hey were in another of the interminable caves, Rawson found when he opened the door. The jana was resting a few feet in from the edge of the shaft. Cautiously they got out, but even without their weight it had a slight negative buoyancy.
"Oro is pulling more strongly than Grah," Dean said, and smiled. Already the names seemed familiar to him.
The two lifted the jana and carried it back some twenty feet more before Rawson realized how unnecessary this was.
"We'll never be using it again," he said. "If I've guessed right it will stay here as long as the rocks; if not—but we'll never know the difference anyway."
He took the flame-thrower from the car in sudden haste. "Quick, dear," he told Loah. "God knows when the end will come. Quick, show me the way."
Loah knew every step of the route that took them on and upward through a maze of twisting passages, and Rawson marveled at her sense of direction. She flashed her light at times—the little bar of metal that had in one hollow end a substance which absorbed the light-energy of the Central Sun. Rawson knew how it worked. Even the lights in the mountain room were taken out from time to time and exposed to the sunlight that brought them back into glowing life. He had seen similar phenomena on earth. But, for the most part, Loah kept the little metal cap in place on the end of her torch, and they moved cautiously through the dark.
ounds of the Red Ones came to them at times. And once they hid in a narrow branching cleft that came abruptly to a dead end, while a force of red warriors marched hurriedly through the passage they had just left. Back in their hiding place Rawson stood tense and ready, with his weapon till the last of the enemy was gone.
Always he was frantic at thought of the time that was slipping past—until, at last, the narrow passage that they followed cut transversely through another large runway that glowed faintly from some distant light.