r under the action
of the vacuum tubes: diamond and cut-glass tubes in the bottom of the
Miner, thermoed with layers of quicksilver: everything cleared,
everything ready.

* * * * *

His hand shaking, Asher pushed the tiny switch that brought his
filament points trembling together under the atmospheric pressure so
far underground. A tiny spark danced and throbbed through the tiny
glass tube before him, beginning to buzz as it started the circuit of
increasing coils, and soon humming and vibrating as the helium and
vacuum tubes swelled it to full power. Spark after spark, increased
almost beyond imagination, followed one after another. The Miner
throbbed and shook.

White-faced, Asher touched the little lever that opened the blasting
outlets in the bottom. Almost instantly the Miner dropped a full six
inches--went on, down to a foot. Asher, pride of success choking him,
pulled the lever hard over, which brought some of the tubes beneath
him spreading out, to blast away the earth on each side of him.

He signaled for more and more slack as the depth indicator showed he
had burned, or disintegrated, his way down to thirty feet beyond the
original bottom of the hole. He was below the bottom of the protecting
wall of casing now--at the mercy of the pressure of two miles of
earth.

Slowly, setting all his bottom tubes to cutting away on all sides of
him, he started hollowing out enough room to step out into. His
lights, when he looked through the windows, showed ghostly on earth
ten feet on each side of him. Ten more minutes and he had created a
room nearly twenty-five feet square--a man-made cave, two miles below
the surface.

There was something akin to awe in the feelings of Asher when he
opened the little door, crawled out and stood erect. The pressure
lamps in his helmet lit up the room he had made. There were no sounds,
just a vague, ringing silence.

Then so quickly that it robbed him of his senses, two things happened.
A hundred yards away from the well in which he had descended, another
well, drilled by another oil company, was shot. Three hundred quarts
of nitro-glycerine were set off in the hole.

* * * * *

Asher screamed and clamped his ear discs down tight. It seemed the
very gods of thunder were shrieking and raging in his head; every
nerve and fiber in his body throbbed and tingled with the hellish
vibration.

On his knees, where the