* * * * *

His gun playing about him, Asher raced toward the big valves and gates
that shut off the drain of the pipe-lines. Burning, reeking of sulphur
and burned leather, the Petrolia vanished before him. But, as he
turned, the drainage system that was robbing the field shut off. They
had blocked his way again!

Too many to blast away altogether, they pressed in. Asher leaped
forward, feet kicking, left fist smashing out, static gun crackling as
if to tell him that nothing could stop them. Tentacles gripped at him,
the foul, stinking smell gagged him. But the squeaks of the Petrolia
maddened him.

"Squeak, damn you!" Asher shouted wildly, kicking, shooting and
hitting, gaining toward the shaft. "Squeak--for all the damned Things
that ever bred below the earth cannot stop one surface man!"

He burned and fought his way through and jumped into the cage as his
gun electrocuted two of the Petrolia that tried to weave in after him.
As he slammed the door, Asher was conscious that something was
happening. He hesitated, just long enough to see the cavern start
buckling and caving. The pressure of the oil, now shut off, was
filling back toward the surface, creating a mighty pressure downward.
The surface wells would produce man's power-fuel once more.

Asher slammed the door, turned on the power, and the cage shot upward.

A half hour later, those waiting on the floor of the derrick above the
hole in which Asher had gone down, started. Asher, burned, wounded,
blood streaming from his battered body, staggered in and collapsed at
their feet.

* * * * *

"I can't believe it! Insane! Impossible! Yet, every well in this field
has started producing again! And when we went to that old, abandoned
wildcat well, we found the shaft opening! I had it covered up, as you
ordered."

R. Briggs Johns paced up and down the laboratory floor, talking to
Asher, who had just arisen from his bed, two weeks after he had
collapsed at their feet in the derrick. Still bandaged, he was a
different Blaine Asher. His face was lined, and the hair next to his
scalp nearly snow white.

"I'll be able to do some walking around outside in a few days," Asher
declared as he cleaned a test tube and placed it in a rack. "I can
locate several wells over that underground storage cavern, and you can
recover that oil. But you can't mine this field.

"Twenty years, perhaps, and you can. But it will ta