"Mr. White says climb!"
Turning, he tried to stagger up that rubble slope again.
For a few yards the footing held, and then the broken rock flowed again.
Falling, he twisted enough to keep the weight of his body off the child, but his breath was crushed out against a rolling boulder.
Savage pain numbed him, and his scratching feet and hands found only sliding stone, pouring down to carry them into the very path of the machine, which came thundering out of the dust, great blades lifted to crush them or fling them off the cliff.
He tried to push Jane Carter out of its path, but a chill of exhaustion had taken his last strength.
"Oh, thank you!" she breathed.
"Thank you, Mr. Lucky!"
She relaxed in his arms, and the red-and-black metal saurian veered again.
The great crushing tracks covered them with yellow dust, and went on by.
The roar of its overdriven gears was deafening - and then abruptly stilled.
Presently the mountain quivered faintly, and he heard a distance-muffled rumble from the talus-slope below.
"I just couldn't stop it." The child's voice still was dry with terror, but she stood up, brushing the dust from her worn yellow dress. " 'Cause there wasn't any black thing in it.
But Mr. Overstreet could see how it worked, like a different kind of humanoid, and Mr. White told Mr. Lucky how to turn it over the edge."
Forester was coming stiffly upright.
His hot body quivered weakly, and dust had caked the lacerations on his knees and feet with stiff red mud.
His twisted ankle throbbed, and his breath was a painful rasping.
Looking at him, the child whispered anxiously,
"Are you hurt - too much?"
He shook his head, too breathless for speech, and they came back, at a lifeless, plodding trot, from that narrow shelf to the door of the settling building, where Jane stopped.
"Mr. White says I must wait here," she said. "To keep the black machines away."
"For just five minutes!"
Forester whispered. "That's all the time I need."
Ahead, as he stumbled into the dusty gloom of the hall that ran back toward his old office, he could hear the ominous snap and groan of plaster and timber and steel yielding reluctantly to the weight of the tilted dome.
Knowing that vast mass of concrete might come down upon him the next instant, he ran breathlessly until a hail of plaster halted him.
Glancing back, as he waited for the dome to drop, he could see Jane Carter, veiled in the plaster dust, standing small and straight in the bright rectangle of the doorway, waving him urgently on.
He caught his breath and flung up his arm to shield his head and plunged blindly on into that rain of debris.
A sudden lurch of the groaning floor confused him, and then something struck his head a dazing blow, but he somehow staggered at last into the cloakroom beyond the office, grateful for doors that a man could open.
The sliding mirror was still in place, the dusty clothing still hanging innocently on the hooks, the rug still where he had left it.
The efficiency of the humanoids must be not quite unlimited, he thought, because he saw no sign that they had found the hidden elevator.
Another shudder of the walls moved him to push the mirror up and jab frantically at the "Down" button. Nothing happened, except another rumble of weakened masonry collapsing into that new excavation.
When the ceiling didn't come down on him, he tried the lights. There was no power, and a new alarm shook him.
The humanoids, operating everything on energy beamed from far Wing IV, had scrapped the old electrical power systems, but Project Thunderbolt had been equipped with its own separate plant, installed beneath the launching station in the lowest level of the vault.
The deadlights posed a distressing riddle now, but he tried to hold off his dismay.
Armstrong must have shut down the automatic plant, he told himself, for fear the humanoids would detect the vibration or exhaust gases from the twin motor-generators.
And the missiles, he promised himself grimly, would still be armed and set to detonate Wing IV.
Still there was no response when he jiggled the button again. He dropped to his throbbing knees, threw back the rug, and lifted the escape door.
Blackness lay deep and quiet below.
A breath of musty dampness came up about him, and a reek of fuel oil, for the power failure had also stopped the ventilators.
Awkwardly, he lowered himself through the elevator floor. His painful feet found the escape ladder, and he scrambled down into black silence.
That reek of spilled oil took his breath, and the metal rungs seemed like sharp blades to his lacerated feet, but he dropped himself frantically until the splash of cold water stopped him at the bottom of the shaft.
He left the ladder, stumbling in the wet dark, to grope toward the vault.
Something in the water bruised his bare toes, and he was sobbing with pain when he found the tunnel door.
Pushing it open, he scrambled laboriously out of the shaft and came panting to his feet in the narrow passage.
Darkness wrapped him. No light came when he found a switch, but he knew the vault from all the months and years that cruel duty had kept him here, and he padded confidently along the tunnel.
His mind could see the shop, the benches and tools and racks, and the launching tube beyond.
He knew where to reach those sleek and ready missiles.
He came out of the passage - and his bare foot went down into emptiness.
He toppled into vacant space, where the steel floor of the shop had been.
He felt his right leg double and snap, as solid rock and ice-cold water stopped him. Agony flickered in his brain, and then a dull, increasing pain seized his knee and thigh.