re, I've
stuck you!" look on Johns' face. "Let's say, rather, creatures. Have
you ever met Lee Wong, the great Chinese scientist, or his Russian
geological collaborator, Krenski? No?

* * * * *

"Well, I have. I met them in Paris in 1935--fire years ago. They're
brilliant men, and they've prepared some wonderful papers. Brilliant,
I said: they are also dangerous. They claim, you know, that the
fossils we now drill up come from a lost race--people who went _into_
the earth while man, like us, was coming up onto the earth from the
water. Some claim those fossils have been on the surface at one time,
and were silted over. But eight thousand feet is a lot of silt, Johns:
ever thought of that?"

"Good God!" Johns gasped hoarsely. "You almost make me believe you are
right. But, supposing there is such a race of things--what will you
do?"

"This." Asher drew back a curtain that was stretched across one end of
the laboratory. "You know I was working on a cage in which to descend
into that eight-thousand-foot well you've drilled--the well you're
going to use to try and find why this field is suddenly gone dry. This
it it."

Johns stared, shook his head wonderingly and stared again. Before him,
ready to be transported to the well that was larger than any ever
drilled before, stood what Blaine Asher called his Miner, for want of
a better name.

A thick steel tube, it was. Twelve feet long and large enough around
that a man might stand inside of it. The top was welded on in much the
manner a top is welded on an ordinary hot-water heater, and had
connections for hose in it. At the height of a man's eyes heavy
windows were set in, and in one side was a door just large enough to
admit a man's body. This door sealed tight the minute it closed.

"It looks like--like some sort of a deep sea diving outfit," Johns
said as he walked around the braces that held the Miner upright. "But
all those gadgets inside and on the bottom--?" He indicated the
strange instruments that could be seen when the door was opened, and
the queer glass tubes that projected from the very bottom.

* * * * *

"Pressure-power units--my own invention," Asher told him. "For ten
years I've been working on this. I knew that some day I would want to
explore the oil caverns beneath the earth, so I made ready.

"As I told you, rock pressure, or earth pressure, is a tremendous
thing. It is power, so