e. "Conn's on-screen!"

His father appeared at Jorisson's shoulder and, a moment later, Klem
Zareff.

"Well, we're in, all right," he said. "We just picked up an army,
too." He swung the jeep to get the crowd in the pickup, explaining who
they were. "Did you hear from Anse?"

"Yes, he just screened in," Rodney Maxwell said. "He said a gunboat
can get in."

"That's right; clear into the crater."

"Well, we're going to put three of them inside," Zareff told him.
"_Werewolf_, _Zombi_, and _Dero_. And a troop carrier with fifty men;
flamethrowers, portable machine guns, bomb-launchers; regular
special-weapons section. What can you do where you are?"

"Here? Nothing. We're going to work around to the other side of the
crater, and then find a vertical shaft and go up topside and make as
much disturbance as we can."

"That's it!" Zareff approved. "Pull them off balance; as soon as we
get in, we'll go straight to the top. Look for us in about an hour;
it's going to take time getting to the tunnel-mouth without being
spotted from above."

He lifted the jeep and started off; the lorry, and the scows and the
other lorry followed; the snooper and the bomb-robots went ahead like
a pack of hunting dogs. They went through great chambers, dark and
silent and bulking with dusty machines. Jacquemont explained that the
prisoners had never gotten into this section; the _Harriet Barne_ was
a mile or so to their right. Conn turned left, when the noise of
firing from outside became plainer. A foundry. A machine-shop which
seemed to have been abandoned in the middle of some rush job that
hadn't really been necessary. They came to a place even the snooper
couldn't enter, choked to the ceiling with dead vegetation, hydroponic
seed-plants that had been left untended to grow wild and die. They
emerged into outside light, in vast caves a mile high and open onto
the crater, and looked across the floor that had been leveled and
vitrified to the other side, three and a half miles away.

He didn't know whether to be more awed by the original eruption that
had formed the crater or by the engineering feat of carving these
docks and ship-berths, big enough for the hugest hyperspaceship, into
it.

At first, he had been afraid of getting into position too soon before
the task force from outside could profit by the diversion. Then he
began to worry about the time it was taking to get halfway around the
crater. He could hear artillery thundering