The Final Encyclopedia

Chapter Eight

The skip dropped swiftly between the close, rough-cut rock walls, its interior lights illuminating the brown of their igneous rock, shot through with the occasional flicker of white that was the gold-bearing quartz. It was gold and sometimes silver that they dug for at the Yow Dee Mine, according to the information in Hal's employment papers. He tried to watch the swiftly passing rock to get a glimpse of whether the quartz he was seeing was indeed visibly veined with gold; but the skip was going down too quickly. He found himself up against the bars of the cage and, remembering John Heikkila's orders to stand away from these, stepped guiltily back.

He felt a hard jab in the center of his spine.

"Who in hell you think you're standing on, kip?"

He turned clumsily in his protective suit and found himself looking through his face shield at another face shield and the features of a lean, big-nosed man in not more than his early twenties, slightly shorter than Hal himself, with straight black hair and an angry expression.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I was just - "

"Sorry don't make it. Just stay off my foot."

Hal had not stepped on any foot. The years of exercises had trained him to be aware at all times of the balance of his own body and the character of what he supported himself on. If he had felt a foot beneath his own, he would have shifted clear of it instinctively before his weight had fully come down upon it. He stared into the other face, baffled; and stopped himself just before he protested that the other had imagined being stepped on.

"I will," he said.

The man growled something at him that was lost in its passage through the speaker valve of his suit and the pickups of Hal's. Hal backed a few inches toward the bars and the other turned away.

The skip's floor began to press up against their feet as its descent slowed. It came to a stop, and the gates by which they had entered it swung open. Following the other miners, the last one out because he had been farthest from the gates, Hal stepped from the overhead gloom of the skip shaft into a large, brilliantly-lit, high-ceilinged chamber that seemed to be the terminal for a number of trains of small cars, each train pointing through one of the many openings in the circular wall of the chamber. The crowd that had filled the skip was now breaking up into smaller groups, each heading toward a different train of waiting cars, in a general mutter of conversation, from which he was sharply conscious of being apart. Some of the cars were already filled with miners from what must be previous skip-loads. With some relief, Hal saw that the black-haired individual who had complained about being stepped on in the skip was headed toward a partly-loaded train beside which Will Nanne waited.

Hal woke suddenly to the fact that he was being left alone by the skip. He looked for John Heikkila and located him, finally, heading with a contingent of miners toward a string of six cars. Hal hurried to catch up.

By the time he did, the others were already climbing into the cars. These were little more than open metal boxes on soft-tired wheels, their four sides sloping outward from above those wheels; wheels, sides and all painted green. Hal was the last to board of the twelve miners who apparently made up the Heikkila team, with the exception of John himself, who had stood frowning by the head car as everyone else climbed in.

"Come on, Tad!" he called, now. "Work-time's counting."

Hal climbed into the next to the last car, which he had to himself, the other miners in John's team having filled the first four cars, with the exception of a space for John in the first car. John, seeing Hal in, climbed in himself, and with a chorus of metallic clankings the train of cars jerked into movement without any command from John that Hal could make out.

They trundled into one of the openings, which turned out to be the end of a tunnel. Here, the sounds of their travel picked up, echoing into a roar cast back by the close rock walls. The floor of the car Hal was in bumped and jibed under him. The tunnel floor was plainly level, but not smooth, as the floor of the larger, terminal chamber had been; and the cars were without springs. Hal, who had sat down unthinkingly in his car, hastily moved to imitate the other miners in the cars ahead, whom he now saw were squatting, knees under their chins. This was a more comfortable, if less balanced way to travel, and he found that it paid to cross his arms and press his hands against the sides of the car to brace himself.

All the same, the ride was fascinating. Now that they were well into the tunnel, the train of cars was picking up speed. They swayed and lurched thunderously along between rocky walls, here less than two meters apart, their way illuminated every ten meters or so by what looked like thousand-year lights stuck to the naked rock of the ceiling, another two meters overhead. Once more, Hal searched the rock to see if he could see any signs of visible gold in the quartz veining. But here, he was not even able to discover any streaks of the quartz itself. He strained his eyes through the window of his suit - and suddenly became aware that in the cars ahead of him all the others had the hoods of their suits thrown back.

He hesitated, remembering Tonina's warning about taking off his helmet, then reminded himself she had been talking about not exposing himself to possibly lethal gases when the other miners were using their torches. Here in the tunnel it ought to be safe, since all the others had theirs off. He threw his own headgear back and peered at the passing rock. But it still appeared as he had seen it through the window of the suit. There was no veining of quartz visible in the granite of the rock.

But it was a relief to have the hood off. The air blowing past his face with the movement of their passage was cold and damp with a faintly musty, acidic smell. He began to have some notion of what it was going to be like to work and sweat sealed in his suit, if this was the way he felt after only a matter of minutes in it, with no exertion.

But there was an eeriness, a magic to being underground like this, rolling through the tunnelled rock at a speed that seemed to threaten to scrape them against the walls on curves. He thought of the story of Peer Gynt in the hall of the Mountain King, from the long poem by Henrik Ibsen; and the music Edvard Grieg had written for that scene thundered and pounded in his memory over the hum of the tires on the rock and the metallic clanking and creaking of the connected cars as they fled down the tunnel.

The cars of the train turned off abruptly into a narrower tunnel. They clanked along another short distance at reduced speed, then came out into a slightly enlarged area where a ramp led from the level they were on to another level about a meter and a half higher, like one step of a giant stairs. The cars rolled up the ramp, straight ahead for a few feet, then up another ramp, and so continued, mounting or descending ramps at small intervals until they stopped so suddenly that Hal was thrown against the front end of his car.

Ahead of the front car they seemed to have come to a solid wall of granite; but since everyone in the cars ahead was getting out, Hal could not be sure at first glance. He climbed out himself and went forward to discover that the front car had come to a stop with its front wheels almost touching a meter and a half rise of rock. It was another of the giant stairsteps, but this time there was no ramp rising to it, and the space at its top barely gave standing room before it reached a wall of stone scored up and down and crosswise until it looked as if someone had made a clumsy attempt at a vertical chessboard.

In an untidy pile at the foot of the meter-and-a-half step were various tools, which the other members of the team were already taking up. Hal watched curiously. Most of the tools were stubby, thick-bodied devices like handguns with thick, short barrels, which Hal guessed to be the torches Tonina Wayles had spoken of; and what seemed to be an equal number of prosthetic-like apparatuses, fitted onto a left-handed glove with the fingers ending in five long, metal spines which curved inward until their points almost touched.

These made no sense. Then, Hal saw those who had put them on beginning to manipulate them. The spines spread open and closed, apparently independently of any action by the gloved fingers. In some cases their needle-sharp points glowed cherry red for a second, then white, then dulled back to ordinary metal color. Each of the miners who put these on tested them several times, looking like creatures half-human, half-insect, groping at thin air; then climbed up onto the step of rock and faced the scored wall.

The rest of the team, except for the six now on the ledge and John Heikkila, had gone back past Hal about ten meters down the tunnel and sat down with their helmets thrown back. John, standing by the front car below the ledge, looked about and saw Hal.

"All right, kip!" he said. "Over here!"

Hal went forward to him, wondering.

"Put your helmet on. Keep it on."

In spite of himself, Hal glanced back at the six other team members who were sitting with their backs to the rock and talking, farther back in the tunnel. He put the helmet on and John's voice came to him through the earphones of his head-covering with the slight unnaturalness of sounds heard over the phone circuits between the two closed suits.

"You don't know anything about this, do you, Thornhill?"

"No," said Hal.

"All right. Your job's to muck out while the torches are working." John reached up and closed his own helmet over his head. Up on the ledge, the six torch-bearers had had their helmets closed for some time. They were standing looking down at John and Hal, obviously waiting.

"Ordinarily, I'd be up there with the first shift with the torches," John said. "But I'll stay down here with you until you get the hang of it. Now, the blocks are going to come off the ledge as they cut them out, until the ledge gets wide enough so they can't sling them all the way back off the edge. When that happens, we'll cut a ramp and you'll be going up to work right behind the torchers. But for now, the blocks'll be coming off the stops to you, and you want to keep your feet out from under. You understand?" He paused.

Hal nodded.

"Yes," he said.

"All right. The other thing to look out for is that the blocks'll still be hot when they come. So don't try to handle them except with tongs. These are tongs…"

He picked up a couple of the spined apparatuses.

"Hold out your hands."

Hal did, and John pushed one of the devices onto the end of each of Hal's gloves. There was a hand-shaped indentation in the end of each device, Hal discovered, into which his suit glove fitted; thumb, forefinger, middle finger, and the last two fingers as a unit - each slipped into one of the four indentations. Experimentally, he flexed the fingers of his right hand and the four clawlike extensions spread and closed in response.

"Waldos," he said.

"No, they're tongs," said John. "Now you use them to pick up the blocks. Watch me. All right, Torchers, get moving!"

He was fitting a pair of the devices onto the gloves of his own suit as he spoke. He barely had them on before the hiss and crackle of the torches burning into the rock exploded up on the ledge; and a moment or two later one of the torchers kicked a block of granite about the size of a grapefruit back over the edge to fall almost at Hal's feet. Easily, John scooped it up in the four pincers of his tongs. He held it out before Hal.

"Don't touch it," he said. "Just look at it. See the vein in it?"

Hal looked. He could see a line of quartz streaking through the piece of granite.

"Is there gold in that?" he asked, fascinated.

"You're damn right," said John, "and probably some silver, but you can't see traces of that. Look, you see the color in the quartz, there?"

Hal squinted at the quartz, uncertain as to what he should be looking for.

"I think so," he said. John tossed the block into the first car.

"You'll learn," he said.

Several more chunks of rock carved from the wall had landed at their feet while they had been talking. John scooped them up, showed them momentarily to Hal and then tossed them into the car. The next one, however, he again held out to Hal for more extended examination.

"See?" he said. "No veining. Those you ditch."

With a flip of his tongs, he threw the last block over against the wall of the tunnel.

"That's sorting," he said, continuing to work steadily now, for now the blocks were coming in a continuous stream off the ledge. "It'll take you a while to learn it, but you'll get it. The team only gets paid for the good ore it brings back. Any dead rock just takes up space in the cars and cuts our production for the day. But don't sweat it to begin with. Just do the best you can for now. The quicker you learn, though, the better off the team's going to be and the more the rest of us are going to like you. Now, you try it with some of these blocks."

Hal tried it. It took no great skill to learn to use the tongs, though it was a little tricky at first, getting a good grip on the blocks without the feeling in his fingers to guide him; and the waldo controls into which his gloves fitted were so responsive that he overcontrolled at first. But within a dozen minutes he was picking up the blocks with fair skill and dropping them into the cars. Sorting, however, was another matter. Whenever he paused to examine the blocks closely, John snapped at him to keep going.

While he was learning, John kept helping him. But Hal picked up speed in handling the blocks swiftly, although he was very aware that he was still rejecting only about one block in ten, whereas John was rejecting more like one in five. Still, the team leader seemed satisfied with just his handling ability; and gradually he let Hal take over more and more of the work until finally he himself was only standing and watching.

"All right," he said at last. "Just keep doing it that way. But take a break now and we'll change crews."

He turned and called up at the crew on the ledge.

"Change!"

The torches hissed and crackled down into silence. Those on the ledge dropped off it and those who had been seated back in the tunnel came forward, pulling their helmets into place and taking the torches from the first workers, climbing up on the ledge to take their place. This time, John was among the torchers, his own helmet pulled into position. He paused for a second, looking over his shoulder, down at Hal.

"Keep your helmet on, until I tell you to take it off," he said. "You hear that?"

"Yes," said Hal.

"All right!" John turned to face the wall and the rest of his crew turned with him. "Let's go!"

So the workshift began. At first Hal sweated over the prospect of handling the stream of blocks without John to back him up. But if there was anything at all in which life had supplied him with experience, it was the process of learning anything new. He quickly became practiced at seizing the blocks firmly with the tongs, so that they did not slip from his grasp or skitter out of reach when he tried to lift them into the cars; and after a while even his choice of the ore-filled blocks, as opposed to those that should be discarded, seemed to improve.

As the shift wore on, the torchers themselves picked up speed. Hal had to struggle anew to not let the blocks coming off the ledge get ahead of him. He succeeded, becoming faster himself. But as he did, the unaccustomed use of the muscles involved in bending and lifting began to build up on him.

Fortunately, he had a chance to stop and catch his breath every fifteen minutes or so when the crews changed. But even with these breaks, as the first half of the shift wore on he began to tire and slow. The lunch break came just in time to save him from getting badly behind the torchers, but food and rest revived him. He started out the second half of the shift keeping up almost easily; but this burst of strength turned out to be temporary. He tired more quickly now than he had in the morning; and to his deep embarrassment the blocks finally got ahead of him to the point where even by working right through a break time, he was losing ground to the torchers.

Sweating, gasping for air inside his suit, he looked longingly every so often at the miners at the rock wall, whom he could see occasionally throwing back their helmets for a brief breath of fresher air. A hundred times he was tempted to lift his own helmet for a second, but the discipline worked into him in his early years helped him to fight off the temptation. Nonetheless, he was literally staggering on his feet, when he finally felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see John standing beside him.