“All set, Morrie?”
“All set. I make one pass to get my bearings and locate the mouth of their hideaway. Then I come back and give `em the works.”
“Right. Try not to hit their rocket ship, if you can. it would be nice to go home. Blast off! Achtung! Aufstieg!”
The avengers raised ground.
“How is it going?” Cargraves shouted a few moments later. “Okay!” Morrie answered, raising his voice to cut through the roar. “I could fly her down a chimney. There’s the hill ahead, I think — there!”
The silvery shape of the Wotan near the hill they were shooting towards put a stop to any doubts. It appeared to be a natural upthrust of rock, quite different from the craters, and lay by itself a few miles out in one of the ‘seas’.
They were past it and Morrie was turning, blasting heavily to kill his momentum, and pressing them hard into their seats. Art fought to steady the revolver without firing it.
Morrie was headed back on his bombing run, coming in high for his dive. Cargraves wondered if Morrie had actually seen the air lock of the underground base; he himself had had no glimpse of it.
There was no time left to wonder. Morrie was diving; they were crushed against the pads as he fought a moment later to recover from the dive, kicking her up and blasting. They hung for a second and Cargraves thought that Morrie had played it too fine in his anxiety to get in a perfect shot; he braced himself for the crash.
Then they were up. When he had altitude, Morris kicked her over again, letting his jet die. They dropped, view port down, with the ground staring at them.
They could see the splash of dust and sand still rising. Suddenly there was a whoosh from the middle of it, a mighty blast of air, bits of debris, and more sand. It cleared at once in the vacuum of that plain, and they saw the open wound, a black hole leading downward.
He had blown out the air lock with a bull’s-eye.
Morrie put her down to Cargraves’ plan, behind the Wotan and well away from the hole. “Okay, Doc!”
“Good. Now let’s run over the plan — I don’t want any slipup. Ross comes with me. You and Art stay with the jeep. We will look over the Wotan first, then scout out the base. If we are gone longer than thirty minutes, you must assume that we are dead or captured. No matter what happens, under no circumstances whatever are you to leave this rocket. If any one comes toward you, blast off. Don’t even let us come near you unless we are by ourselves. Blast off. You’ve got one more bomb — you know what to do with it.”
Morrie nodded. “Bomb the Wotan. I hate to do that.” He stared wistfully at the big ship, their one chain to the earth.
“But you’ve got to. You and Art have got to run for it, then, and get back to the Dog House and hole up. It’ll be your business, Art, to manage somehow or other to throw together a set that can get a message back to earth. That’s your only business, both of you. Under no circumstances are you to come back here looking for Ross and me. If you stay holed up, they may not find you for weeks — and that will give you your chance, the earth’s chance. Agreed?”
Morrie hesitated. “Suppose we get a message through to earth. How about it then?”
Cargraves thought for a moment, then replied, “We can’t stand here jawing — there’s work to be done. If you get a message through with a reply that makes quite clear that they believe you and are getting busy, then you are on your own. But I advise you not to take any long chances. If we aren’t back here in thirty minutes, you probably can’t help us.” He paused for a moment and decided to add one more thing — the boy’s personal loyalty had made him doubtful about one point. “You know, don’t you, that when it comes to dropping that bomb, if you do, you must drop it where it has to go, even if Ross and I are standing on your target?”