Could it be believed that at last they had won nineteen hours of toil in their race to finish the job here, before Fane managed to kill them? They had fed huge quantities of familiar powder of uranium into the fuel blowers. They had set cables and grids into place. And still they continued to line things up, getting ready. During all this time there was only ominous, intermittent thudding, as from far away.
"Fane's gathering his robot forces," Finden said anxiously. "And now he can at least tear at the vents of the tubes, up above."
"I hope it won't matter," Rick answered.
They couldn't search out and understand everything that was here. The instruments that might have warned, or the weapons that might have defended them. But optimism came at last. Though it wavered some when they heard a faint grinding sound which seemed deep beyond the walls, but came closer. They hurried to hook up the last cable.
The thing that exploded must have been a mole-torpedo that drilled through rock and steel as fast as a man can walk. The walls of this vault did not break fully even under the Titanic force that hit them from outside. They bulged inward. A great section of the roof came down. Two of those huge jets were smashed. The whole chamber seemed to swing like a pendulum. A cable snapped in a flash of electric fire that consumed it.
Rick Mills hardly knew where he was now. He was too stunned. Lattimer was moveless beside him on the floor. Finden crawled on his elbows. Blood dribbled from his mouth. Rick had closed the main switch but the great apparatus here was not functioning. Maybe he dreamed it, but Rick was sure he heard Fane's bitter laugh.
"Just a few minutes more, Mills," he said. "Smart boy! We're all terribly smart, aren't we? We of the Survey Service. Sleep without dreams, Mills! Eternal sleep for fools like you and me!"
This was like the last act with the Martians and Xians. Almost a repetition. These were tortured seconds on which hung the future of Mercury as a Terran colony. Or was that already and badly decided? Must frozen silence and blazing heat continue, here? How many centuries must pass before Terrans would attempt to do for Mercury what the Martians had attempted? Or would they do so, ever? Silence. Silence and death would close in. Fane's robots were certainly aiming more mole-torpedoes.
It must not happen like that. Not again. Out of this thought in Rick's mind, an idea was squeezed. It challenged fate. It gave him the muscle power to arise. He staggered forward and grasped in his metal hands the fire-spitting end of the broken cable. The lining of the gloves was an insulation. He propped himself up with his steel-shod boot on the terminal that the cable was meant to reach. Heat oozed around him as the metal skin of his space suit took the cable's place as an electrical conductor.
Hell broke loose. Rick Mills and his companions felt a thunderous vibration, as of a million space ships blasting off, as all but two of those giant jet-tubes roared into life. Rick had propped himself well. Even when consciousness left him he maintained the electrical contact. Other mole-torpedoes, exploding, shook the chamber and bulged its walls. But the constructive fury that had started there, went on. It wasn't till half an hour later that those great tubes burned out.