Hold Up the Sky

FIRE IN THE EARTH

Father had reached the end of his life. He breathed with difficulty, using far more effort than when he used to hoist hundred-kilo iron struts in the mine. His face was pale, his eyes bulged, and his lips were purple from lack of oxygen. An invisible rope seemed to be slowly tightening around his neck, drowning all of the simple hopes and dreams of his hard life in the all-consuming desire for air. But his father’s lungs, like those of all miners with stage-three silicosis, were a tangle of dusty black chunks; reticular fibers that could no longer pull oxygen from the air he inhaled into his bloodstream. Bit by bit, through twenty-five years in the mine, his father had inhaled the coal dust that made up those chunks, a tiny part of a lifetime’s worth of coal.

Liu Xin knelt by the bed, his heart torn by his father’s labored breaths. Suddenly, he sensed another sound in the rasping, and realized his father was trying to speak.

“What is it, Dad? Are you trying to say something?”

His father’s eyes locked on him. The noise came again, indecipherable through his father’s scratchy gasps, but even more urgent-sounding this time.

Liu Xin repeated his question again, desperate to understand what his father was trying to say.

The noise stopped, and his father’s breathing became a light wheeze, then halted altogether. Lifeless eyes stared back at Liu Xin, as if pleading with him to heed his father’s last words.

Liu Xin felt frozen; he couldn’t look away from his father’s eyes. He didn’t see his mother fainting at the bedside or the nurse removing the oxygen tube from his father’s nose. All he heard, echoing in his brain, was that noise, every syllable engraved on his memory as if etched on a record. He remained in that trance for months, the noise tormenting him day after day, until at last it began to strangle him, too. If he wanted to breathe, to keep on living, he had to figure out what it meant. Then one day, his mother, in the midst of her own long illness, said to him, “You’re grown up. You need to support the family. Drop out of high school and take over your father’s job at the mine.” Liu Xin absently picked up his father’s lunch box and headed out through the winter of 1979 toward the mine—Shaft No. 2, where his father had been. The black opening of the pit gazed at him like an eye, its pupil the row of explosion-proof lights that stretched off into the depths. It was his father’s eye. The noise replayed in his head, urgently, and in a flash he understood his father’s dying words:

“Don’t go into the pit…”

The Mercedes was a little out of place, Liu Xin felt. Too conspicuous. A handful of tall buildings had been erected, and hotels and shops had multiplied along the road, but everything at the mine was still shrouded in dismal gray.

When he reached the Mine Bureau, he saw a throng of people in the square outside the main office. He felt even more out of place in his suit and dress shoes as he made his way through the work-issued coveralls and sweat-stained T-shirts. The crowd watched him silently as he passed. He felt himself blushing, and looked at the ground to avoid the gaze of so many eyes on his two-thousand-dollar suit.

Inside, on the stairs, he ran into Li Minsheng, a high school classmate of his who now worked as chief engineer in the geology department. Li Minsheng was still as wiry as he had been two decades before, though he now had worry lines on his face, and the rolls of paper he carried seemed like a huge weight in his hands.

After greeting him, Li Minsheng said, “The mine hasn’t paid salaries in ages. The workers are demonstrating.” As he spoke, he gestured at the crowd, and also looked Liu Xin over curiously.

“There hasn’t been any improvement? Even with the Daqin Railway Company and two years of state coal restrictions?”

“There was for a time, but then things went bad again. I don’t think anyone can do anything about this industry.” Li Minsheng gave a long sigh, looking anxious to move past Liu Xin. He seemed uncomfortable talking to him. But as the engineer turned to go, Liu Xin stopped him.

“Can you do me a favor?”

Li Minsheng forced a smile. “In high school, you were always hungry,” he said, “but you never accepted the ration tickets we snuck into your book bag. You’re the last person who needs help from anyone these days.”

“No, I really do. Can you find me a small coal seam? Just a tiny one. No more than thirty thousand tons. It has to be independent though, that’s key. The fewer connections to other seams, the better.”

“That… should be doable.”

“I need information on the seam and its surrounding geology. The more detailed the better.”

“That’s fine, too.”

“Shall we talk over dinner?” Liu Xin asked. Li Minsheng shook his head and turned to leave, but Liu Xin caught him again. “Don’t you want to know what I’m planning?”

“I’m only interested in surviving, just like the rest,” he said, inclining his head toward the crowd. Then he left.

Taking the weathered stairs, Liu Xin looked at the high walls, the coal dust coated on them appearing for a moment like massive ink wash paintings of dark clouds over dark mountains. A huge painting, Chairman Mao En Route to Anyuan, still hung there, the painting itself free of dust but the frame and surface showing their age. When the solemn gaze of the figure in the painting fell upon him after an absence of more than ten years, Liu Xin finally felt at home.

On the second floor, the director’s office was still where it had been two decades earlier. A leather covering had been applied to the doors, but it had since split. He pushed through and saw the director, graying head facing the door, bent over a large blueprint on the desk, which he realized was a mine-tunneling chart as he drew closer. The director seemed not to have noticed the crowd outside.

“You’re in charge of that project from the ministry?”1 the director asked, looking up only briefly before returning to the chart.

“Yes. It’s a very long-term project.”

“I see. We’ll do our best to cooperate. But you’ve noticed our current situation.” The director looked up and extended a hand. Liu Xin saw the same weariness he’d seen on Li Minsheng’s face, and when he shook the director’s hand, he felt two misshapen fingers, the result of an old mining injury.

“Go look up Deputy Director Zhang, who’s in charge of scientific research, or Chief Engineer Zhao. I have no time. I’m very sorry. We can talk once you’ve got results.” The director returned his attention to the blueprint.

“You knew my father. You were a technician on his team,” Liu Xin said, then gave his father’s name.

The director nodded. “A fine worker. A good team leader.”

“What’s your opinion of the mining industry now?” Liu Xin asked.

“Opinion about what?” the director asked without looking up. The only way to get this man’s attention is to be blunt, Liu Xin thought, then said, “Coal is a traditional, backward, and declining industry. It’s labor-intensive, it has wretched work conditions and low production efficiency, and requires enormous transport capacity…. Coal used to be a backbone industry in the UK, but that country closed all of its mines a decade ago!”

“We can’t shut down,” the director said, head still down.

“That’s right. But we can change! A complete transformation of the industry’s production methods! Otherwise, we’ll never be free of those difficulties,” Liu Xin said, taking quick steps over to the window. He pointed outside. “Mine workers, millions upon millions of them, with no chance of a fundamental change to their way of life. I’ve come today—”

The director cut him off. “Have you been down below?”

“No.” After a moment, he added, “Before he died, my father forbade me.”

“And you achieved that,” the director said. Bent over the chart as he was, his expression was unreadable, but Liu Xin felt color flooding his cheeks again. He felt hot. In this season, his suit and tie were appropriate only in air-conditioned rooms, but here there was no air-conditioning.

“Look. I’ve got a goal, a dream, one my father had before he died. I went to college to realize it, and I did a doctorate overseas…. I want to transform coal mining. Transform the lives of the mine workers.”

“Get to the point. I don’t have time for childhood dreams and flights of fancy.” The director pointed behind him, but Liu Xin wasn’t certain whether he was pointing at the crowd outside or not.

“I’ll be as brief as I can. As it stands, the present state of coal production is: Under extremely poor conditions, coal is transported to its point of use, and then put into coal gas generators to produce coal gas, or into electric plants where it’s pulverized and burnt…”

“I’m well aware of the coal production process.”

“Yes, of course.” Liu Xin faltered momentarily before continuing. “Well, here’s my idea: Turn the mine itself into a massive gas generator. Turn the coal into coal gas underground, in the seam, and then use petroleum or natural gas extraction techniques to extract the combustible gas, and then transport it to its points of use in dedicated pipes. Furnaces in power stations, the largest consumers of coal, can burn coal gas. Mines could disappear, and the coal industry could become a brand-new, totally modern industry, completely different from what it is today!”

“You think your idea is a new one?”

Liu Xin did not think his idea was new. He also knew that the director, who had been a talented student at the Mining Institute in the 1960s and was now one of the country’s leading authorities on coal extraction, did not think it was new either. The director was certainly aware that subterranean gasification of coal had been studied throughout the world for decades, during which time no small number of gasification catalysts had been developed by countless labs and multinational companies. But it had remained a pipe dream for the better part of a century for one simple reason: The cost of the catalysts far outstripped the value of the coal gas they produced.

“Listen to this: I can achieve subterranean gasification of coal without using a catalyst!”

“And how would you do that?” the director said, pushing aside his blueprint and giving Liu Xin his full attention. An encouraging sign, Liu Xin thought, and revealed his plan:

“Ignite the coal.”

The director was silent for a moment, then lit a cigarette and motioned for Liu Xin to continue. But Liu Xin felt his enthusiasm drain as he realized the nature of the director’s excitement: Here, after days of constant drudgery, he had at last found a brief opportunity to relax. A free performance by an idiot. But Liu Xin pressed stubbornly onward.

“Extraction is accomplished through a series of holes drilled from the surface to the seam, using existing oil drills. These holes have the following effects: First, they distribute a large number of sensors into the seam. Second, they ignite the subterranean coal. Third, they inject water or steam into the seam. Fourth, they introduce combustion air into the seam. Fifth, they remove the gasified coal.

“Once the coal is ignited and comes into contact with the steam, the following reactions occur: Carbon reacts with water to produce carbon monoxide and gaseous hydrogen, and carbon dioxide and hydrogen; then carbon and carbon dioxide react to form carbon monoxide; and carbon monoxide and water react to form more carbon dioxide and hydrogen. The ultimate result is a combustible gas akin to water gas, with a combustible portion consisting of fifty percent hydrogen and thirty percent carbon monoxide. This is the coal gas we will obtain.

“Sensors transmit burn and production conditions of all combustible gases at every point in the seam to the surface by ultrasound. These signals are aggregated by a computer to build a model of the coal-seam furnace, enabling us to control, through the holes, the scale and depth of the subterranean fire as well as the burn rate. Specifically, we can inject water into the holes to arrest the burn, or pressurized air or steam to intensify it. All of this proceeds automatically in response to changes in the computer’s burn model so that the fire is kept at an optimum state of incompletely combusted water and coal, to ensure maximum production. You’d be most concerned, of course, with controlling the fire’s range. We can drill a series of holes ahead of its advance and inject pressurized water to form a fire barrier. Where the burning is fierce, we can also employ a pressurized cement curtain, the kind used in dam building, to block the fire.” He trailed off. “Are you listening to me?”

A noise outside had attracted the director’s attention. Liu Xin knew that the image his plan evoked in the director’s mind was different from his own vision. The director surely knew what igniting subterranean coal meant: right now, coal mines were burning all over the world, including several in China.

The previous year, Liu Xin had seen ground fire for the first time in Xinjiang. Not a stitch of grass on the ground or hillsides as far as the eye could see, and the air churned in hot waves of sulfur, shimmering his vision as if he were underwater or as if the entire world were roasting on a spit. At night, Liu Xin saw ribbons of ghostly red where light seeped through countless cracks in the earth. He had approached one to peer inside, and immediately gulped a nervous breath. It was like the entrance to hell. The light shone dimly from deep within, but he could still sense its ferocious heat. Looking out at the glowing lines beneath the night sky, he’d felt as if the Earth were a burning ember wrapped in a thin layer of crust. Aygul, the brawny Uighur man who had accompanied him, was the leader of China’s sole coal-seam fire brigade, and Liu Xin’s aim in making the trip there had been to recruit him for his lab.

“It’ll be hard to pull myself away,” Aygul had said in accented Chinese. “I grew up watching these ground fires, so to me they’re an integral part of the world, like the sun or the stars.”

“You mean the fire started burning when you were born?”

“No, Dr. Liu. This fire has been burning since the Qing Dynasty.”

Liu Xin stood rooted in place and shivered as the heat waves rolled over him in the night.

Aygul had continued, “I’d do better to stand in your way than agree to help you. Listen to me, Dr. Liu. This isn’t a game. You’re working with devilry!”

Now, in the director’s office, the noise outside the window had grown louder. As the director stood up and went over to it, he said to Liu Xin, “Young man, I really hope that the sixty million the bureau is investing in this project could be put to better use. You can see there’s much that needs to be done. Until next time.”

Liu Xin followed the director out of the building, where the workers’ sit-in protest had grown larger, and a leader was shouting something he couldn’t make out to the crowd. His attention was drawn to a corner of the crowd, where he saw a group of people in wheelchairs. More were filing in, each one a miner who had lost a limb in a work accident.

Liu Xin felt like he couldn’t breathe. He loosened his tie, lowered his head, and passed quickly through the crowd before ducking into his car. He drove aimlessly, his mind blank, and after a while slammed on the brakes at the top of a hill. He used to come here as a kid. From here, there was a bird’s-eye view of the whole mine. He got out and stood motionless for a long time.

“What are you looking at?” a voice said. Liu Xin looked back and saw Li Minsheng, who had come up at some point to stand behind him.

“That’s our school,” Liu Xin said, pointing off at a large mining school that housed both primary and secondary classes. The athletic field on the campus was conspicuously large. It was there they had lain to rest their childhood and youth.

“Do you think you remember everything?” Li Minsheng said tiredly as he sat down on a nearby rock.

“I do.”

“That afternoon in late autumn, when the sun was hazy. We were playing football on the field, when the building’s loudspeaker came on… do you remember?”

“It was playing a dirge, and then Zhang Jianjun came running over barefoot to say that Chairman Mao had died…”

“We called him a counterrevolutionary, and walloped him, even as he was crying out that it was true, honest to Chairman Mao it was true. We didn’t believe him, though, and dragged him off to the police…”

“But we slowed down at the school gate, since the dirge was playing outside too, as if that dark music was filling the whole world…”

“That dirge has been playing in my mind for more than two decades. These days, when the music plays it’s Nietzsche who runs over barefoot and says, ‘God is dead.’” Li Minsheng barked out a laugh. “I believe it.”

Liu Xin stared at his childhood friend. “When did you turn into this? I hardly even recognize you.”

Li Minsheng jumped up and glared back at him, jabbing a finger at the gray world at the foot of the hill. “When did the mine turn into that? Do you still recognize it?” Then he sat down heavily again. “Our fathers were such a proud group. Such a proud, grand group of miners. Take my dad. He was a level-eight worker2 and earned a hundred and twenty yuan a month. A hundred and twenty yuan in the Chairman Mao era, no less.”

Liu Xin was silent for a moment, then tried to change the subject. “How’s your family? Your wife… uh, something Shan, is it?”

Li Minsheng smiled thinly. “Last year she told me she was taking a work trip, told her work unit she was taking annual leave, and took our daughter and left me and vanished. Two months later she sent a letter, posted from Canada, in which she said she had no wish to waste her life with a dirty coalman.”

“You’ve got to be kidding. You’re a senior engineer!”

“Same difference.” Li Minsheng swept his hand about them. “To those who’ve never been below, it’s all the same. We’re all dirty coalmen. Do you remember how badly we wanted to become engineers?”

“Those were the days of record-chasing production,” Liu Xin said. “We brought our fathers lunch. It was the first time we’d been down the shaft, and it was so dark down there. I asked my father and those standing near him, ‘How do you know where the coal seam is? How do you know where to dig the tunnels? And how are you able to get two tunnels dug from different directions to meet so precisely so far down?’ And your father answered, ‘Child, no one knows except for the engineers.’ And when we got to the surface, he pointed out a few men carrying hard hats and clipboards, and said, ‘Look, those are engineers.’ Do you remember that, Minsheng? Even we could see that they were different. The towels around their necks, at least, were a bit whiter. We’ve achieved that childhood dream now. Of course, it’s not all that glorious, but we have to at least fulfill our duty and accomplish something. Otherwise, won’t we be betraying ourselves?”

“That’s enough,” Li Minsheng said, standing up with a sudden anger. “I’ve been doing my duty this whole time. I’ve been accomplishing things. But you? You’re living in a dream! Do you really believe you can bring miners up from the mines? Turn this mine into a gas field? Say all that theory is correct and your test succeeds. So what? Have you calculated the cost of the thing? Also, how are you going to lay tens of thousands of kilometers of pipe? You realize that we can’t even pay rail shipping fees these days?”

“Can’t you take the long view? In a few years, or a few decades…”

“The hell with the long view! The people here aren’t certain about the next few days, much less the next few decades. I’ve said before that you live on dreams. You’ve always been that way. Sure, back in your quiet old institute headquarters in Beijing you can have that dream, but I can’t. I live in the real world.”

Li Minsheng turned to leave, then added, “Oh, I came to tell you that the director has arranged for us to cooperate with your experiment. Work is work, and I’ll do it.” Then he set off down the hill without looking back.

Liu Xin silently surveyed the mine where he had been born and spent his childhood. Its towering headframes and their enormous top wheels spinning, lowering large cages down the shaft out of sight; rows of electric trams going in and out of the entrance to the shaft where his father had worked; a train outside the coal-separator building easing past more piles of coal than he could count; the cinema and soccer field where he had spent the best moments of his youth; the huge bathhouse—only miners had ones so large—where he had learned how to swim in water stained black from coal dust. Yes, he had learned to swim in a place so far from rivers and oceans.

Turning his gaze toward the distance, he saw the spoil tip, the accumulation of more than a century’s worth of shale dug out of the mine. It seemed taller than the surrounding hills, with smoke rising where the sulfur heated the rain…. All of it black, blanketed over time in a layer of coal dust. It was the color of Liu Xin’s childhood, the color of his life. He closed his eyes, and as he listened to the sounds of the mine below, time seemed to stop.

Dad’s mine. My mine…

The valley was not far from the mine, whose smoke and steam were visible beyond the ridge during the day, whose glow projected into the sky at night, and whose steam whistles were always audible. Liu Xin, Li Minsheng, and Aygul stood in the center of the desolate valley. In the distance, a herder was driving a flock of scrawny goats slowly along the foot of the mountain. Beneath the valley lay the small isolated coal seam that Liu Xin wanted to use for his subterranean gasified coal extraction experiment, found by Li Minsheng and the engineers in the geology department after a month of combing through mountains of materials in the archives.

“We’re pretty far from the main mining area, so we’ve got fewer geological details on it,” Li Minsheng said.

“I’ve read the materials, and from what we have now, the experimental seam is at least two hundred meters from the main seam. That’s acceptable. We should get to work,” Liu Xin said excitedly.

“You’re not an expert in mining geology, and you’re even less familiar with the actual conditions here. I advise you to be more cautious. Think about it some more.”

“There’s nothing to think about. The experiment can’t proceed,” Aygul said. “I’ve read the materials too. They’re too sketchy. The separation between exploratory boreholes is too large, and they were made in the sixties. They need to be redone, to prove conclusively that the seam is independent, before the experiment can begin. Li and I have drawn up an exploratory plan.”

“How long until exploration is complete, according to your plan? And how much more investment is needed?”

Li Minsheng said, “At the geology department’s current capacity, at least a month. We didn’t run the investment numbers. To estimate… at least two million or so.”

“We have neither the time nor the money for that!”

“Then put in a request to the ministry.”

“The ministry? A bunch of bastards in the ministry want to kill this project! The higher-ups are anxious for results, so I’m dooming the entire project if I go back and ask for more time and a bigger budget. Instinct tells me there won’t be major problems, so why not take a little risk?”

“Instinct? Risk? Not on a project like this! Dr. Liu, do you realize where we’re starting this fire? You call that a small risk?”

“I’ve made my decision!” Liu Xin cut him off with a wave of his hand and walked off alone.

“Engineer Li, why aren’t you stopping that madman? The two of us are on the same side,” Aygul said.

“I’m going to do what I’m required to,” Li Minsheng said.

Three hundred men were at work in the valley. Besides physicists, chemists, geologists, and mining engineers, there were a few unexpected experts. Aygul led a coal-seam fire brigade of more than ten members, and there were two entire drilling squads from Renqiu Oil Field in Hebei Province, as well as a number of hydraulic-construction engineers and workers who would erect subterranean firebreaks. On the work site, in addition to tall rigs and piles of drilling poles, there were piles of cement bags and a mixer, a high-pressure slurry pump whining as it injected liquid cement into the ground, rows of high-pressure water and air pumps, and a spiderweb of crisscrossing multicolored pipes.

Work had been progressing for two months, and an underground cement curtain more than two thousand meters long had been constructed surrounding the seam. Liu Xin had thought of adapting hydraulic engineering technology used in waterproofing the foundation of dams to the subterranean firewall: high-pressure cement was injected underground, where it hardened into a tight fireproof barrier. Within the curtain, the drills had sunk nearly a hundred boreholes, each directly into the seam. The holes were connected by pipes that split into three prongs attached to different high-pressure pumps that could inject water, steam, or compressed air.

The final bit of work was the release of the “ground rats,” as they called the fire sensors. The curious gizmos, Liu Xin’s own design, resembled not rats but bombs. Each was twenty centimeters long with a bit at one end and a drive wheel at the other, and once released into the borehole, it could drill nearly a hundred meters farther into the seam and reach its designated location autonomously. Operable even under high temperatures and pressures, it would transmit the parameters at its location back to the master computer once the seam was ignited via seam-penetrating infrasound. More than a thousand of these ground rats had been released into the seam, half of which were positioned outside of the fire curtain to detect potential breaches.

Liu Xin stood in a large tent in front of a projection screen showing the fire curtain, with flashing lights that indicated the position of each ground rat according to the signals. They were densely distributed, giving the screen the look of an astronomical chart.

Everything was ready. Two bulky ignition electrodes had been lowered down a borehole at the center of the enclosure and were directly wired to a red button switch in the tent where Liu Xin was standing. All of the workers were in place and waiting.

“There’s still time to change your mind, Dr. Liu,” Aygul said quietly. “Or to take more time to think on it.”

“Aygul, that’s enough. You’ve been spreading fear and uncertainty from day one, and you’ve complained about me all the way to the ministry. To be fair, you’ve contributed immensely to this project, and without your work this past year, I wouldn’t be so quick to conduct the experiment.”

“Dr. Liu…” Aygul was pleading now. Liu Xin had never seen him like this. “We don’t have to do this. Don’t release the demon from the depths!”

“You think we can quit now?” Liu Xin smiled and shook his head, then turned toward Li Minsheng.

Li Minsheng said, “As you instructed, we reviewed all of the geological materials a sixth time. We found no problems. Last night we added an additional curtain layer to a few sensitive spots.” He pointed out several short lines on the screen, outside the enclosure.

Liu Xin went up to the ignition switch, and when his hand made contact with the red button he paused and closed his eyes as if in prayer. His lips moved, but only Li Minsheng, standing closest to him, heard the word he said—

“Dad…”

The button made no sound or flash. The valley remained the same as ever. But somewhere deep underground, a glittering high-temperature electric arc was created by more than ten thousand volts of electricity in the seam. On the screen, at the location of the electrodes, a small red dot appeared and quickly expanded like a blot of red ink on rice paper. Liu Xin moved the mouse, and the screen switched to a burn model produced from the data returned by the ground rats, a continuously growing, onion-like sphere, where each layer was an isotherm. High-pressure pumps roared, pouring combustion air into the seam through the boreholes, and the fire expanded like a blown-up balloon…. An hour later, when the control computer switched on the high-pressure water pumps, the fire onscreen twisted and distorted like a punctured balloon, although its volume remained the same.

Liu Xin exited the tent. The sun had set behind the hill, and the thunder of machines echoed in the darkening valley. More than three hundred people were assembled outside, surrounding a vertical jet the diameter of an oil barrel. They made way for him, and he approached the small platform at the foot of the jet. Two people were standing on the platform, one of whom twisted the knob when he saw Liu Xin coming; the other struck a lighter to light a torch, which he passed to Liu Xin. The turning of the knob produced a hiss of gas from the jet that rose dramatically in volume until it roared throughout the valley like a hoarse giant. On all sides, three hundred nervous faces watched in the faint torchlight. Liu Xin closed his eyes and spoke silently to himself again. Then he brought the torch to the mouth of the jet and ignited the world’s first gasified coal well.

With a bang, a huge pillar of fire leapt into the air, shooting up almost twenty meters. Closest to the mouth of the jet, the column was a clear, pure blue, but just above that it turned a blinding yellow before gradually turning red. It whistled in the air, and those closest to it could feel its surge of heat. Its radiance lit the surrounding hills, and from a distance it would look as if a sky lantern were shining over the plateau.

A white-haired man, the director, emerged from the crowd and shook Liu Xin’s hand. He said, “Please accept the congratulations of a closed-minded relic. You’ve succeeded! But I hope you’ll extinguish it as soon as possible.”

“Even now you don’t trust me? It won’t be extinguished. I want it to keep burning, for the whole country and the whole world to see.”

“They’ve already seen it.” The director pointed to the throng of TV reporters behind him. “But as you well know, the test seam is no more than two hundred meters from the surrounding main seam at its closest point.”

“But we’ve laid three firebreaks at those spots. And we have high-speed drills on standby. There won’t be any problems.”

“You’re engineers from the ministry, so I have no authority to interfere. But there’s potential danger in any new technology, no matter how successful it may seem. I’ve seen my share of dangers in my decades in coal. Maybe that’s the reason for my rigid thinking. I’m truly worried…. However,” and the director again extended a hand to Liu Xin, “I’d still like to thank you. You’ve shown me hope for the coal industry.” He gazed at the pillar of fire again. “Your father would be pleased.”

Two more jets were ignited in the next two days, so there were now three pillars of fire. The production volume of the test seam, calculated at a standard supply pressure, had reached five hundred thousand cubic meters per hour, equivalent to more than a hundred large coal gas furnaces.

The underground coal fire was moderated entirely by computer, with the scale controlled to a stable-bounded area no larger than two-thirds of the total area within the curtain. At the mine’s request, multiple fire-control tests had been conducted. On the computer, Liu Xin described a ring around the fire with the mouse, and then clicked to constrict it. The whining of the high-pressure pumps outside changed, and within an hour the fire had been contained within that ring. Meanwhile, two more fire curtains, each two hundred meters long, had been added in the risky direction of the main seam.

There was little for him to do. Most of his time he devoted to taking media interviews. Major companies inside and outside of China, including the likes of DuPont and Exxon, were swarming to propose investment and collaboration projects.

On the third day, a coal-seam firefighter came to Liu Xin to say that their chief was about to collapse from fatigue. Aygul had for the past two days led the firefighting squad in a mad series of subterranean firefighting exercises. He had also, on his own initiative, rented satellite time from the National Remote Sensing Center to survey the region’s crust temperature. He hadn’t slept in three days, spending his time instead doing rounds outside the curtain ring, each circuit taking all night.

When Liu Xin found Aygul, he saw that the stocky man had gotten much thinner, and his eyes were red. “I can’t sleep,” he said. “The nightmares start as soon as I shut my eyes. I see those fire columns erupting all around me, like a forest of fire…”

“Renting a sensor satellite is a huge expense,” Liu Xin said gently. “And although I don’t see the need, you’ve done it and I respect your decision. I’ll be needing you in the future, Aygul. I don’t think your firefighting squad will have much to do, but even the safest place still needs a fire team. You’re exhausted. Go back to Beijing for a few days’ rest.”

“Leave now? You’re insane!”

“You grew up above ground fire. That’s why your fear of it goes so deep. Right now we may not be able to control a massive fire like the one in the Xinjiang mines, but we soon will be. I want to set up the first gasified coalfield for commercial use in Xinjiang. When that time comes, the underground fires will be under our control, and the land of your hometown will be covered in glorious vineyards.”

“Dr. Liu, I respect you. That’s why I’m working with you. But you overestimate yourself. Where ground fire is concerned, you’re still just a child.” Aygul smiled bitterly and walked away, shaking his head.

Disaster struck on the fifth day. The sun had just come up when Liu Xin was shaken awake by Aygul, who was out of breath, wild-eyed, and almost feverish. His trouser legs were soaked through with dew. He held a laser-printed photograph in front of Liu Xin’s face, so close it blocked his vision entirely. It was a false-color infrared sensor image returned from the satellite, a vibrant abstract painting he couldn’t understand, so he just stared in confusion. “Come!” Aygul shouted, and dragged Liu Xin out of the tent by the hand.

Liu Xin followed him up a hill on the north side of the valley, his confusion growing all the while. First, this was the safest direction, separated from the main seam by more than a kilometer. Second, Aygul had led him nearly to the top of the hill, but the curtain ring was far, far beneath them. What was there to go wrong here? When they reached the top, Liu Xin was about to gasp out a question when Aygul pointed in a different direction, to a place even farther off. Liu Xin laughed in relief—there was no disaster. The mine was directly ahead of where Aygul pointed, and between that hill and the one beneath their feet was an even slope that led to a meadow at the bottom. That was Aygul’s target. The mine and the meadow seemed peaceful at this distance, but after a longer look Liu Xin saw something strange about the meadow: in one circular spot, the grass appeared darker than the surrounding area, a difference only noticeable upon careful observation. He felt his heart seize, then he and Aygul raced down the hill to that patch of darker green.

When they got there, Liu Xin examined the round patch of grass, which had wilted to the ground as if it had been scalded. He put his hand on it and felt heat emanating from the ground. In the center of the circle a puff of steam rose in the light of the rising sun….

After a morning of emergency drilling and the dispatch of another thousand-odd ground rats, Liu Xin confirmed the nightmarish fact: the main seam had caught fire. The scope of the fire was unknown for the time being, since the ground rats had a maximum below-ground speed of around ten meters per hour. However, with the fire so much deeper than the test seam, the fact that its heat was radiating above ground meant it had been burning for quite some time. It was a big fire.

The strange thing was that the thousand meters of earth and stone between the main seam and the test seam was whole and unbroken. The ground fire had ignited on either side of the thousand-meter buffer zone, leading someone to suggest that it was unrelated to the experiment. But that was no more than self-delusion; even the person who had said it didn’t really believe the two weren’t in some way connected. Deeper exploration cleared up the matter late that night.

Eight narrow coal belts extended from the test seam. Only half a meter at their narrowest point, they were hard to detect. Five of them were bisected by the fire curtain, but the other three led downward and just skirted the curtain’s bottom edge. Two of these terminated, but the last one led directly to the main seam a kilometer away. All of them were actually ground fissures that had been filled up by coal; their connection to the surface provided them with an excellent supply of oxygen. The one linking the test seam and the main seam thus acted as a fuse.

None of the three was marked on the materials Li Minsheng had provided, and in fact, such long and narrow belts were extremely rare in the field of coal geology. Mother Nature had played a cruel joke.

“I had no choice. My kid’s got uremia and needs continual dialysis. The money from this project was too important to me, so I didn’t fight you as strongly as I could have….” Li Minsheng’s face was pale, and he avoided Liu Xin’s eyes.

The three of them stood atop the hill between the two ground fires. It was another early morning. The entire meadow between the mine and the peak was now dark green, apart from the previous day’s circular area, which was now a burnt yellow. Steam wafted from the ground, obscuring their view of the mine.

Aygul said to Liu Xin, “My fire brigade from Xinjiang has landed in Taiyuan with equipment, and they’ll be here soon. Teams from elsewhere in the country are headed here too. The fire looks to be spreading fast.”

Liu Xin looked silently at Aygul for a long moment before he asked in a low voice, “Can you tame it?”

Aygul shook his head.

“Then tell me: How much hope is there? If we seal off the vents, or inject water to quell the fire…”

Again, Aygul shook his head. “I’ve been doing this my whole life, but ground fire still consumed my hometown. I told you that where ground fire is concerned, you’re still just a child. You don’t know what it is. That far underground it’s slipperier than a viper, wilier than a ghost. Mortals can’t stop it from going where it wants. Under our feet is a huge quantity of high-quality anthracite, and this devil’s been coveting it for millions of years. Now you’ve released it, and given it limitless energy and power. The ground fire here will be a hundred times worse than in Xinjiang.”

Liu Xin shook the Uighur man by the shoulders in desperation. “Tell me how much hope we have! Tell me the truth, I beg you!”

“Zero,” Aygul said with a slow shake of his head. “Dr. Liu, you can’t atone for your sins in this lifetime.”

An emergency meeting was held in the main bureau building attended by the bureau leadership and the heads of the five mines, as well as a group of alarmed officials from the city government, including the mayor. The meeting’s first act was to establish an emergency command center headed up by the director, with Liu Xin and Li Minsheng as members of the leading group.

“Engineer Li and I will do our utmost, but I’d like to remind you all that we’re now criminals,” Liu Xin said, as Li Minsheng sat silently, head bowed.

“Now’s not the time for recrimination,” the director said. “Act, and think of nothing else. Do you know who said that? Your father. Once, back when I was a technician on his squad, I ignored his warning and enlarged the extraction range so I could meet production targets. As a result, a huge quantity of water entered the works, trapping more than twenty squad members in the corner of a passageway. Our lamps had gone out, and we didn’t dare strike a lighter, afraid of gas on the one hand and of using up the oxygen on the other, since the water had sealed us off completely. You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, it was so dark. Then your father told me he remembered there was another passageway above us, and our ceiling was probably not all that thick. Next thing I heard was him scratching at the ceiling with a pick. The rest of us felt around for our picks and joined him, digging in the darkness. As the oxygen level dropped, we began to feel woozy and tight-chested. And on top of that there was the darkness, an absolute blackness no one on the surface is able to imagine, but for the glint of picks striking the ceiling. Staying alive was sheer torture, but it was your father who kept me going. Over and over he said to me in the darkness, ‘Act, and think of nothing else.’ I don’t know how long we dug, but just when I was about to faint from lack of breath, a chunk of the ceiling fell in and the glare of the explosion-proof lamps from the overhead passageway shone through the hole…. Later your father told me that he had no idea how thick the roof was, but it was the only thing we could do: act, and think of nothing else. Your father’s words have been etched ever deeper on my brain over the years, and now I pass them on to you.”

Experts who had rushed from all over the country to attend the meeting soon drafted a plan for fighting the fire. The options at hand were limited to just three. First, cut off the underground fire’s oxygen. Second, use a grout curtain to cut the path of the fire. Third, inject massive quantities of water underground to quench the fire. These three techniques were to proceed simultaneously, but the first had been demonstrated ineffective long ago. Air vents supplying oxygen to the fire were difficult to pinpoint, and they would be hard to seal off even if located. The second method was effective only against shallow coal-seam fires and was much slower than the pace of the underground fire’s advance. The third method was most promising.

News was still embargoed, and the firefighting proceeded quietly. High-power drilling rigs, emergency transfers from Renqiu Oil Field, passed through the mining city under the eyes of curious onlookers; the army entered the hills; whirling choppers appeared in the sky… a cloud of uncertainty descended over the mine, and rumors spread like wildfire.

The drills were lined up at the head of the subterranean fire, and once drilling was complete, more than a hundred high-pressure pumps began injecting water into the hot, smoking boreholes. The sheer quantity of water meant that the water supply to both the mine and the city was cut off, which only increased uncertainty and unrest among the public. But initial results were encouraging: On the big screen in the command center, dark spots appeared surrounding the position of the boreholes at the head of the red-colored fire, indicating that the water had dramatically dropped the fire temperature. If the line of dots connected, then there was hope for stopping the fire’s spread.

But this slightly comforting situation did not last long. The leader of the oil field drilling crew found Liu Xin at the foot of the enormous rig.

“Dr. Liu, no more drilling can be done at two-thirds of the well positions!” he shouted over the roar of the drills and pumps.

“Are you joking? We’ve got to add more water-injection holes to the fire.”

“No. Well pressure at those positions is growing too quickly. Any more drilling and there’ll be a blowout!”

“Bullshit. This isn’t an oil field. There’s no high-pressure gas reservoir. What’s going to blow?”

“You know nothing! I’m shutting down the drills and pulling out.”

Enraged, Liu Xin grabbed his collar. “You will not. I order you to continue drilling. There will not be a blowout. You hear me? There won’t!”

Even before he finished speaking, they heard a loud crash from the direction of the rig, and they turned in time to witness the well’s heavy seal fly off in two pieces as a yellowish-black mud spurted into the air together with pieces of broken drill pipe. Bystanders shouted in alarm, and the mud gradually lightened in color as its particulate content reduced. Then it turned snow-white, and they realized that the ground fire had heated the injected water into pressurized steam. High up on the rig they saw the body of the drill driver, suspended and twisting slowly in the roiling steam. There was no trace of the other three engineers who had been on the platform.

What happened next was even more terrifying. The head of the white dragon broke free from the ground and gradually took flight, until finally the white steam had risen above the rig like a white-haired demon in the sky. There was nothing in the space between the demon and the mouth of the well apart from the wreckage of the rig. Nothing but that terrifying hiss. A few young engineers, under the impression that the blowout had stopped, took hesitant steps forward, but Liu Xin grabbed two of them and shouted, “That’s suicide! It’s superheated steam!”

They watched in terror as the damp headframe was blasted dry in the steam’s heat, and the thick rubber pipes strung from it liquefied like wax. The infernal steam assaulted the frame with a hair-curling thunder….

Further water injection was impossible, and even if it weren’t, it would act more to combust than to quench the fire.

All emergency command center personnel assembled at the third mine, by Shaft No. 4, the nearest to the fire line.

“The fire is nearing the mine’s extraction zone,” Aygul said. “If it gets there, then the mine passages will supply it with oxygen and multiply its strength considerably…. That’s the present situation.” He broke off, and glanced at the bureau director and the heads of the five mines uncomfortably, unwilling to violate the greatest taboo in mining.

“And conditions in the shafts?” the director asked without emotion.

“Excavation and extraction are proceeding as normal in eight shafts, primarily for stability’s sake,” the head of one mine said.

“Shut down production altogether. Evacuate all staff in the shafts. Then…” The director paused and remained silent for a few seconds.

Those few seconds felt immeasurably long.

“Seal the shafts,” the director said at last, uttering the heartbreaking words.

“No! You can’t!” The cry burst from Li Minsheng before he could stop himself. “What I mean is…” He grasped for counterlogic to present the director. “Sealing the shafts… sealing the shafts… will throw everything into chaos. And…”

“Enough,” the director said with a gentle wave of his hand. His expression said everything: I know how you feel. I feel the same way. We all do.

Li Minsheng crouched on the ground, head in hands, shoulders shaking with silent sobs. The mining leadership and engineers stood silently before the shaft. The cavernous entrance stared back at them like a giant eye, just as Shaft No. 2 had stared at Liu Xin two decades before.

They shared a moment of silence for the century-old mine.

After a while, the bureau’s chief engineer broke the silence with a low voice: “Let’s take up as much equipment as we can from down below.”

“Then,” the mine chief said, “we ought to get together demolition squads.”

The director nodded. “Time is of the essence. You get to work. I’ll file a request with the ministry.”

The bureau party secretary said, “Can’t we use military engineers? If we use miners for the demolition squad, and anything happens…”

“I’ve considered it,” said the director. “But we only have one detachment of military engineers at the moment, far too few even for one shaft. Besides, they’re not familiar with subterranean demolitions.”

Shaft No. 4, closest to the fire, was the first to shut down. When the tramloads of miners reached the entrance, they found a hundred-strong demolition squad waiting around a pile of drills. They inquired, but the demolition squad members didn’t know what they were expected to do; their orders were only to assemble beside the drilling equipment. Suddenly, their attention was seized by a convoy heading toward the entrance. The first truck bristled with armed police, who jumped down to secure a perimeter around a parking area for the vehicles that followed. When the eleven trucks stopped, the canvas was pulled back to reveal neat stacks of yellow wooden crates. The miners were stunned. They knew what was in these crates.

Each crate held twenty-four kilos of ammonium nitrate fuel oil, fifty tons of it altogether in the ten trucks. The final, somewhat smaller truck carried a few bundles of bamboo strips for lashing the explosives together, and a pile of black plastic bags, which the miners knew held electronic detonators.

Liu Xin and Li Minsheng hopped down from the cab of one of the trucks and saw the newly appointed captain of the demolition squad, a muscular, bearded man, coming their way with a roll of charts.

“What are you making us do, Engineer Li?” the captain asked as he unrolled the paper.

Li Minsheng pointed to a spot on the chart, his finger trembling slightly. “Three blast lines, each thirty-five meters long. Detailed positions are on the chart underneath. One-hundred-fifty-millimeter and seventy-five-millimeter boreholes, filled with twenty-eight kilos and fourteen kilos of explosives, respectively, at a density of…”

“I’m asking, what are you trying to make us do?”

Li Minsheng went silent and bowed his head under the captain’s fiery stare.

The captain turned toward the crowd. “Brothers, they want us to blow up the tunnels!” he shouted. There was a moment of commotion among the miners, but a wall of armed police came forward in a semicircle to block the crowd from reaching the trucks. But the police line distorted under the pressure of the surging black human sea, until it was at the breaking point. All of this took place in a heavy silence, with the scuffle of footsteps and clack of gun bolts the only sounds. At the last moment, the crowd ceased its tumult as the director and mine head stepped up onto the bed of one of the trucks.

“I started work in this mine when I was fifteen. Are you just going to destroy it?” shouted one old miner. The wrinkles carved into his face were visible even beneath the thick cover of coal dust.

“What are we going to live on after it’s closed?”

“Why are you blowing it up?”

“Life in the mine was difficult enough without you all messing around.”

The crowd exploded, waves of anger surging ever fiercer over the sea of coal-blackened faces flashing white teeth. The director waited silently until the crowd’s anger turned to restless movement, then, when it was just about to get out of control, he spoke.

“Take a look in that direction,” he said, pointing to a small rise near the mine entrance. His voice was not loud, but it quieted the angry storm, and everyone looked where he was pointing.

“We all call that the old coal column, but do you realize that when it was erected, it wasn’t a column, but a huge cube of coal? That was in the Qing Dynasty, more than a hundred years ago, when Governor Zhang Zhidong erected it at the founding of the mine. A century of wind and rain have weathered it into a column. Our mine has weathered so much wind and rain during that century, so many difficulties and disasters, more than anyone can remember. That’s more than a brief moment, comrades. That’s four or five generations! If there’s nothing else we’ve learned or remembered over the past century, then we must remember this—”

The director raised his hands toward the sea of faces.

“The sky won’t fall!”

The crowd stood frozen. It seemed as if even their breathing had ceased.

“Out of all of China’s industrial workers, all of its proletariat, none has a longer history than us. None has a history with more hardship and tumult than ours. Has the sky fallen for miners? No! That all of us can stand here and look at that old coal column is proof of that. Our sky won’t fall. It never did, and it never will!

“Hardship? There’s nothing new about that, comrades. When have we miners ever had it easy? From the time of our ancestors, when have miners ever had an easy day in their lives? Rack your brains: Of all the industries and all the professions in China and the rest of the world, are any of them harder than ours? None. None at all. What’s new about hardship? If it were easy, now that would be surprising. We’re holding up both the sky and the earth! If we feared hardship, we’d have died out long ago.

“But talented people have been thinking of solutions for us as society and science have advanced. Now we have a solution, one that has the hope of totally transforming our lives, bringing us out of the dark mines and into the sun to mine coal beneath blue skies! Miners will have the world’s most enviable job. This hope has now arrived. Don’t take my word for it, but look at the pillars of fire shooting skyward in the south valley. But these efforts have caused a catastrophe. We will explain all of this in detail later. Right now all you need to understand is that this may be the very last hardship for miners. This is the price for our wonderful tomorrow. So let’s stand together and face it. As so many generations have before—again, the sky hasn’t fallen!”

The crowd dispersed in silence. Liu Xin said to the director, “I’ve known you and my father, and I can die without regret.”

“Act, and think of nothing else,” the director said, clapping Liu Xin on the shoulder, then gripped him in an embrace.

The day after demolition work commenced on Shaft No. 4, Liu Xin and Li Minsheng walked side by side through the main tunnel, their footsteps echoing emptily. They were passing the first blast area, and in the dim light of their headlamps, they could see the boreholes densely distributed in the high ceiling, and the colorful waterfall of detonation wires streaming toward a pile on the floor.

Li Minsheng said, “I used to hate the mine. Hate it, because it consumed my youth. But now I realize that I’ve become one with it. Hate it or love it, it’s what my youth was.”

“We shouldn’t torture ourselves,” Liu Xin said. “We’ve done something with our lives, at least. If we’re not heroes, then at least we’ve gone down fighting.”

They fell silent, realizing that they were talking about death.

Then Aygul ran up, breathing hard. “Engineer Li, look at that,” he said, pointing at the ceiling. A few thick canvas hoses, used for ventilating the mine, were now limp and slack.

Li Minsheng blanched. “Shit! When was ventilation cut off?”

“Two hours ago.”

Li Minsheng barked into his radio, and soon the chief of ventilation and two ventilation engineers showed up.

“There’s no way to restore ventilation, Engineer Li. All of the equipment from down below—blowers, motors, anti-explosion switches, and even some pipes—have been taken out!” the ventilation chief said.

“You fucking idiot! Who told you to take them out? Are you fucking suicidal?” Li Minsheng shouted, far past caring about decorum or professionalism.

“Engineer Li, watch your language. Do you know who told us? The director expressly said for us to take out as much equipment as possible before the shaft is sealed. We all were at the meeting. We’ve been working day and night for two days and have taken out more than a million yuan worth of equipment. And now you’re cursing at us? What’s the point of ventilation anyway when the shaft’s going to be sealed?”

Li Minsheng let out a long sigh. The truth of the situation had still not been disclosed, leading to this kind of coordination issue.

“What’s the problem?” Liu Xin asked after the ventilation staff had left. “Shouldn’t the ventilation be stopped? Won’t that reduce the supply of oxygen to the mine?”

“Dr. Liu, you’re a theoretical giant but a practical dwarf. You’re clueless in the face of reality. Like Engineer Li said, you only know how to dream!” Aygul said. He had not spoken courteously to Liu Xin since the fire had started.

Li Minsheng explained, “This coal seam has a high incidence of gas. Once ventilation is shut off, the gas will quickly accumulate at the bottom of the shaft, and when the fire gets here, it may touch off an explosion powerful enough to blow out the seal. At the very least it will blow out new channels for oxygen. There’s no choice but to add another blast area.”

“But Engineer Li, the two areas above us are only half done, and the third hasn’t even started. The fire is nearing the southern mining zone; there might not even be enough time to complete three zones.”

“I…” Liu Xin said carefully. “I have an idea that may or may not work.”

“Ha!” Aygul laughed coldly. “This is unprecedented. When has Dr. Liu ever been uncertain? When has Dr. Liu ever had to ask someone else before making a decision?”

“What I mean is that we’ve got a blast zone already set up at this deep point. Can we detonate it first? That way, if there’s an explosion farther down the shaft, there will be one obstacle, at least.”

“If that worked we would have done it already,” Li Minsheng said. “The blast will be large enough to fill the tunnels with toxic gas and dust that won’t disperse for a long time, impeding further work in the tunnels.”

The ground fire’s advance was faster than anticipated. The construction group decided to detonate with only two blast zones in place, and ordered all personnel evacuated from the shaft as quickly as possible. It was near dark. They were standing around a chart in a production building not far off from the entrance, considering how to detonate at the shortest possible distance using a spur tunnel, when Li Minsheng suddenly said, “Listen!”

A deep rumble was coming from somewhere below ground, as if the earth were belching. A few seconds later they heard it again.

“Methane explosions. The fire has reached the mine,” Aygul said nervously.

“Wasn’t it supposed to still be farther away?”

No one answered. Liu Xin’s ground rats had been used up, and with the only sensing techniques now at their disposal it was difficult to precisely determine the fire’s position and speed.

“Evacuate at once!”

Li Minsheng snatched up his radio, but no matter how he shouted, there was no answer.

“Before I came up, Chief Zhang was worried he’d smash a radio while working,” a miner from the demolition squad told him. “So he put them with the detonation wires. There are a dozen drills working simultaneously down there. It’s pretty loud!”

Li Minsheng jumped up and dashed out of the building without even grabbing a helmet. He called a tram, then headed down the shaft at top speed. The moment the tram vanished into the shaft entrance, Liu Xin could see Li Minsheng waving at him, and there was a smile on his face. It had been a long time since he’d smiled.

The ground belched a few more times, but then silence descended.

“Did that series of explosions consume all of the methane in the mine?” Liu Xin asked an engineer standing beside him, who looked back at him in wonder.

“Consume it all? You’ve got to be kidding. It will just release more methane from the seam.”

A sky-spitting thunder rolled, as if the Earth itself were exploding under their feet. The mouth of the mine was engulfed in flames. The blast lifted Liu Xin up into the air, and the world spun madly about him. A mess of stones and crossties were thrown by the blast, and he saw a tramcar hurtle out of the flames, spit out of the entrance like an apple core. He landed heavily on the ground as rock rained down on him, and it felt as if each was coated in blood. He heard more deep rumbles, the sound of the explosives detonating in the mine. Before he lost consciousness, he saw the fire at the entrance disappear, replaced by thick clouds of smoke….

He walked as if through hell. Clouds of black smoke covered the sky, rendering the sun a barely visible disk of dark red. Static electricity from dust friction meant the smoke flickered with lightning, which lit up the hills above the ground fire with a blue light, exposing the image indelibly onto Liu Xin’s mind. Smoke issued from shaft openings that dotted the hills, the bottom of each column glowing a savage dark red from the ground fire before gradually blackening farther up the columns that swirled snakelike into the heavens.

The road was bumpy, and the blacktop surface was melted enough that with every few steps it almost peeled the soles off his shoes. Refugees and their vehicles packed the roadway, all of them in masks against the stifling sulfurous air and the snowflake-like ash that fell endlessly and turned their bodies white. Fully-armed soldiers kept order on the crowded road, and a helicopter cut through the smoke overhead, calling through a loudspeaker for no one to panic…. The exodus had begun in the winter and was initially planned to be completed in one year, but a sudden intensification of the ground fire meant they had to proceed more urgently. Chaos reigned. The court had repeatedly delayed Liu Xin’s hearing, but this morning he had been left unguarded in the detention center and had made his way uncertainly outside.

The land around the road was parched and fractured into fissures filled with the same thick dust that billowed around him. A small pond steamed, its surface crammed with floating corpses of fish and frogs. It was the height of summer, but no stitch of green was visible. Grass was withered yellow and buried under dust. The trees were dead as well, and some were even smoking, their charcoal branches reaching toward the evening sky like grotesque hands. Smoke wafted from some of the windows of the empty buildings. He saw an astonishing number of rats, driven from their nests by the fire’s heat, crossing the road in waves.

As he went farther into the hills, the heat became even more palpable, rising up around his ankles, and the air more choked and dirty.

Even through his mask it was hard to breathe. The fire’s heat was not evenly distributed, and he instinctively skirted the most scorching places. It left him few paths. Where the fire was particularly fierce, the buildings had caught flame, and there were periodic crashes as structures collapsed.

He had reached the mine entrances. He walked past a vertical shaft, now more of a chimney, its enormous rig red-hot under the heat and emitting a sharp hiss that made his skin crawl. He had to detour around its surging heat. The separator building was enveloped in smoke, and the piles of coal behind it had been burning for days. They had melted into a single enormous chunk of glowing coal flickering with flames….

There was no one here. The soles of his feet were burning, the sweat had almost dried off his body, his difficulty breathing pushed him to the edge of shock, but his mind was clear. With his last ounce of strength he walked toward his destination. The mouth of the shaft, glowing red from the fire within, beckoned to him. He had made it. He smiled.

He turned in the direction of the production building. The roof might be smoking but it was not on fire, at least. He walked through the open door and entered the long changing room. Light from the shaft fire shining through the window filled the room with a hazy red glow and caused everything to shimmer, including the line of lockers. He walked along the long row, inspecting the numbers until he found the one he wanted.

He remembered it from his childhood: His father had just been appointed head of extraction, the wildest team, well-known for being hard to handle. Those rough young workers had been dismissive of his father at first, because of the way he had timidly asked for a detached locker door to be nailed back in place before their first prework meeting. The crew had mostly ignored him, apart from a few insults, but his father had said only, “Then give me some nails and I’ll put it up myself.” Someone tossed him a few nails, and he said, “And a hammer too.” This time they really ignored him. But then they suddenly fell quiet, and watched in awe as his father pressed the nails into the wood with a bare thumb. At once the atmosphere changed, and the workers lined up and listened respectfully to his father’s prework talk….

The locker wasn’t locked, and upon opening it, Liu Xin found it still contained clothes. He smiled again, at the thought of the miners who had used his father’s locker over the past two decades. He took out the clothes and put them on, first the thick work trousers, then the equally thick jacket. The uniform smeared with layers of mud and coal dust had a sharp odor of sweat and oil that was surprisingly familiar, and a sense of peace came over him.

He put on the boots, picked up the helmet, took the lantern out of the locker, wiped the dust off of it with his sleeve, and clipped it to the helmet. There were no batteries, so he looked in the next locker, which had one. He strapped the bulky lantern battery to his waist, then realized that it was drained: work had been halted for a year, after all. But he remembered where the lamp shop was, directly opposite the changing room, where in his youth female workers would spray the batteries with smoking sulfuric acid to charge them. That was impossible now; the lamp shop was shrouded in yellow sulfuric acid smoke. He solemnly put on the lamp-equipped helmet and walked over to a dust-covered mirror. There, in the flickering red light, he saw his father.

“Dad, I’ll go down below in your place,” he said with a smile, then strode out toward the smoking mouth of the shaft.

A helicopter pilot recalled later that during a low-altitude flyby of Shaft No. 2, a final sweep of the area, he thought he saw someone near the opening, a black silhouette against the red glow of the ground fire. The figure seemed to be heading down the shaft, but in the next instant there was only red light, and nothing else.

People really were dumb in the past, and they really had a tough time.

Do you know how I know? Today we visited the Mining Museum. What impressed me the most was this:

They had solid coal!

First, we had to put on weird clothing: there was a helmet, which had a light on it, connected by a wire to a rectangular object that we hung at our waists. I thought it was a computer at first (even if it was a little large), but it turned out to be a battery for the light. A battery that big could power a racing car, but they used it for a tiny light. We also put on tall rain boots. The teacher told us this was the uniform that early coal miners used for going down the mines. Someone asked what “down the mines” meant, and the teacher said we’d find out soon enough.

We boarded a metallic, small-gauge segmented vehicle, like an early train, only much smaller and powered by an overhead wire. The vehicle started up and soon we entered the black mouth of a cave. It was very dark inside, with only an occasional dim lamp above us. Our headlamps were weak as well, only enough to make out the faces right beside us. The wind was strong and whistled in our ears; it felt like we were dropping into an abyss.

“We’re going down the mine now, students!” the teacher said.

After a long while, the vehicle stopped. We passed from this relatively wide tunnel into a considerably thinner and smaller spur, and if not for my helmet, I would have knocked a few lumps in my head. Our headlamps created small patches of light but we couldn’t see anything clearly. Students shouted that they were scared.

After a while, the space opened up in front of us. Here the ceiling was supported by lots of columns. Opposite us, there were many points of light shining from lamps like the ones on our helmets. As we drew closer, I saw lots of people were at work, some of them making holes in the cave wall with a long-bore drill. The drills were powered by some sort of engine whose sound made my skin crawl. Other people with metal shovels were shoveling some sort of black material into railcars and leather satchels. Clouds of dust occasionally blocked them, and lanterns cast shafts of light through the dust.

“Students, we’re now in what’s called the ore zone. What you see is a scene of early mining work.”

A few miners came toward us. I knew they were holograms, so I didn’t move out of the way. Some of them passed through me, so I could see them very clearly, and I was astonished.

“Did China hire black people to mine coal?”

“To answer that question,” the teacher said, “we’ll have a real experience of the air of the ore zone. Please take out your breathing masks from your bags.”

We put on our masks, and heard the teacher say, “Please remember that this is real, not a hologram.”

A cloud of black dust came toward us. In the beams from our headlamps I was shocked to see the thick cloud of particles sparkling. Then someone started to scream, and like a chorus, a lot of other kids screamed as well. I turned to laugh at them, but I, too, yelped when I got a look: Everyone was completely black, apart from the portion the masks covered. Then I heard another shout that turned my hair on end: It was the teacher’s voice!

“My god, Seya! You don’t have your mask on!”

Seya hadn’t put on his mask, and now he was as completely black as the holographic miners. “You said over and over in history class that the key goal was to get a feel for the past. I wanted a real feel!” he said, his teeth flashing white on his black face.

An alarm sounded somewhere, and within a minute, a teardrop-shaped micro-hovercar stopped soundlessly in front of us, an unpleasant intrusion of something modern. Two doctors got out. By now, all of the real coal dust had been sucked away, leaving only the holographic dust floating around us, so their white coats stayed spotless as they passed through it. They pulled Seya off to the car.

“Child,” one doctor said, looking straight into his eyes. “Your lungs have been seriously harmed. You’ll have to be hospitalized for at least a week. We’ll notify your parents.”

“Wait!” Seya shouted, his hands fumbling with the rebreather. “Did miners a hundred years ago wear these?”

“Shut your mouth and go to the hospital,” the teacher said. “Why can’t you ever just follow the rules?”

“We’re human, just like our ancestors. Why…”

Seya was shoved into the car before he could finish. “This is the first time the museum has had this kind of accident,” a doctor said severely, pointing at the teacher and adding, before getting into the hovercar, “This falls on you!” The hovercar left as silently as it had come.

We continued our tour. The chastened teacher said, “Every kind of work in the mine was fraught with danger, and required enormous physical energy. For example, these iron supports had to be retrieved after extraction in this zone was completed, in a process called support removal.”

We saw a miner with an iron hammer striking an iron pin in one of the supports, buckling it in two. Then he carried it off. Me and a boy tried to pick up another support that was lying on the ground, but it was ridiculously heavy. “Support removal was a dangerous job, since the roof overhead could collapse at any time…”

Above our heads came scraping sounds, and I looked up and saw, in the light of the mining lanterns, a fissure open up in the rock where the support had just been removed. Before I had time to react, it fell in, and huge chunks of holographic stone fell through me to the ground with a loud crash. Everything vanished in a cloud of dust.

“This accident is called a cave-in,” the teacher’s voice sounded beside me. “Be careful. Harmful stones don’t always come from up above.”

Before she even finished, a section of rock wall next to us toppled over, falling a fair distance in a single piece, as if a giant hand from the ground had pushed it over, before finally breaking up and raining down as individual stones. We were buried under holographic rocks with a crash, and our headlamps went out. Through the darkness and screams, I heard the teacher’s voice again.

“That was a methane outburst. Methane is a gas that builds to immense pressure when sealed in a coal seam. What we saw just now was what happens when the rock walls of the work zone can’t hold back that pressure and are blown out.”

The lights came back on, and we all exhaled. Then I heard a strange sound, at times as loud as galloping horses, sometimes soft and deep, like giants whispering.

“Look out, children! A flood is coming!”

We were still processing what she said when a broad surge of water erupted from a tunnel not far away. It quickly swamped the entire work zone. The murky water reached our knees, and then was waist-high. It reflected the light of our headlamps to shine indistinct patterns on the rocky ceiling. Wooden beams stained black with coal dust floated by, and miners’ helmets and lunch boxes…. When the water reached my chin, I instinctively held my breath. Then I was entirely underwater, and all I could see was a murky brown where my headlamp shone, and air bubbles that sometimes floated up.

“Mine floods have many causes. Whether it’s groundwater, or if the mine has dug into a surface water source, it’s far more life-threatening than a flood above ground,” the teacher said over the sound of the water.

The holographic water vanished and our surroundings returned to normal. Then I noticed an odd-looking object, like a big metal toad puffing out its stomach. It was huge and heavy. I pointed it out to the teacher.

“That’s an anti-explosion switch. Since methane is a highly flammable gas, the switch suppresses the electric sparks that ordinary switches create. That’s related to what we’ll see next, the most terrifying mining danger of all…”

There was another loud crash, but unlike the previous two times, it seemed to come from within us, bursting through our eardrums to the outside, as huge waves contracted our every cell, and in the searing waves of heat, we were plunged into a red glow emitted from the air around us that filled every inch of space in the mine. Then the glow disappeared, and everything plunged into darkness.

“Few people have actually seen a methane explosion, since it’s hard to survive one in the mines.” The teacher’s disembodied voice echoed in the darkness.

“Why did people used to come to such a terrible place?” a student asked.

“For this,” the teacher said, holding a chunk of black rock into the light from our headlamps, where its innumerable facets sparkled. That was the first time I saw solid coal.

“Children, what we just saw was a mid-twentieth-century coal mine. There were a few new machines and technologies after that, such as hydraulic struts and huge shearers, which went into use in the last two decades of the century and improved conditions somewhat for the workers, but coal mines remained an incredibly dangerous, awful working environment. Until…”

It turned dull after that. The teacher lectured us on the history of gasified coal, which was put to use eighty years ago, when oil was nearly exhausted and major powers mobilized troops to seize the remaining oil fields. The Earth was on the brink of war, but it was gasified coal that saved the world…. We all knew this, so it was boring.

Then we toured a modern mine. Nothing special, just all those pipes we see every day, leading out from underground into the distance, although it was the first time I went inside a central control building and saw a hologram of the burn. It was huge. And we saw the neutrino sensors and gravity-wave radar monitoring the underground fire, and laser drills… all pretty boring, too.

The teacher recounted the history of the mine, and said that over a century ago, it had been destroyed in an uncontrolled fire that burned for eighteen years before going out. In those days our beautiful city was a wasteland where smoke blotted out the sky, and all the people had left. There were many stories of the cause of the fire; some people said it had been started by an underground weapons test, and others said it was connected to Greenpeace.

We don’t have to be nostalgic for the so-called good old days. Life in those days was dangerous and confusing. But we shouldn’t be depressed about today, either. Because today will one day be referred to as the good old days.

People really were stupid in the past, and they really had a tough time.

1 The Ministry of Coal Industries was abolished in 1998, some of its functions replaced by the State Administration for Coal Industries.

2 The highest of eight working-class wage levels adopted nationwide in the 1950s.