It slipped and slid, jouncing him out of the seat time after time, banging his head on the top, throwing him almost over on his face. It was speed now that counted, speed more than anything else, and he urged the car forward recklessly. A dismal red line was forming on the horizon; dawn was not far away, but the light only confused the picture before him as the half-track hurtled up the grade and over the rim, leaving the Earth ship far behind. Tuck hung on for dear life, praying that the machine would stay upright, and not run into any of the treacherous gullies and crevices that lay on either side.
The Snooper was in working order. If he could get to the colony and get David, they could go for the little ship. He had no more idea than the man in the moon what they would be looking for—but something existed, the Big Secret was somewhere—and if it existed, it could be found—
A squeal of jet engines cut through to his ears, and he braked down the half-track, staring. Like a streak, he saw the little jet swoop down over him, arc up high, and loop over to come in again. Tuck’s heart skipped a beat. David had had the same idea! He slowed the ’track to a stop, threw open the hood, and crawled out, running down the grade to the place where the Snooper had jetted in.
David waved, and moved aside in the cockpit, motioning Tuck in beside him. “I thought I was going to have to storm the ship single-handed to get you out,” he exclaimed. “Your dad really fixed things! I had to sneak out—sent the air-lock guard on a wild-goose chase and copped his half-track to get out to the Snooper—”
“But why?”
“I’ve been thinking, Dad got control of things in the meeting finally—but only because of the fight with the Colonel.” He grinned. “Cortell’s boys were having trouble explaining why they would be fighting if they were really in cahoots. But there’s only one thing that will bring any sort of solution now.” He looked up at Tuck, his face eager. “It means selling out my dad and the colony, but it’s the only thing.”
“You mean the plan,” Tuck said eagerly.
“Exactly. Wherever it is, we’ve got to find it, and spring it wide-open to everybody. If that won’t get dad and the Colonel together, nothing will.”
Tuck nodded. “It will. It can’t help but do it. But where do we start?”
David chewed his lip for a moment. “Wherever it is, it’s connected with the colony,” he said. “I mean by tunnel. I don’t have any idea where. The easiest thing would be to go in through the colony, but I’m afraid that’s out. Cortell would have the tunnel guarded, whichever one it was—”
Tuck blinked. “That would tip us off to the right one—”
“If we ever did find it. But there may be another way in.”
“From the outside?”
“Right. If it’s a vault, or a battle station, it’s big—it would have to be to take five hundred people. There are lots of abandoned shafts that might let us in to the mines. And once inside, we’ll have to make use of every break we can.” He snapped on the primer switch of the jet. “Hang on, boy,” he said softly. “We’ve got a lot of hunting to do, and we haven’t got much time.”
Tuck sat back, hardly able to breathe, the excited whine of the engines driving all thoughts out of his mind. The little scooter jerked, bumped a time or two, and then suddenly they were swooping out into the clear, thin atmosphere, rising higher and higher, until they could see the edge of the morning sun. Time was passing even now, precious minutes that could mean success or failure. With time closing in on them, it seemed an almost impossible chance—
But somewhere below them the planet held a secret, a secret that had been kept inviolate for a hundred years. And in a few short hours, somehow, the secret had to be found—
Chapter 13
The Secret of the Tunnel
The quest seemed hopeless from the start. Tuck had I never been higher above the surface of Titan than I the observation room of the Earth ship; he had I never realized the vastness of the place. But now, as the Snooper skimmed higher and higher into the sun the realization drove home, and he stared bleakly down at the wild panorama spread out beneath them.
There was no break in the barren wildness. A few miles to the right he could see the oval dome of the colony, reflecting the early morning light, gleaming like a dull jewel as the lights within it blinked off one by one. But the colony lay totally isolated by miles and miles of endless rock. Even as they rose, the surface lost its detail and took on a different sort of wildness. It was a mammoth chunk of barren rock—
And somewhere down there five hundred people had carved out a tiny foothold, and from it were threatening the entire Solar System!
David Torm glanced down for an instant. “Not very pretty, eh?”
“It looks horrible. I don t see how we could ever find anything.”
David chuckled. “Don’t give up yet.” He tipped the nose of the little ship down again, and curved in toward the colony. “We can’t see anything at all up this high—I just wanted to give you a picture of the surface.” He pointed off toward the rising sun. “The first thing I want to do is to go down there close to the surface and look for a fault I saw a couple of months ago. There was a big clordelkus there—the nasty things like oxygen, for dessert, I guess and he’d sucked up enough stone to start a cave-in over the tunnel. I mapped it, and didn’t pay too much attention to it, but it might get us inside the tunnels. If we spot that, so we know we can get in, well start circling the colony in widening circles. That way we should spot anything that looks suspicious.”
“And if we don’t see anything?”
“Then we’ll try hunting from the inside.” The ship was quite low now, sweeping over the jagged land in a beeline for the sun. David handed Tuck a pair of binoculars. “I’ll make several runs of about five miles over the area—see if you can spot anything.”
“What am I looking for, exactly?”
“A deep cut.”
Tuck snorted. “The whole surface is full of deep cuts.”
“Sure, I know—but this will be sandbagged up, and you should be able to see the bags.” The ship cut even lower, and Tuck started scanning the ground as it whizzed by, looking for anything which might be an artificial cut. The ship reached the end of the run, made a quarter-mile arc, and sped back. The high rocky cliffs spun by them crazily; sometimes the ship jerked up abruptly, sometimes it nearly skidded on the ground, sending up whirlwinds of snow in its wake. Still Tuck saw nothing. He kept gripping at the instrument panel as the ship lurched and dropped, but there was just nothing to see.
“You do a good job of flying,” he said, as they skimmed along one of the runs.
“Lots of practice. I’d hoped to get into rocketry, and I learned everything I could from dad’s books—but it took a lot of flying hours, too.” The leader’s son looked over at Tuck. “I’m still going to get into rocketry,” he said. “Somehow, I’ll get a rocket built. We’re in a perfect place to base some real exploratory work here—study Saturn and her moons, all of them.” His eyes took a wistful light. “But that’s just the start. Someday, maybe even while I’m alive, somebody is going to break the space barrier. The real space barrier—”
Tuck’s eyes glowed. “You mean discover an interstellar drive?”
David nodded. “Good old Sol is just one star. There are millions of them waiting for us. When they build the first star-ship—that’s where I want to be.” He spun the scooter around for another run, then snorted in disgust. “This is getting us nowhere. Let’s take the colony as a hub and start circling.”