One of the women who had fled from the cave was brought to me. White-faced, she twisted her hands together in anguish while she talked.
"We didn't know he'd done it, Captain Theusaman—I swear it!"
"Who?"
"Baiel—this morning at the Olympus. He just told us."
"But what? Speak up! Tell me!"
"He put on the automatic power in the control room, timed to energize the dorsal tubes at noon."
"No harm in that. The tubes are blown. The blast will simply send open flame soaring into the sky."
"There's forty hours' residue in the tank. Baiel thought the sight of the flame would terrify the tribe into obeying him. But he says the ship was overturned this morning, after he had set the dials; so the broken tubes are pointing down toward the base of the glacier."
I understood the woman's terror, then, and my own body tensed with cold fear. Instead of making a harmless display, the sun-hot energy, blasting through the naked dorsal tubes for the next forty hours, would be fed into the glacier and the ground beneath it. In half that time the liquefying flame could pierce the planetary crust and reach its molten core.
As I sprang to my feet the first shock stabbed into the frozen ground. The shattering explosion of the crumbling glacier rocked the air. In the distance a cloud of steam arose, blood red from the flames raging beneath it. In seconds the sun was blotted over with thick clouds. Hot rain began to fall.