“Actually, the surface is so irregular that we might be able to climb just using our hands. But we won’t!”
By then Alice had climbed the rope up to the projection on which Burton stood. Burton kissed her and went on up after Nur.
Ten hours later, the entire group sat on top of the cliff. After they’d recovered, they walked on looking for a place to shelter them from the wind. They found none until they had traversed at least three miles. Here they came, as Joe said they would, to the base of another cliff. To their left The River, some miles away now, roared as it hurtled over the lip of the falls.
Joe played the beam of his lamp along the rock. ‘
“Damme! If I did go up along the right side of The River, then ve’re thcrewed. The tunnel ith on that thide, and ve can’t get across The River!”
“If the Ethicals found X’s rope and removed it, then they must have found the tunnel,” Burton said.
They were too tired to search for the fissure which would be the gate to the tunnel. They walked along until they came to an overhang. Joe used some of his few remaining sticks to make a small fire, and they ate supper. The fire went out quickly. They piled heavy cloths on the rock floor and more over them and slept while The River thundered.
In the morning, while they were eating dried fish, pemmican, and bread, Nur said, “As Dick’s pointed out, X wouldn’t know which side his recruits would come up. So he must have left two ropes. Therefore, he must have made two tunnels. We should find one on this side.”
Burton opened his mouth to say that that tunnel, if it existed, would also have been plugged. Nur held up his hand to forestall him.
“Yes, I know. But if the plug is thin, we can locate it, and we have the tools to dig through it.”
One search party hadn’t gone more than twenty feet from the camp when it found the plug. It was a few feet inside a fissure broad enough for even Joe to enter.
Great heat had been applied to melt the round plug into the surrounding quartz.
“Hot dog!” Joe said. “Thimmety tham! Maybe ve got a chanthe after all!”
“Perhaps,” de Marbot said. “But what if the entire tunnel is plugged up?”
“Then we try the corner. If X was smart enough, he1 would’ve figured out that the tunnels might be found. So he would have arranged for a climbable angle here just as he did at the other place.”
Burton scanned the face of the cliff while his lamp poked a bright hole through the fog. Ten feet from the base, the rock was wrinkled and fissured. But it abruptly became as smooth as a mirror from there to as far as he could see.
Joe swung his hammer against the plug. Burton, his ear close to the rock, said, “It’s hollow!”
“Jutht great,” Joe said. He removed several tungsten-steel alloy chisels from his backpack and began hammering. When he’d cut out enough of the quartz to make six holes, he and Burton inserted plastic explosive into them. Burton would have liked to daub clay over the plastic, but there wasn’t any.
He stuck the ends of wires into the plastic and retreated along the face of the cliff, rolling out the wires. When the group was far enough away, he pressed one wire of his small battery against another. The explosions deafened them, and pieces of quartz flew out.
“Veil,” Joe said, “at least my burden’ll be lighter now. I von’t have to carry thothe canth of plathtik and the battery anymore. That’th the end of them.”
They went back into the fissure. Burton shot his light across it. The holes made by Joe had been enlarged. Several of them were big enough for him to see the tunnel beyond it.
He said, “We’ve got about twelve hours more work, Joe.”
“Oh, thyit! Veil, here goeth nothing.”
Shortly after breakfast, the titanthrop hacked out the last piece of rock, and the plug fell out.