as humid in the Mole as in the
Amazon jungle during the dog days. The boring inner spaceship starts
screeching like a banshee.

I look at the instrument panel again and see we are close to being seven
thousand miles down, and all at once the gauges show we are out of
energy. I look out the port and see a fish staring in at me, and a crab
with eyes like two poached eggs swimming in ketchup.

Then we are going through dirt again and all of a sudden we come out of
it and I see a city below us all lit up and the buildings are made of
stuff that looks like jade run through with streaks of black.

The Mole drops down about a thousand more feet and then hits the floor
of the subterranean city and we land like a fountain pen with its point
slammed into the top of a lump of clay. Bo-o-o-o-i-ing! We twang like a
plucked harp string for nearly five minutes and I hit my noggin against
the pilot's seat.

When I pick up my marbles I look around for either an Elysium field or a
slag heap but instead a creep is staring down at me. He looks part human
and part beetle and has a face the color of the meat of an avocado. His
head is shaped like a pear standing on its stem and has two eyes spaced
about six inches apart and they are as friendly as those of a spitting
cobra irked by hives. He is about four feet tall and has two pairs of
arms. I guess I am still a little delirious or I would not have told
the thing he would make a swell paper hanger.

The subterranean creep throws a fit and belts me with four fists.
"Dummkopf!" it says, and then I really get scared as he has got a lop of
hair falling down over one eye and has a black mustache the size of a
Venutian four centra stamp over his mouth which is like that of a
pouting goldfish.

I get to my feet and grab for a railing, and I see Wurpz and Zahooli
held by two other monsters that look more like beetles than the one
standing beside me.

"Zo!" the creep with the mustache says. "It is a surprise I talk
Universa? We have radar and telepathometers that give us everything that
is said in the upper world."

I think back and try not to. In the hermetically sealed cylinder back
upstairs among my Americana Spink I have some photographs, Circa 1945.
One is of a citizen of old Nazi Germany who was supposed to have
cremated himself in a bunker. Papers there record that my forebear,
Cyril Spink, had his doubts at the time.

"I am the Neofeuhrer, Earthman," this creep says. "I will conqu