countryside to the entrance to a cave guarded by some extra tall Subterrors. Hitler the Third leads us into the spelunker's nightmare and we finally come to a big metal door about eighty feet long and twenty feet high.

Agrodyte pushes a button and the steel door lifts. Then we walk up a flight of steps to the top of a dam and take a gander at a fleet of submarines that makes Earthian pig-boats look like they belonged in antique shops.

"We will take you for a ride in one," the dictator of Subterro says. "After that I will turn you over to the executioner."

"We need lawyers," Wurpz says.

We cross a thin gangplank and enter the sub. The lights in it are indirect and are purplish green. Hitler Number Three shows us the telepathic machine, the radar, and the viso-screen that pictures everything going on upstairs on Earth, and on Mars, Jupiter and all other planets. There are four other beetleheads on the sub and they carry disintegrators.

"These Subterro U-boats," our genial host brags, "can go as fast in reverse as full speed ahead, as the situation warrants. They are alive with guided missiles no larger than this flashlight I have here, but one would blow up your Metropolita and leave hardly an ash."

He looks at me, and then goes on: "We will proceed to the lock that will raise us to the underground river and cruise along its course for a few hundred miles. It is the treat I should accord such distinguished visitors from the outside of Earth, nein?"

The skipper of the Subterro sub pulls a switch and there is a noise like three contented cats purring. The metal fish slides along the surface of the underground lake and comes to a hole in a big rock ledge.

We see all this through a monitor which registers the scenery outside the sub within a radius of three miles. The sub slides into the side of the rock, and then is lifted up to the underground river that winds and winds upward like a corkscrew to the outlet under Brazil. Every once in a while a blast of air that smells like a dentist's office goes through the sub from bow to stern and I ask why.

"There is such terrific potency to the power we use from our puranium," Hitler Number Three says, "that we purify the air every few seconds with formula XYB and Three-fifth. The basis of the gas is galena."

I nudge Wurpz and Zahooli as the Neofeuhrer goes over to converse with his crew. "It is our big chance," I whisper. "You watch how they run this tub for the next few minutes. Then when I cough three times you be ready. I do not know how much powder it will take to knock off the big bug as he is half human. Once I blow this insect powder at the same time as the purifying blast is to take place, you two be ready to jump Agrodyte. I noticed that a small purple light flashes on over the monitor just before that stuff turns loose. It is a warning so the beetleheads can take deep breaths."

"Sep," D'Ambrosia Zahooli says. "I take back all the insults of the past five hours. Shake."

"I am doin' that already," I says. "We have to work fast while we are in the underground river."

We wait. The Neofeuhrer comes walking back to where we are sitting. The purple light flashes on, and I count to three. Just as the blast of air loaded with XYB plus cuts loose I throw all the bug powder left in the box into the current. Hitler Number Three breathes in a big gob of it and buckles a little at the knees.

"Grab him!" I screech. "Don't let him yank that disintegrator loose. Hit him with anything you see, pals!"

I see the other beetleheads collapse like they had been hit with bulldozers and I know now that insecticide is more dangerous in Subterro than all the radioactivity harnessed up on six planets.

Agrodyte Hitler, however, has some moxey left in him as he has two of his hands around Wurpz's throat, the third around Zahooli's leg and is reaching for a ray Betsy with his fourth. He grabs the disintegrator just as I belt him over his ugly noggin with a wrench about two feet long and which was