There was biting cold upon Chip Warren's limbs and body as he cast the limp shell of his bulger behind him. But as he neared the cavern's mouth, the cold grew less intense. Less intense! That in itself was final, convincing proof he had been right! He was barely two yards from the writhing gouts of flame now. Were that the true fire it appeared to be, its searing blasts would already be parching his skin to black flakes—
But it was not! It was merely—pleasantly warm!
"I was right!" he cried exultantly. "Syd ... Padre! Come on in!" His voice was almost hysterical with relief as he stepped gingerly over the prostrate bodies of those who had gone into the fiery furnace garbed in suits of metallic substance. "Come on in—the fire's fine!"
And together the three new Children of Israel walked unharmed into the fiery furnace of Titania....
The corridors led, as the Titanian chieftain said, downward, winding, through the hill to the vale below, where rested Amborg's navigable life-skiff. The small cruiser in which they were to fly to neighboring Uranus, there find aid and eager ears into which to pour their story.
And it did not surprise Chip Warren in the least to discover, about halfway down the flickering tunnel, a ledge of brightly gleaming ore that was resilient to the touch but broke the keen edge of the knife with which Chip attempted to scratch it.
"Ekalastron!" he cried. "See—a whole mountain of it! Not just a mine; a mountain! Enough to fill Man's needs for centuries!"
Syd's eyes, behind the quartzite globe, were big as saucers. He gulped, "C-chip—are you sure we're alive? Do you think maybe we died back there in the first cave, maybe? And this is all some wild illusion—?"
"It is not illusion," proclaimed Salvation serenely. "I understand, now, what Chip divined in time to save us from a dreadful fate." And he looked at the young man affectionately. "Radiation was what killed the others, my boy?"