rible silence of this nether world. Here Time had
paused, and life had halted in primate form.

A little moan came from Sue Guinness's pale lips. She plucked at her
arm; a sickly white worm, only an inch long, had fallen on it from the
ceiling. "Oh!" she gasped. "Oh!"

Phil drew her closer to him, and walked with her over to Quade's
wrecked borer. "Let's see what we've got here," he suggested
cheerfully.

The machine was over on its side, the metal mangled and crushed beyond
repair. Nevertheless, he squeezed into it. "Stand back!" he warned.
"I'm going to try its rockets!" There was a click of broken machinery,
and that was all. "Rockets gone," Phil muttered.

He pulled another lever over. There was a sputter from within the
borer, then a furious roar that sent great echoes beating through the
cavern. A cloud of dust reared up before the bottom of the machine,
whipped madly for a moment, and sank as the bellow of sound died down.
Sue saw that a rocky rise in the floor directly in front of the
disintegrators had been planed off levelly.

Phil scrambled out. "The disintegrators work," he said, "but a lot of
good they do us. The borer's hopelessly cracked." He shrugged his
shoulders, and with a discouraged gesture cast to the ground a coil of
rope he had found inside.

Then suddenly he swung around. "Professor!" he called to the old
figure standing bowed beneath the hole in the ceiling. "There's a
draft blowing from somewhere! Do you feel it?"

Guinness felt with his hands a moment and nodded slowly. "Yes," he
said.

"It's coming from this way!" Sue said excitedly, pointing into the
darkness on one side of the cavern. "And it goes up the hole we made
in the ceiling!"

Phil turned eagerly to the old inventor. "It must come from
somewhere," he said, "and that somewhere may take us toward the
surface. Let's follow it!"

"We might as well," the other agreed wearily. His was the tone of a
man who has only a certain time to live.

But Phil was more eager. "While there's life, there's hope," he said
cheerfully. "Come on, Sue, Professor!" And he led the way forward
toward the dim, distorted rock shapes in the distance.

* * * * *

The roof and sides of the cavern angled down into a rough, tunnel-like
opening, from which the draft swept. It was a heavy air, weighted with
the smell of moist earth and lifeless water and a nameless, flat,
stale gas. They slowly made their way through th