wiched. Other long halls,
or crevices, ran in every direction out of this main cavern. In the
walls, in niches and cracks, the superior pressure lamps had been
placed, throwing a bright, eery light over it all.

Asher recoiled suddenly at the sight of hundreds of Petrolia that
swarmed the hallways, and they seemed to sense another presence beside
that of Lee Wong or Krenski. A choked, gurgling sound came from the
Chinaman, and they disappeared down the halls, squeaking angrily as
they went.

"Our control room," explained Lee Wong waving his hand about him. He
pointed to a dozen twenty-four inch pipe-lines that ran along the low
ceiling, coming from as many different halls into the room, but all
going out the same large hall, larger than the rest. "There are the
arteries of our system. There is the oil that is so--shall we say
strangely?--missing in your wells." He smiled, a taunting, mocking
light in his eyes.

"You well understand how we do it. Above us, just below the oil
strata, is a steel, trough-shaped roof. The oil, tapped from below,
drains into these, and then into these pipe-lines. If we were working
from above, now, we would run it to a central shaft, and pump it out.
We do not want it on the surface, however."

* * * * *

"Then why in the name of hell do you want it?" Asher barked, a tense
note of anger in his voice. "And what do you do with it?" These two
were humans. At least, they were in man-form, if not in feeling. And
the Petrolia could be handled. Asher was getting mad, and his fear
ebbed.

"Come." Lee Wong led the way under the pipe-lines, down the large
hall. Krenski, his heavy static gun ready, walked at Asher's back.
They came out into another cavern that stretched beyond the powerful
lights. The sound of their voices echoed like thunder of the drums of
Thor, and Asher realized this cavern might stretch away in Stygian
blackness for hundreds of miles.

Asher marveled, for the floor of this cavern dropped at least five
feet below the level of the control room or incoming hallways, forming
a natural reservoir. A reservoir for the big streams of oil that were
pouring into it from the pipe-lines.

The rumble of the oil as it came in and splashed out in a never-ending
stream, and the rumble of the oil streams above them as the precious
fluid flowed down into the plated drain roof, sounded like the tramp
of the weary feet of the damned, as it echoed back and fort