Digby hailed him from the mower. "Should I try cutting a path through 'em?"
"How can you, when they die before your blade turns, and grow up before it can turn again? They'll bounce you to butter and shake the mower to bits."
"But we got to do something!"
By now the men on the detectors and ore-cars had caught up with the gwips, and the men on foot were within hailing distance.
"We're licked," Horseface mourned. "Ain't nothing we can do, except try the other end of the zips—and that's miles away. We're finished."
But they weren't. Elmer sneezed, exclaimed, "Yuk, yuk!" and jabbed his bill to indicate the cliffs.
Horseface sniffed. "Smells like rock-dust. If I didn't know better, I'd say somebody's been boring through the rock—hey! Trix and Goreck were riding on the borer! The zips must have cut them off the road like us! Come on, boys, look for the hole they made—boring a tunnel to cut past the zips!"
He didn't need to nudge Elmer. The gwip leaped toward the rocks, found the hole and slowed to a crouching walk into it. The passage was eight feet in diameter and reeking of blasted rock. After about a hundred yards it emerged into daylight but encountered zips en masse and so returned inward for several hundred yards more.
"That means Goreck wasted a lot of time tunneling," Horseface said happily. "Maybe we ain't so terrible far behind after all."
There was a shriek from the rear, and he reined Elmer. "What's that?"