"I forgot to resign," he says, and I pull a disintegrator Betsy on him and tell him to hop back to the controls.
"Awright, we have computed the masses of fuel we need. Stand by for the takeoff—er, takedown. Eight seconds. Seven—Six—Five—Four—"
"I know now my mother raised one idiot," Zahooli says.
"Three seconds—two seconds—one second!" I go on. "Awright, unload the pile in one and three tubes! Then when we have gone about five hundred miles, give us the radium push."
Whir-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-o-o-om! The Mole shudders like a citizen looking at his income tax bite and then starts boring. There is a big bright light all around us, changing color every second, then there is a sound like all the pneumatomic drills in all the universe is biting through a thousand four-inch layers of titanium plate. And with it is a rumble of thunder from all the electric storms since the snake bit Cleopatra. In less than five seconds we turn on the oxygen just in case, and I jump to the instrument panel and look at the arrow on a dial.
"Hey," I yell, "we are makin' a thousand miles per hour through the ground!"
"Don't look through the ports," Wurpz says. "In passin' I saw an angleworm three times the size of a firehose, and a beetle big enough to saddle."
"Git into the compression chamber quick," I says to him. "You are gettin' hallucinations."
I turn on the air conditioning as it gets as humid in the Mole as in the Amazon jungle during the dog days. The boring inner spaceship starts screeching like a banshee.
I look at the instrument panel again and see we are close to being seven thousand miles down, and all at once the gauges show we are out of energy. I look out the port and see a fish staring in at me, and a crab with eyes like two poached eggs swimming in ketchup.