The nuclear explosion, deep underground, had gone off.
"Now what?" Rick wondered.
Hartson Brant said quietly, "We may have to wait a while."
"That explosion sure didn't look like the pictures I've seen of shots in Nevada," Rick told him.
"No, Rick. This was too far underground. They've had those in Nevada, too, but the pictures don't get much publicity because they're not spectacular."
Far below, where the end of the big hole had been, the huge chamber blown by the atomic explosion was white-hot with trapped heat and radioactivity. Below the chamber the earth was shattered, with myriad tiny cracks reaching far down.
Some cracks reached the white-hot magma. Instantly the magma exploited the new weakness, pressure was released until ...
"Look!" Even in the plane Scotty's yell was loud.
Rick turned in time to see the side of El Viejo blow off in an explosion that made ten kilotons of fission seem puny indeed. For an instant he saw thousands of tons of white-hot lava rise into the air, then it fell into the sea. Instantly steam clouds blanketed the area, but the steam was mixed with traces of red and gray from the rock carried upward.
A great boulder, weighing many tons, was hurled high in the air to fall into the steam cloud. The great rift in the volcano widened, and the molten lava was visible until steam rose again.