Johns, looking into the cool gray eyes of the man before him,
did know better. Blaine Asher was more than just a geologist or
scientist. Well he might be termed a master geo-metallurgist. Johns
nodded, wiping beads of perspiration from his brow.

"You say impossible--and want to know how those creatures cause this
field, the largest oil field in the world, to start going bone dry
over night. All right:

"Remember how you laughed when I told you that oil would some day be
mined instead of pumped or flowed from the earth? You couldn't see how
one central shaft could be sunk, then tunnels run back underneath the
oil strata, tapping the sand from the bottom and letting the oil run
down to be pumped out one shaft. Yet, that way, we would get _all_ the
oil, instead of the possible one-eighth of the total amount as we get
by present methods.

"Now, you have seen that done. And you said that was impossible."

* * * * *

"Yes," Johns objected, "but those test wells we mined were only a few
hundred feet deep. Wells in this field are eight thousand feet deep!
Think of the heat, man! You can't do it. And as for people--"

"Your great field has suddenly gone dry, almost in a month's time,"
Asher stopped him. "What is happening here can happen elsewhere. Only,
formations in this field are more suited to there being life--or
something--below us. Stan-America is going broke. Many others have
already gone broke. Still, that oil couldn't have gotten away.

"As for heat--yes, we know that oil is hot when it comes up from the
oil sand at eight thousand feet, or from ordinary wells at three to
six thousand feet. But"--Asher lit a cigarette and inhaled
deeply--"gas coming out of the same well is _cold_! So cold it forms
frost inches thick on pipes and tanks.

"Rock pressure--the pressure of the earth--forcing up the gas, causes
that. Why couldn't that same pressure cool great caverns below the
granite cap below the oil sands? It could. For that matter, I know
that same pressure will generate useful power. I'll show you that in a
minute."

"All right!" Johns chewed his cigar almost savagely. "Say, then, that
you can work down there, nearly two miles underground; granted that we
can tunnel from beneath the sands and pump more oil from one central
shaft than we now do from fifty wells--what has that to do with this
tosh about a race of people?"

"They are not people, perhaps." Asher grinned at the "the