"What are you doing?" demanded the mate, hefting the disc of metal.
"This wall sounds hollow. Here goes!" He had driven the machine deep in, and stepping back, pulled the handle marked "Split." There was a sudden rending clang; a crash and a six-foot section of the wall fell inwards. The two men stared into the hole it had left, heedless of the fact that the other members of the excavating crew were crowding up behind them.
They were looking into a low square room, perhaps twenty feet across. At the far side was a doorway, and in the doorway stood a man!
To be sure he was such a man as none of them had ever before seen. He was not over four and a half feet tall, yet with arms as long as an earthling's hanging down below his knees, tremendously broad shoulders, and a head that seemed permanently pushed forward and downward above them. Below that head the creature was wrapped from neck to toe in some shimmering blue material with a metallic luster, banded around the arms and legs with red metal.
As they gazed in astonishment, the man took two steps forward, his head bobbing on his neck at each step, opened his lips, and uttered "Wahwahroo!" in a voice thick with gutturals.
Adam glanced around at his own men, then once more at the Plutonian dwarf, whose face, as far as he could judge, bore an expression of intense interest rather than of fear or anger. The remark, he judged, would be a greeting.
"Wahwahroo!" he replied amiably, but the Plutonian continued to stare in a manner that indicated Adam's first lesson in this unknown tongue was far from a success.
"Stand by," he remarked to the crew. "I'm going in and try to talk to this bird. May be trouble." Catching the sides of the split in the wall, he jumped down in a small cascade of pebbles that rang on the floor below in a manner which assured him this also was metal.
"I don't understand what you're saying, old man," he remarked to the Plutonian, who had remained standing in the doorway, and touching a finger to lips and ears to emphasize the point. "I don't understand, but maybe you'll be able to get it from a picture."