x-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.