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that possible melting ice from above would not flood the lower part of the tunnel. But would the hatch open?
    The elevator ground to a halt. It was possible to peer over the edge and see the vestibule, tiny and dark, hundreds of feet below. After a few moments of inspection, Jim came upon a set of switches mounted in the tunnel wall. A hasty conference followed; then Ted Callison threw one of the switches.
    The hatch began to swing open.
    Creaking and protesting, the thick door retracted until it had withdrawn itself half the width of the tunnel. There was room for the elevator to continue upward. Callison started the elevator again. When they passed through the bulkhead, they found more switches, and one of them closed the hatch. They moved on toward the surface.
    Four hundred feet farther up, they came to another hatch, and passed it the same way. Then a third, and a fourth, and a fifth. More than half a mile separated them now from the entrance to New York City, and-hopefully-only half a mile separated them from the surface.
    This was the newest part of the tunnel, built only some two hundred years before. There were subtle changes in the workmanship. It became more slipshod, as though this part of the tunnel had been put in purely out of ritualistic reflex, rather than out of any real intention ever to use it for a mass exodus from the city.
    Upward. Upward. Past a sixth hatch, and a seventh.
    Then, as they drew near the eighth bulkhead, it became apparent that the next barrier was not a man-made one. A ceiling of ice blocked the shaft!
    They halted the elevator within fifteen feet of the ceiling. By climbing up on the sled and stretching, Jim could just barely touch the ice. He put his finger tips to it, and drew them away quickly, as though burned.
    "Cold!"
    "Yes," Dr. Barnes said, "and it'll be a lot colder for us if we're stuck in this tunnel forever. Break out the power torches!"
    Roy Veeder and Chet Farrington unpacked one of the knapsacks and produced four power torches, yard-long metal rods whose tiny fusion plasmas generated fierce heat. Dr. Barnes studied the ice plug thoughtfully.
    "We don't want to bring it down on our heads," he said. "Let's melt away the far side of it first and see what happens."
    Jim took one of the torches, his father another. Dr. Barnes hefted his torch and pressed the firing stud. A greenish glow of light bathed the surface of the ice plug, which melted away as though touched by a dragon's fiery breath. In the chill of the tunnel, the ice vapor condensed a moment later, and the men on the elevator heard a sound brand-new to them: that of rain, falling from a highly localized cloud and pelting down hundreds of feet to the closed metal hatch below them.
    "Listen to it!" Carl whispered. "Little drops of water falling! Like a hundred drums!"
    The power torch had bitten a gouge twenty feet high and six or seven feet across into the ice plug. It held firm.
    Dave Ellis said, "Someone left the city at the turn of the century. That fellow Stanton that Roy mentioned. We haven't found any bones along the way, so he must have come at least this far. Therefore the ice above us is less than a sixty-year accumulation."
    "How thick would that be, Dave?" Dr. Barnes asked.
    Ellis shook his head. "There are five or six feet of snow a year in these parts now. But the question isn't so much the amount that falls as the amount that doesn't melt. The year-to-year accumulation may be as much as a couple of feet-or it could be less."
    "So we may have fifty to a hundred feet of ice above us," Dr. Barnes said. "All right. Everybody pull up hoods. We're going to get wet."
    He gripped the power torch again, and this time aimed it straight overhead. The lambent glow of the torch turned the tunnel bright; another slice of ice disappeared; cold droplets of rain showered down on the roofless elevator. Jim shivered, but grinned all the same, and turned his face upward to the rain. He saw Ted Callison, hoodless, all but