ded by some extra
tall Subterrors. Hitler the Third leads us into the spelunker's
nightmare and we finally come to a big metal door about eighty feet long
and twenty feet high.

Agrodyte pushes a button and the steel door lifts. Then we walk up a
flight of steps to the top of a dam and take a gander at a fleet of
submarines that makes Earthian pig-boats look like they belonged in
antique shops.

"We will take you for a ride in one," the dictator of Subterro says.
"After that I will turn you over to the executioner."

"We need lawyers," Wurpz says.

We cross a thin gangplank and enter the sub. The lights in it are
indirect and are purplish green. Hitler Number Three shows us the
telepathic machine, the radar, and the viso-screen that pictures
everything going on upstairs on Earth, and on Mars, Jupiter and all
other planets. There are four other beetleheads on the sub and they
carry disintegrators.

"These Subterro U-boats," our genial host brags, "can go as fast in
reverse as full speed ahead, as the situation warrants. They are alive
with guided missiles no larger than this flashlight I have here, but one
would blow up your Metropolita and leave hardly an ash."

He looks at me, and then goes on: "We will proceed to the lock that will
raise us to the underground river and cruise along its course for a few
hundred miles. It is the treat I should accord such distinguished
visitors from the outside of Earth, nein?"

The skipper of the Subterro sub pulls a switch and there is a noise like
three contented cats purring. The metal fish slides along the surface of
the underground lake and comes to a hole in a big rock ledge.

We see all this through a monitor which registers the scenery outside
the sub within a radius of three miles. The sub slides into the side of
the rock, and then is lifted up to the underground river that winds and
winds upward like a corkscrew to the outlet under Brazil. Every once in
a while a blast of air that smells like a dentist's office goes through
the sub from bow to stern and I ask why.

"There is such terrific potency to the power we use from our puranium,"
Hitler Number Three says, "that we purify the air every few seconds with
formula XYB and Three-fifth. The basis of the gas is galena."

I nudge Wurpz and Zahooli as the Neofeuhrer goes over to converse with
his crew. "It is our big chance," I whisper. "You watch how they run
this tub for the next few minutes. Then when I cough three