He tried in vain to project his thoughts through those miles of hard rocks to see the mysterious ways he was exploring. He guessed in confusion, shook his head slowly, and spoke sharply.

"Get out!" he ordered. "We have indeed entered a hot spot, although I can't just figure out what it is. But we will tame it, Smith. Drill down and clean up. Then we poke there and get all the answers."

It takes five days to put down the big drill with a new drill to replace the gold drills that are too dirty to be used. Hook the tubular parts one hundred feet in length together, and then put them down one by one. Each joint also means the connection of the air pipe. The air mixes with the water in the jacket and must foam through the center core to bring the powdery rock to the ground.

Five days, then an hour of boredom, and another five days. Before Li Badi hoped to get an answer, he withdrew from the exercise. But he found it at the decapitation of the big drill, and the head melted completely. Except for the heat of the electric stove, the large stem that all other materials can resist is cut like a tallow candle in the oxyacetylene flame.

He is Dean Lee's "office", with a flat shed with a yellow roof on it, and a second canopy roof above it, which extends like a wooden umbrella. When the sun goes straight overhead, the asphalt on the fir slab explodes almost audibly, but under their shelter, the heat is easier to bear.

On the open window, the breeze was blowing, and Li Huai was sitting quietly in the camp. His face was as copper-colored as Apache's, motionless. His eyes fixed on the derrick in the distance and the blasting pile of the big drill hanging above the concrete floor.

But the man's eyes did not consciously record the details of that scene. He couldn't see derricks or heat waves that made steel look like alive; he looked at things in the distance, things in the distance, vague and mysterious things looming for miles underground.

"Hot," he said finally, as if speaking in a dream. "High temperature, great temperature, but I can't recognize it; I can't see it!"

The young, shoulder-width man, with his khaki shirt splayed around his neck, exposing his tanned face on his chest, walked back and forth in the hot room.

"Yes?" His tone was agitated. "There is a lot of heat-enough heat to melt this superalloy shaft! Want to know what the devil is the heat? What made me understand is: the shaft is blocked again. Now, what? It's kind of..."

During the eruption, his face did not move muscles. His gaze was still fixed on the distant place, but he tried to close it in his mind, enough to be seen to understand the mystery that should be so simple.

"Lava wouldn't do this!" he said softly. "Unless there is pressure, no molten stone will melt the alloy, otherwise it will not melt. Our shaft did not explode. But we were immersed in gold; we inserted the drill directly into it. But what did we go next time? What's up?"

He pounced quickly and violently at Smith who was facing him from the center of the room. He pointed a finger at him, like a pistol, and his words sounded as clearly as they came from a gun:

"You put down that tube-that sleeve! How did it burn? Is the end scattered, icy metal drops? Does it look like an old-fashioned molasses stick that has melted?"

"Why, no," Smith said. "It didn't drip anything; it was cut clean."

"Cut!" Li Huai almost shouted the word. "You are talking about Smith. So is the shaft of the drill. If you see a piece of this co-financialization, you will know that it is as sticky as a pot of old paint. Smith was cut! Dipped into the melting melt. The gold took us off track; we were thinking about crashing the drill bit into a pile of lava. But we did not. It was cut off by a flame explosion hotter than lava, and the melted rock looked cold!"

"That helps us a lot, doesn't it?" Smith asked sarcastically, "When the flame melts, the end of the shaft is as fast as it opens?"

Dean Lee's slender, muscular hands grabbed Smith's broad shoulders and threw the young man away. "Cheer up," told him. "We were licked. Why didn't it blow out like noon? It's beyond my knowledge; but the heat is there! We won!"

"But-" Smith started. Use the power his assistant hasn't guessed to turn him toward the door.

"Soup!" he ordered. "Break the nitroglycerin, Smith. Let the Swede at work, Hansen; he is a shooter. He knows his stuff. We will blow the lower end of the shaft so it never closes!"

Anson knew and did it. However, when the open mouth of the twenty-inch hole made a faint echo, he shook his head in confusion and saw Li Badi's eyes, and then the faint air rushed toward his face.

Hansen said: "Like a cannon, she should be gone." "She's going!"

"It's open below," Li Badi said briefly. "This is different from the kind of well you photographed."

He said to Reilly, who was waiting, "Tie a rope to that cable and put it down. See what you can learn about this hole."

The ten-mile cable hissed hoarsely down the hoarse throat again. Then it slowed down.

Riley said: "Seven out of fifty-two, she is open. Seven out of twenty-five points! Seventy-five points, and we are at the lowest point!"

"Go up," Li Badi ordered, "if there is a spin dryer available, it may become scrap."

But the strange thing is that this is not the case. It was suspended from a suspended rotating cable until Reilly stepped in to check its movement.

There is a check valve at the bottom-a door that opens inward to fetch water and gravel when needed. Riley ignored the heat that might be generated by the spinning dryer and reached for it with his bare hands. He pulled them back, and held them in front of him-a hundred staring eyes saw something that had never been seen before: red liquid dripping slowly from the end of the barreling machine. The same water drop fell from Riley's hand, who had touched that end.

"Blood!" The word came from the foreman's throat, and he exclaimed. It echoed quietly among the crew watching. The creak of trucks came from the hot sand in the distance, and the trucks transported a lot of cement and steel for the buildings. Its driver is singing:

"Hear me out:

You are struggling in hell

And bragging is too damn,

Because when you go to hell, you will find

The devil there has to pay! "

But Li Bai looked into Smith's eyes blankly, and only said, "It's cold, it's the cold of the client. There is no heat there."

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