Thelonius and Celeste ducked down behind the stoves as a pair of Nazi soldiers thundered through the kitchen. The instant they were gone, Thelonius popped up to rummage through the kitchen drawers. He softly hooted in delight when he found a tray of silverware, and he immediately tamped a pouch of black powder into his blunderbuss and crammed a handful of forks in after it.

“What are you doing?” Celeste demanded. “They’re going to be back any minute, and you’re stealing silverware?”

“I am not pilfering, madam. I am preparing a mighty weapon which will strike supernatural terror into our enemy’s hearts, just as it did before.”

“You fire that thing again inside this zeppelin and you could blow us all up, you know.”

Ignoring her, Thelonius jammed in a cloth plug to seal the blunderbuss charge, and his weapon was then fully ready for action.

As he scooped more silverware into his pocket for later use, he noticed a set of dials. Unable to restrain his curiosity, he gave one a twist. Nothing happened. He gave the others a twist, but he still noticed no effect. Then he saw that a red light blazed within a small chamber beneath the knob. When he opened the door to the small chamber, heat washed over his face. He could see no open flames, only two red bars glowing like miniature suns.

“Amazing,” Thelonius’s brows furrowed in concentration. “The Na-Tzee tribe must worship fire, and this must be a religious altar.”

“It’s an oven,” Celeste commented dryly.

Thelonius nodded. “I will remember that in your primitive language, the word ‘oven’ is synonymous with ‘altar.’ But there is no more time for this. What we need is a distraction…”

A devious idea struck the chimp-man’s brain, and his domed lips pulled back into a smile. Swiftly, he took out one of the gourds in which he carried his blasting powder. He popped it inside the oven and closed the door.

“What was that?” Celeste eyed the oven suspiciously. “Is this how you gorillas cook supper?”

“A distraction, my dear monkey-woman,” Thelonius grabbed her wrist and led her at a run out the door. The gourd would insulate the powder for a short time, but soon the heat of the oven would cause it to explode. Fire, shrapnel, noise—it would make an entirely satisfying distraction.

“By the way,” Thelonius asked as they dashed through the hallway. “Earlier you said I shouldn’t fire my blunderbuss inside this zeppelin. Why was that?”

“Well, because it’s a blimp,” Celeste said as if he would know what that meant. “It floats because it’s filled with an explosive gas, for crying out loud. If there’s a leak somewhere and you make so much as a spark—BOOM! The whole stinkin’ place could burn to a cinder and fall right outa the sky.”

Thelonius peered back over his shoulder in the direction of the kitchen, where his gunpowder-packed gourd was currently roasting in an oven.

“Oh dear,” he allowed.

Thelonius the chimp-man, quite bored of Professor Limefellow’s investigations of the ruins, scampered up the tether connecting the zeppelin to the central pylon. He had waited long enough to investigate this strange machine that hovered overhead like a dark storm cloud: it appeared as large as a hill, and yet it floated in the air as easily as a sprig of wood floated on a pond.

How could this be? He wondered. The chimpanzees of the surface world must be wise indeed to create such a vehicle for their human servants.

Thelonius slipped in through the anchor hatch and soon found his way into the cabins. The insides, he discovered, were ringed with tight passages and narrow doorways, the intersections of which were marked with the bent-cross insignia that he recognized as the symbol of the Na-Tzee tribe. Seeing it reminded him to be cautious, for Limefellow had warned that they were a brutal tribe.

It took Thelonius little time to work out the mechanism for operating the door latches, and he peeked into several rooms to inspect the soldiers’ living quarters. He found little of interest. The decorations were limited to little more than pictures of a thin, arrogant-looking human with a square mustache that sat on his upper lip like a small box. After marveling at the lifelike quality of the artwork—what ape-man could paint with such precision?—Thelonius realized that this must be the Na-Tzee leader. Picking up one of the flat glass picture cases, he wondered why they would enshrine a human being in this way rather than the ape-men who must certainly be in charge of their society. (Human beings govern themselves? Preposterous.) With closer inspection, Thelonius decided that he could see a certain chimpanzee-esque quality in this leader’s features. Possibly, he was some kind of vile half-breed. Thelonius set the picture down with a shudder of disgust.

Suddenly, a piercing shriek sounded over the ambient wind against the zeppelin’s hull. Thelonius un-slung his blunderbuss and crept out into the hall. Another shriek and a series of very angry words uttered in a female voice drew him forward through the tight hallways. The chimp-man moved cautiously and quietly, but he found he needn’t: only a skeleton crew remained aboard, evidently assuming that their elevation would protect them from all boarders. Foolish humans and their two-dimensional thinking.

Thelonius quickly tracked the sound through the hallways to the opposite end of the ship, where the Spartan bedrooms were replaced with Spartan storage closets. Two gray-suited men were attempting to push a human female into one of these closets. The female resisted furiously. In the struggle, one of them knocked her cap from her head and a cascade of golden hair rained down around her shoulders.

“Unhand that female!” Thelonius shouted boldly, raising his rifle to his shoulder. He considered giving them a warning shot to scare them off, but it would take too long to reload. Better a quiet threat than a loud bluff, he decided.

The two soldiers were startled at his voice. They turned to him in amazement, the female all but forgotten. Then there was a flash of steel, and each had a knife in hand.

If the molemen understood Scrumtumbler, then they ignored him. Instead, those clawed fingers forced him forward into the open chamber. It was brighter in here, with the bio-luminescent moss growing much more thickly along the cavern’s ceiling and walls.

Among the stalactites and stalagmites, the molemen went about their various chores. Some were digging new burrows, their arms blurring in the half-light. Others traveled the winding paths, seemingly indifferent to whether they walked on all fours or on their hind legs. A few lead trails of young ones behind them and a few more drove a flock of fat white grubs the size of wild turkeys. Most grouped together in twos and threes, standing so close that they almost touched snouts. It made them look as if they were sharing secrets.

His captors hauled him deeper into this cavern. The rough ceiling rose, first enough so that he could walk without stooping and then eventually high enough that he might have driven a double-decker bus through it, were it not for the stalagmites that blocked the way. The sounds of the moleman language were higher here, too, and the voices fell together now so that instead of a babble of different conversations, now they were unified in some kind of song or chant.

In the deepest part of this cavern, the stalactites and stalagmites had been cleared away, allowing Scrumtumbler to see what the chanting was about. Dozens of molemen bowed down around a huge, steel vehicle with a sharp cone for a nose.

“Hey, that’s my drilling machine!” Scrumtumbler shouted. The molemen’s chant faltered, and many of the worshippers shot fierce glares in the scientist’s direction.

“What are you fellows doing—worshipping it?” Scrumtumbler’s voice echoed off the walls. “I made that thing, you know. You should be worshipping me! I created your god, and my name is Scrumtumbler. It’s spelled S-C-R—oh, here, let me etch it on this stone altar—”

Scrumtumbler tried to pull away from his captors, but the clawed fingers clamped tightly around his arms. The chanting continued, though with a little more dissonance than there had been before the interruption.

One of the molemen broke away from the ritual to approach Scrumtumbler. Evidently, this was a shaman or a chieftain, because he wore an ungainly headdress made of bat wings and shiny stones, all cemented together with what appeared to be dried mud. Scrumtumbler made a desperate attempt to explain himself and his relationship to their new-found god, but the chieftain and his guards ignored him as they grunted and clicked to each other. A moment later, he was hauled forcibly away and thrown—quite unceremoniously—down a hole.

He crumpled as he landed and lay on the ground for a time, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark. They never did. There was simply no light by which to see. So, instead, he listened. Here, the sounds of the molemen were nothing more than a distant echo. Closer by, there was a trickling of water which signified some underground stream. And there was another sound, which at first he could not identify. It was a scraping, clawing sound—not rhythmic, but persistent, like an animal chewing on a bone. No, he thought as he listened more closely, not like one animal—like dozens of animals. Or hundreds. Maybe thousands of things gnawing all around him.

He was not alone.

Furry hands dragged Scrumtumbler down a lightless tunnel. He tried to resist, but he could not see his captors well enough even to understand what kind of creatures had seized him. But he could feel their long, curving claws clamped around his arms and his legs, holding him with a not-so-subtle threat of doing far worse if he got away.

Their path twisted and turned in the darkness. Scrumtumbler began to feel more than disoriented: he became positively dizzy, and began to lose even the notion of which way was up. The closed spaces around him made the sounds of their feet echo back at them from all directions, and underlying all that sound was an ever-present clicking and creaking that conjured images of bats and centipedes and nightmare things following him in the dark.

Suddenly, Scrumtumbler saw a blue-green splotch of light ahead. At first, he assumed that he must be hallucinating, yet as he drew nearer he could see that it remained fixed in its position, and even illuminated the next turn of the tunnel. As he drew nearer he realized it was the moss on the walls—it glowed with a dim, bioluminescent radiance that allowed him just enough light to make out shapes around him.

His captors were not animals, or at least not fully so. They were furry, with long, rat-like snouts, small black eyes, and rounded ears which at times pressed flat against their heads and at other times swiveled around as if nervously hunting for sounds. Yet for all their animalistic features, they walked upright, like men. Their thick arms ended in formidable claws that looked like they could rip tunnels through solid rock, yet there was also an opposable digit, a thumb, which undoubtedly indicated the ability to use tools and manipulate objects.

The clicking and the groaning increased and Scrumtumbler realized that this was not an ambient noise, but rather intentional sounds from the mouths of his captors. It was language. For the first time in his life, he wished that Professor Limefellow were nearby to translate.

They pulled him onward, past the end of the hallway where the tunnel opened into a large underground chamber braced by countless limestone pillars.

“Listen,” Scrumtumbler said breathlessly. “I doubt you fellows can understand me, but I’m still hopeful that you can pass along a very important message. If anyone else comes down here, you tell them this: I discovered you first.”