ere."

"Here she comes!" the chief engineer called. "Watch the base of the
column!"

The pillar of fiery smoke and dust, still boiling up from where the
bombs had gone off far underground, was being violently agitated at
the bottom. A series of new flashes broke out, lifting and spreading
the incandescent radioactive gasses, and then a great gush of flame
rose. A column of pure hydrogen must have rushed up into the vacuum
created by the explosion; the next blast of flame, in a lateral sheet,
came at nearly ten thousand feet above the ground, and great rags of
fire, changing from red to violet and back through the spectrum to red
again, went soaring away to dissipate in the upper atmosphere. Then
geysers of hot ash and molten rock spouted upward; some of the
white-hot debris landed almost at the acid river, half-way to the
armor-tender.

"We've started a first-class earthquake, too," the Hispano-Indian
Martian Murillo said, looking at the instruments. "About six big
cracks opening in the rock-structure. You know, when this quiets down
and cools off, we'll have more ore on the surface than we can handle
in ten years, and more than we could have mined by ordinary means in
fifty."

About four miles from the original blast, another eruption began with
a terrific gas-explosion.

"Well, that finishes our work," the large young man said, going to a
kitbag in the corner of the cabin and getting out a bottle. "Get some
of those plastic cups, over there, somebody; this one calls for a
drink."

"That's right," Gomes said. "You do something once, it may be an
accident; you repeat the performance, and it's a success." He began
pushing papers aside on his desk, and the girl in the too-ample
coveralls brought drinking cups.

The Ulleran, in the background, rose quickly and squeaked
apologetically. Murillo nodded. "Yes, of course, Gorkrink. No need for
you to stay here." The Ulleran went out, closing the door behind him.

"That taboo against Ullerans and Terrans watching each other eat and
drink," Murillo said. "What is that, part of their religion?"

"No, it's their version of modesty," the girl replied. "Like some of
our sex-inhibitions, which they can't even begin to understand.... But
you were speaking to him in Lingua Terra; I didn't know any of them
understood it."

"Gorkrink does," Murillo said, uncorking the bottle and pouring into
the plastic cups. "None of them can speak it, of course, because of
the structure o