undred years what with the new arteries they are making
out of Nucrolon and the new tickers they are replacing for the old
ones."

"Let us look over the model again," I says. "You are just moody today,
D'Ambrosia."

It still looks like it would work to me. It is just a rocket ship
pointed toward terra firma instead of the other way, and has an auger
fixed in place at the nose. It is about twenty feet long and four feet
wide and made out of the strongest metal known to modern science,
cryptoplutonite. It won't heat up or break off and it will start
spinning around as soon as we cut loose with the tail blasts.

"How much time do we need and how much energy for only four thousand
kilometers?" I asks Zahooli. "We got enough stored up to go seventy
million miles into space? We'll cross that bridge when we get to the
river."

"You mean the Styx?"

"That is one thing I will not believe," I sniff. "We will never find
Attila the Hun or Hitler down there. Or Beelzebub."

All at once we hear a big rumbling noise and the plexidomed house we are
in shakes and rattles and we are knocked out of our chairs and deposited
on the seats of our corylon rompers. The viso-screen blacks out, I get
to all fours and ask, "You think the Nougatines have gone to war again,
D'Ambrosia?"

"It was not mice," Zahooli gulps. "It is either a hydroradium plant
backfired or a good old-fashioned earthquake."

After a while we have the viso-screen working. The face of Coordinator
Five appears. He says the worst earthquake in five centuries has
happened. There is a crack in the real estate of Department X6 near the
Rockies that makes the Grand Canyon look like a kid just scraped a stick
through some mud. Infra-Red Cross units, he says, are rocketing to the
area.

"There might be somethin' goin' on inside this earth," I says. "If you
don't poke a hole in a baked potato its busts right open from heat
generated inside. Our project, D'Ambrosia, seems even more expedient
than ever."

"That is a new word for 'insane' I must look up," Zahooli says.

Professor Apsox Zalpha comes out with a statement the next morning. He
says the quake confirms his theory that the inside of the Earth is as
hot as a Venutian calypso number, and that gases are being generated by
the heat and that we haven't volcanoes enough on the surface to allow
them to escape.

Exmud R. Zmorro comes and asks me if I have an opinion.

"Ha," I laugh. "I have many on file in the Neurop