THE COSMIC COMPUTER

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in, we'll go straight to the top. Look for us in about an hour; it's
going to take time getting to the tunnel-mouth without being spotted
from above."

He lifted the jeep and started off; the lorry, and the scows and the
other lorry followed; the snooper and the bomb-robots went ahead like a
pack of hunting dogs. They went through great chambers, dark and silent
and bulking with dusty machines. Jacquemont explained that the prisoners
had never gotten into this section; the /Harriet Barne/ was a mile or so
to their right. Conn turned left, when the noise of firing from outside
became plainer. A foundry. A machine-shop which seemed to have been
abandoned in the middle of some rush job that hadn't really been
necessary. They came to a place even the snooper couldn't enter, choked
to the ceiling with dead vegetation, hydroponic seed-plants that had
been left untended to grow wild and die. They emerged into outside
light, in vast caves a mile high and open onto the crater, and looked
across the floor that had been leveled and vitrified to the other side,