used the women and some of the old men to do housekeeping

chores for them," she said. "Mostly, though, they were hostages; if

the men didn't work, Perales threatened to punish the women and

children. I wasn't doing any housework; I'm too good a mechanic. I was

helping on the ship."

"Well, what'll I do with them when the fighting starts? I can't take

them into battle."

"You'll have to; it'll be the safest place for them. You can't leave

them anywhere and risk having them recaptured."

"That means we'll have to detach some men to cover them, and that'll

cut our striking force down." He whistled at the sound-pickup of his

screen and told his father about it. "What do I do with these people,

anyhow?"

"You're the officer in command, Conn," his father told him. "Your

decision. How soon can you attack? We're almost through to the

crater."

"There's a vertical shaft right above us, and a lot of noise at the

top. We'll send up a couple of bomb-robots to clear things at the

shaft-head and follow with everything we have."

"Noncombatants and all?"

He nodded. "Only thing we can do." An old quotation occurred to him.

"'If you want to make an omelet, you have to break eggs.'"

He wondered who'd said that in the first place. One of the old

Pre-Atomic conquerors; maybe Hitler. No, Hitler would have said, "If

you want to make sauerkraut, you have to chop cabbage." Maybe it was

Caesar.

"We'd better send Gumshoe Gus up, first," Sylvie suggested.

"You handle him. Take a quick look around, and then pull him back.

We'll need him later." It was the first time he'd ever caught himself

calling a robot "him," instead of "it." He thought for a second, and

added: "Give your father and Mr. Vibart the controls for the two

window-washers; you handle the snooper."

He gave more instructions: Yves Jacquemont to turn his bomb-robot

right, Vibart to turn his left; the two lorries to follow the jeep up

the shaft, the scows to follow. Then he leaned back and looked at the

screens that had been rigged under the top of the jeep. A circle of

light appeared in one, growing larger and brighter as the snooper

approached the top of the shaft; two more came on as the bomb-robots

followed.

"All right; follow me," he said into the inter-vehicle radio, and

started the jeep slowly up the shaft.

The snooper popped out of the shaft, onto a gallery that had been cut

into the solid rock, fifty feet high and a hundred and fifty across,

with a low parapet on the outside and the mile-deep crater beyond.

There were a few grounded aircars and lorries in sight, and a medium

airboat rested a hundred or so feet on the right of the shaft-opening.

Fifteen or twenty men were clustered around it, with a lifter loaded

with ammunition. They looked like any crowd of farm-tramps. Suddenly,

one of them saw the snooper, gave a yell, and fired at it with a

rifle. Sylvie pulled it back into the shaft; her father and the chief

engineer sent the two bomb-robots up onto the gallery. The right-hand

robot sped at the airboat; the last thing Conn saw in its screen was a

face, bearded and villainous and contorted with fright, looking out

the pilot's window of the airboat. Then it went dead, and there was a

roar from above. On the other side, several men were firing straight

at the pickup of the other robot; it went dead, too, and there was a

second explosion.

In the communication screen, somebody was yelling, "Give them another

one for Milt Hennant!" and his father was urging him to get in fast,

before they recovered.

In peace or war, screen communication was a wonderful thing. The only

trouble was that it let in too many kibitzers.

The gallery, when the jeep emerged onto it, was empty except for

casualties, a few still alive. The side of the airboat was caved in;

the lifter-load of ammunition had gone up with the bomb. He moved the

jeep to the right of the shaft and waited for the vehicles behind him,

suffering a brief indecision.

_Never divide your force in the presence of the enemy._

There had been generals who had done that and gotten away with it, but

they'd had names like Foxx Travis and Robert E. Lee and

Napoleon--Napoleon; that was who'd made that crack about omelets!

They'd known what they were doing. He was playing this battle by ear.

There was a lot of shouting ahead to the right. That meant live

pirates, a deplorable situation which ought to be corrected at once.

The communication screen was noisy, now; his father had gotten to the

top gallery with the three gun cutters, and was meeting resistance. He

formed his column, his jeep and one of the lorries in front, the scows

next, and the second lorry behind, and started around the gallery

counterclockwise, the snoopers and the three remaining bomb-robots

ahead. They began running into resistance almost at once.

Bullets spatted on the armor glass in front of him, spalling it and

blotching it with metal until he found that he could steer better by

the show-back of his view-pickup. He used that until the pickup was

shot out. Then his father began wanting to know, from the

communication screen, what was going on and where he was. A bomb or

something went off directly under the jeep, bouncing it almost to the

ceiling; he found that it was impossible to lift it again after it

settled to the floor of the gallery, and they all piled out to fight

on foot. Sommers and his gang from the number one lorry were also

afoot; their vehicle had been disabled. He saw them lifting wounded

into one of the scows.

They blew up the light-service robot to clear a nest of pirates who

had taken cover ahead of them. They sent the robo-janitor up a side

passage and exploded it in a missile-launching position on the outside

of the mountain; that produced a tremendous explosion. They began

running out of cartridges, and had to stop and glean more from enemy

casualties. They expended their last bomb-robot, the restaurant

server, to break up another pirate resistance point.

At length he found himself, with Sylvie and her father and one of the

Home Guardsmen from Sommers' lorry, lying behind an aircar somebody

had knocked out with a bazooka, with two dead pirates for company and

a dozen distressingly live ones ahead behind an improvised barricade.

Behind, there was frantic firing; the rear-guard seemed to have run

into trouble, probably from some gang that had come down from the

upper level. He wondered what his father was doing with the gunboats;

since abandoning the jeep, he had lost his only means of contact.

Suddenly, the men in front jumped up from their barricade and came

running toward him. Been reinforced, now they're counterattacking. His

rifle was empty; he drew his pistol and shot one of them, and then he

saw that they were throwing up their hands and yelling for quarter.

This was something new.

He looked around quickly, to make sure none of the liberated prisoners

except Jacquemont and his daughter were around, and then called to a

couple of his own men to come up and help him. While they were

relieving the pirates of their pistol belts and cartridge bandoliers,

more came up, their hands over their heads, herded by a combat car

from which Tom Brangwyn covered them with a pair of 12-mm machine

guns. Tom hadn't put in an appearance before he had taken his commando

force into the tunnel; he hadn't even known the chief of Company

Police was on Barathrum.

"Well, nice seeing you," he greeted. "How did you get in?"

"Over the top," Brangwyn told him. "Everything's caved in on the other

side. We have a quarter of the top gallery, and half of this one. Your

father's cleaning up above. Klem's got some men working along the

outside."

Sylvie was tugging at his arm. "Hey, look! Look at that!" she was

clamoring. "Who's she belong to?"

He looked; the _Lester Dawes_ was coming over the edge of the crater.

"She's ours," he said. "It's all over but the mopping up. And counting

the egg breakage."