h across
the mighty cavern.

"Our storage." Lee Wong stood at the edge and explained. "Also, as you
may see, a concentration incubator, or spawning bed and food storage
for our Petrolia."

Blaine Asher looked again at the rippling oil at his feet. He choked
brokenly and stepped back a pace. For the oil near the bank was alive!
It rippled and splashed, teeming with life. By the strange alchemy of
breeding in oil and living on oil as man lives on bread, that lake of
oil was a mass of growing Petrolia. Millions--yes, countless
billions--of them! Hideous, foul Things that would be turned loose
with the rest in that nightmare world--that would be taken to other
buried worlds to start new races.

* * * * *

"But why--why?" Asher almost screamed the words at Lee Wong.

"Petrolia will be our armies, protecting our underground wealth," Lee
Wong answered him. "They will be our faithful workers, under no
command but mine. For, even Krenski has not mastered the over-control
it takes to handle them!

"Gradually, as happened to the field we are now under, all oil fields
will go dry. We will be getting the oil from below, and putting it in
storage in mother earth. Think, Blaine Asher, what it will mean!"
There was a fanatical light in Lee Wong's beady eyes.

"A world without petroleum is a world without power. No oil for fuel;
no gasoline, lubricants or by-products of any sort. No airplanes could
fly; tanks, tractors, oil-burning trains and ships; mechanical
appliances--nothing could run. We now take the oil from America.
Later, when our Petrolia have increased and we have devised means of
moving them, we will go to all oil-producing countries.

"We will secrete the oil and paralyze the world. Now, in Russia and
China and India, our societies are organizing and growing. They will
handle the weakened, powerless nations, and I shall be ruler of the
universe, surface and beneath, with Krenski to aid me, you see. It it
wonderful, is it not? And, knowing what you do, having seen what you
have, could you call it impossible?"

Blaine Asher groaned. It was not impossible, he knew. Unreal;
monstrous--but never impossible. A region of hideous Petrolia; a world
stripped of automotive and mechanical power, its fuel held in the
hands of a few, far underground--it was terrible to think of.

And Asher the only one who knew. The only one who could avert such a
thing. The fate of an entire world was in his h