as going to be able to take charge here.

"You haven't found any passage leading into it?" he asked, when they
were gathered in Fawzi's--formerly Foxx Travis's--office.

"Nifflheim, no! If we had, we'd be inside now." Tom Brangwyn swore.
"And we've been all over the ceiling in here, and we can't find
anything but vitrified rock and then the collapsium shielding."

"Sure. There are collapsium-cutters, at Port Carpenter, on Koshchei.
They do it with cosmic rays."

"But collapsium will stop cosmic rays," Zareff objected.

"Stop them from penetrating, yes. A collapsium-cutter doesn't
penetrate; it abrades. Throws out a rotary beam and works like a
grinding-wheel, or a buzz-saw."

"Well, could you get one down that hole?" Judge Ledue asked.

He laughed. "No. The thing is rather too large. In the first place,
there's a full-sized power-reactor, and a mass-energy converter. With
them, you produce negamatter--atoms with negatively charged protons
and positive electrons, positrons. Then, you have to bring them into
contact with normal positive-matte--That's done in a chamber the size
of a fifty-gallon barrel, made of collapsium and weighing about a
hundred tons. Then you have to have a pseudograv field to impart
rotary motion to your cosmic-ray beam, and the generator door that
would lift ten ships the size of the _Lester Dawes_. Then you need
another fifty to a hundred tons of collapsium to shield your
cutting-head. The cutting-head alone weighs three tons. The rotary
beam that does the cutting," he mentioned as an afterthought, "is
about the size of a silver five-centisol piece."

Nobody said anything for a few seconds. Carl Leibert stated that
Divine Power would aid them. Nobody paid much attention; Leibert's
stock seemed to have gone bearish since he had found nothing in the
butte and Fawzi had found that whatever-it-was on top of Force
Command.

"Means we're going to dig the whole blasted top off, clear down to
where that thing is," Zareff said. "That'll take a year."

"Oh, no. Maybe a couple of weeks, after we get started," Conn told
them. "It'll take longer to get the stuff loaded on a ship and hauled
here than it will to get that thing uncovered and opened."

He told them about the machines they used in the iron mines on
Koshchei, and as he talked, he stopped worrying about how he was going
to take charge here. He had just been unanimously elected
Indispensable Man.

"Bless you, young man!" Carl Leibert cr