ulder.

"It's the end, dear," he told the girl softly. "It's the end of our
journey. You've been so dear and so brave. Pretty tough to lose out
when we'd almost fought clear." Then, to Smithy: "Loah came back to
save me--refused to go when she could have got away and been safe."

* * * * *

Already the air was stifling. The tunnel beyond the mouth of the cave
was hot, though only at its end, where the invisible ray struck the
rock surface squarely, was there red, glowing heat. Rawson suddenly
saw none of it. He was seeing in his mind the world up above, his own
world of great, free, sunlit spaces. Suddenly he was hungry for some
closer link, no matter how slight, to bind him to that world.

"What day is it?" he asked. "Have you kept track of time?"

Smithy looked at him wonderingly. "Yes," he said, then added: "Oh, I
see. You want to know what day this is when we die. It's the
twentieth, Dean"--he looked at the watch on his wrist--"just two
o'clock, the afternoon of the twentieth."

Within him, Rawson felt a dull resentment. He was being denied even
this last trifling solace. "You're wrong," he said sharply. "You
slipped up on your count."

"It doesn't make any real difference," Smithy said. But Rawson went
on:

"We left the inner world on the nineteenth. At noon on the twentieth
Gor was to cut loose the flame-throwers, melt a hole in the floor of
the ocean. But it didn't work. I had hoped I could wipe out the
mole-men, turn a solid stream of water down a shaft for over six
hundred miles. It would have gone through the Zone of Fire, come
flooding up into the mole-men world and spread out all over down deep
where it's hot. It would have hit the Lake of Fire--all that!"

"I don't know what you are talking about, Dean." Smithy's voice was
intentionally soothing; he knew Rawson was talking wildly. "But I know
I am right on the time. We've kept track of it every hour since--"

Rawson's talk had sounded like insanity in Smithy's ears. He would
have gone on--he didn't want to see Dean Rawson go out like that--but
now he stopped. The rock was quivering beneath his feet.

And now Rawson, with a wild wordless cry, threw himself toward the
flame-thrower on the floor. His voice rose to what was almost a
scream. "It's worked!" he shouted in a delirium of joy. "It's the end
of the brutes!"

* * * * *

Then, in words which the others could not comprehend but