Lorenzo Menardes and Morgan
Gatworth. Dolf Kellton, playing hookey from school. Kurt Fawzi; he
landed in the canyon and watched every shovelful of rock lifted, as
though trying to help with mental force. Tom Brangwyn, with a score of
the Home Guard to reinforce the Company Police. Klem Zareff called in
his air cavalry to help control the sightseers. Nobody was making
trouble; they were just getting in the way.

At eleven, Rodney Maxwell went aboard the _Lester Dawes_ to use the
radio and telescreen equipment. By then, two time zones west in
Storisende, the Claims Office was opening; he filed preliminary claim
to an underground installation with at least two entrances in
uninhabited country, and claimed a ten-mile radius around it. By that
time, the gang working on top had uncovered a vitrified slab over the
hundred-foot circle of the vertical shaft and were cracking it with
explosives. According to the scanners, it was full of loose rubble for
a hundred feet down. Below that, the microrays hit something
impenetrable.

Toward midafternoon, the tunnel in the canyon was cleared. It had been
vitrified solid; the scanners reported that it was plugged for ten
feet. A contragravity tank let down in front of it, with a solenoid
jackhammer mounted where the gun should have been, and began pounding,
running a hole in for a blast shot. There were more explosions
topside; when Conn took a jeep up to observe progress there, he found
the vitrified rock blown completely off the vertical shaft, exposing
the rubble that had been dumped into it. The gang on the mesa-top had
discovered something else; a grid of auro-copper bussbars buried four
feet underground. Ten to one, radio and telescreen signals would be
transmitted to that from below, and then probably picked up and
rebroadcast from a relay station on one or another of the high buttes
in the neighborhood. Time enough to look for that later. He returned
to the canyon, where the lateral tunnel was now almost completely
open.

When it was clear, they sent a snooper in first. It was a robot,
looking slightly like a short-tailed tadpole, six feet long by three
feet at the thickest. It transmitted a view of the tunnel as it went
slowly in; the air, it found, was breathable, and there were no
harmful radiations or other dangers. According to the plans, there
should be a big room at the other end, slightly curved, a hundred feet
wide by a hundred on either side of the tunnel entrance.