Into the big exhaust tube he dove, crawling through it as though it had been a drain pipe.
"Take the rocks as I pass them back," he ordered. Then, chuckling grimly, "Makes you feel like Dante's tunneling under the Chateau D'If. Here comes a big one!" He shoved a chunk of meteor back along the tube.
The heap of stones in the old engine room had grown large when Haller saw the light ahead. A pale trickle of illumination, it filtered through the loose rocks. Haller wormed his way nearer, peered through the opening ... and his face went gray.
A cave, its brilliant lights dimming the glow of luminous bodies, lay before them. Well furnished from looted ships, auxiliary engines from some plundered liner, run by rocket fuel, supplied electricity to power the great arc lights that hung from the ceiling. One entire end of the room was an Aladdin's cave of treasures. Bars of gold, from the mines of Saturn, stacked in towering heaps ... leaden chests of radium, uranium, polonium, a nation's ransom of the stuff for which men died in the great fields of Venus ... and jewels, huge Martian rubies, big as pigeon's eggs, flame-colored karnites of Io, even the rare crystolex that collects, absorbs, light, until it gives off a diffused pink aura. Loot of a hundred vessels that had met their doom on this Island of Lost Spaceships, utterly worthless on the barren asteroid, yet hoarded because of the legend that they were prized on other worlds, because lure of treasure lingered in the savage minds of the sub-men.
Incalculable as was this treasure, Haller gave it but a passing glance. His gaze was fixed on the glowing, hideous figures grouped about the cave. With them were Carlson, Seltzsky, Wallace, and Kindt ... renegades, joining these inhuman brutes, fearing the consequences of refusal. In the center of the cave stood Orth, a gigantic, semi-simian figure, his herculean body shining like a cat's eye, and beside him stood Fay. All the joyousness, the gayety, the beauty, that had bedeviled Haller's memories, were gone from the girl. Pale, emaciated, worn by constant fear, she seemed scarcely aware of her surroundings, stood there like a sleepwalker.
"I claim the new woman!" Orth boomed, his guttural voice echoing through the cavern. "Does anyone dispute it?"
For a long moment there was silence, then a repulsive, embryonic creature, nearly as big as the leader, stepped forward.
"You have another woman!" he growled. "I claim this one!"
A roar went up from the sub-men. "Let strength decide! Fight!"