Slowly from walls and roof they collected the bits of long-dried fuel. A globule here, a flake there, it was painfully slow work. At the end of an hour they had a double handful of the brown crystals.
"Enough for a try, anyhow," Haller muttered. "Let's see!" He arranged the brown grains in a circle perhaps two feet in diameter. "Stand clear! Here goes!"
A match flickered in the darkness, described a short arc as Haller tossed it toward the circle. At once a ring of lurid fire flared up and a searing gust of heat swept through the metal tank. For only a moment it burned, then died away, leaving the floor plates around it a cherry red. Barger, staring, gave a cry of triumph.
"Worked!" he exclaimed. "Burned through!" He poured a portion of the phosphorescent water on the bronze, watched clouds of steam arise.
"Now the work starts!" Haller's grin was fierce. Kicking aside the metal disc that had been melted from the floor, he peered into the opening. Small stones, chunks of meteoric rock, lay beneath.
Largely ferrous, the stones were caught in the grip of the asteroid's magnetic core. It required the combined efforts of both men to lift them through the opening into their prison. At the end of half an hour they were drenched with sweat, and the hole beneath was only four feet deep.
"No ... no use!" Old Barger panted. "We can go on like this indefinitely. And if we try to tunnel sidewise it'll fall on us."
"But we ought to reach the big meteorites soon," Haller muttered. "They'd have settled lower and will have open spaces between them. And the sub-men have this place honeycombed with passages. If we hit one...."
"About as much chance as a snowball on Mercury," the quartermaster wheezed. "Hold the water jar near. I'm going to have a look."