Battlefield Earth (39 page)

A light shone down from the present edge and confirmed it. The fissure, thirty feet back from the old edge, had simply opened in the earthquake and fallen into the gorge.

The cliff face was no longer overhanging but sloped up toward them.

In the light, the wide edge of the broken-off quartz lode was visible. It was pure white. No gold in the remaining vein. The pocket of gold was gone!

But Jonnie was thinking right now of the crew. They had not reached the fissure, for the avalanche had exposed no tunnel.

They were somehow trapped under them, if they were still alive.

Jonnie raced back to the shaft edge. It yawned blackly, a large circle of emptiness, silent. The shaft was about a hundred feet deep.

He looked around, flashing his light. “The hoist! Where is the hoist?”

The entire apparatus used to take out ore and lower and raise men was missing.

Lights played down the mountain. It was not on the slope.

Jonnie approached the hole more closely. Then he saw the slide marks of the cross timbers that had supported the hoist cage over the hole.

The hoist was down there in the shaft.

“Be very quiet, everyone,” said Jonnie. Then he bent over and cupped his hands and shouted down, “Down there! Is any one alive?” They listened.

“I thought I heard something,” said the parson, who had come along.

Jonnie tried again. They listened. They could not be sure. Jonnie turned on his belt radio and spoke into it. No answer. He saw Angus in the rescue team. “Angus! Drop an intercom on a cable down into that hole.”

While Angus and two others were doing that, Jonnie pulled a picto-recorder out of the rescue gear. He found more cable and extended its leads.

Angus had rigged and lowered the intercom. Jonnie signaled to the parson. The place was broadly lit now with lamps the relief crew had put on poles. The parson’s hand was shaking as he held the intercom mike.

“Hello the mine!” said the parson.

The intercom mike down there should pick up voices if there was any reply. There wasn’t.

“Keep trying,” said Jonnie. He paid out the line of the picto-recorder and lowered it into the hole. Robert the Fox stepped forward from the relief group and took charge of the portable screen.

At first there was just the shaft wall sliding by as the picto-recorder went down. Then a piece of timber, then a tangle of cable. Then the hoist!

Jonnie rotated the cable and shifted the remote control to wide-angle.

The hoist was empty.

A sigh of relief joined the night wind as the tense group saw that no one had been killed in the hoist.

Jonnie worked the remote to look over the hoist. It was hard to tell, but it did not appear there was anybody crushed under the fallen hoist.

The picto-recorder swung idly on its cable ninety feet below them. Eyes strained at the viewscreen, begging it for data.

“No drift hole!” said Jonnie. “The drift hole isn’t visible! When the hoist fell it caved in the entrance to the drift down there!”

Pressing a flying platform into service, they flew a three-man crew down to the bottom of the drift. Robert the Fox wouldn’t let Jonnie go down on it.

One of the men dropped down from the platform and fixed lifting hooks into the cage cable and they pulled it back up to the top of the hole.

They rigged a crane, pulleys, and a winch, and thirty-three minutes later- clocked by the historian who also had sneaked aboard the relief plane- they had the hoist out of the shaft and sitting off to the side.

Jonnie put the picto-recorder back down and it confirmed his guess. The shaft end of the level drift down there was blocked, knocked shut when the hoist fell.

They rigged buckets to crane cable and very shortly they had four men down at the bottom. Jonnie ignored Robert and went this time.

They tore at the rocks with their hands, filling up buckets that shot aloft to be replaced by empty ones. More tools and welcome sledges came down.

Two hours went by. They changed three of the men twice. Jonnie stayed down there.

They worked in a blur of speed. The rattle of rocks and thud of sledges freeing them resounded in the dusty hole bottom. The rockfall was thicker than they had hoped.

Two feet into the drift. Three feet. Four feet. Five feet. Maybe the whole drift had collapsed!

They changed crews. Jonnie stayed down there.

Three hours and sixteen minutes after their arrival at the bottom, Jonnie heard a distant whisper of sound. He held up his hand for silence. “In the mine!” he shouted.

Very faintly it came back: “…air hole…” “Repeat!” shouted Jonnie. It came back, “…make…”

Jonnie grabbed a long mine drill. He looked for the thinnest place he could imagine in the white rock wall before him, socked the rock drill point into it, and signaled the man on the drill motor. “Let her spin!”

They bucked the drill into it with the pressure handles. The others would hear it in there and get out of the way.

With a high scream the drill went through.

They dragged it out.

“Air hose!” yelled Jonnie. And they fed the hose through the drill hole and turned the air compressor on. Air from the drift squealed back past the sides of the hose and into the rescue crew’s faces.

Twenty-one minutes later they had the top of the rockfall cleared and could drag men out.

They had to drop the gap farther to get the last one. It was Dunneldeen and he had a broken ankle and broken ribs.

Seventeen men, only one with a serious injury.

They passed them to the top silently in the hoist buckets.

A dust- and sweat-covered Jonnie was the last one up. The parson threw a blanket around him. The salvaged crew were bundled up, sitting in the snow, most of them drinking something hot that one of the old women had sent in a huge jug. The parson had finished setting the ankle of Dunneldeen and, helped by Robert the Fox, was taping up the ribs.

Finally Thor said, “We lost the lode.” Nobody said anything.

     With dawn making a faint, pale line in the east, Jonnie looked down into the abyss.

The pure white lode showed not the slightest trace of gold. It was in plain sight.

When the recon drone came over, Terl would have a picture of this. Far, far below, as yet invisible in the darkness, a new fall of rock would tell the story.

Jonnie tried to guess Terl’s reaction. It was difficult to do so, for Terl was undoubtedly over his own edge into madness.

How many hours did Jonnie have until the drone? Not many.

The air was unaccountably still. The morning wind had not started up. The dawn light was reflected back from the surrounding majestic peaks.

Jonnie ran over to a flying platform and gestured to a pilot to join him. He lifted it up, put it over the edge of the chasm, and dropped it like a rocket to the bottom. He braked it and hovered.

Turning on the beam lights of the platform he examined the mass of fallen rock. Some of it had gone through the river ice. Some of it made

a new bank for the stream. He played the light through the debris. It was an enormous mass.

Hopefully, he looked for some slightest whiteness that would indicate a piece of the lode.

None!

A ton of gold perhaps. But now it was buried under a mountain of rock-fall, possibly even plunged into the river bottom.

The debris was so peaked and broken one couldn’t even land on it. He tossed around the idea of clearing a flat place. But it would take hours and the winds would be here soon.

He had to face it. The gold was gone.

The morning wind was beginning to blow now. He couldn’t stay down here

and live to tell about it. If he had another short period of morning quiet he might do something. But they’d used up their time.

He sent the flying platform screaming up to the cliff top. It was already being buffeted by turbulent air. He landed.

He told Robert the Fox, “Get these men back to the town.”

Jonnie walked back and forth. The parson looked at him in sympathy.

“We aren’t done yet, laddie,” said the parson. The whole group looked to be in the shock of disappointment.

Robert the Fox was looking at Jonnie. They were loading the saved crew and two pilots were at the controls of the plane. Dunneldeen was being eased gently aboard.

“I’m going to do it!” said Jonnie suddenly.

Robert the Fox and the parson walked over.

“Terl,” said Jonnie, “doesn’t know how close that drift was to the inside of the lode. He doesn’t know that we hadn’t already mined the back of it. If he sees that white quartz out there he’ll know we didn’t get to it before the slide. Thor!” he shouted. “How close were you to the fissure?”

Thor asked the shift leader and they did some calculations. “About five feet,” Thor finally shouted from the plane.

“I’ll blow it in,” said Jonnie. “It doesn’t matter now if we blast. I’m going to blow the last end of the drift so it looks like it was through! Take that plane back fast and get me explosives and a shot-holer gun!”

He rattled off the exact explosives needed and the plane with the salvaged crew vibrated, ready to take off.

“And bring in the next shift!” shouted Jonnie. “We’ve very little time till the recon drone pass-over. Fly fast!” It was daylight now and they could. The plane roared off the pad.

Jonnie didn’t wait for it to get back before he started to work. He went down the shaft, carrying some tools, got out of the bucket at the bottom, and made his way over the rubble and into the drift.

The crew’s equipment was still lying about. The lamps were still on. Jonnie picked up a drill and began to make six-inch-deep holes all around the extreme edges of the white quartz. Two Scots picked up other drills and began to help him when they saw what he was doing: he was putting in shot holes.

While he worked he had others of the rescue team clear the remaining equipment out of the drift and take it above. No reason to waste that. Only the shift radio had been smashed in the rockfall. This drift would never be used again and it might well blow to bits.

He was surprised the plane came back so fast. He was in radio contact with the surface and he told them what he wanted down there.

Very shortly the explosives arrived. He put powerful, molding explosive into each one of the shot holes. Then on top of that he put a giant concussion-fired blasting cap. On top of all that he packed neutral goo. It was rigged so it would blow outward toward the cliff face.

He went back up to the surface, talking on the radio as he was hoisted aloft. They had a harness and cable rigged and he went out to the cliff edge, shrugging into the harness. He ignored Robert the Fox’s request that somebody else do it; they had not used explosives that much and Jonnie knew them well.

Using a winch and safety wires, they lowered him over the edge. He found it very easy to go down the cliff face now that it was slightly inclined. He signaled when he was opposite the lode and they halted the lowering winch.

Bouncing himself about with his moccasins against the cliff, he looked for the pinhole. From inside he had put a very thin drill all the way through to the outside.

There was the tiny hole! It marked the top center of the inside ring of shot holes.

The shot-holer gun bounced down to him. This was the dicey part. The gun might set off the inside blast with concussion, and if it did he’d be blown off the cliff by the explosion. But he had no time to just drill.

He made a plaited cable of blasting cord. With the shot-holer set at minimum power he made holes for pins in the lode. Getting himself adjusted up and down by the winch and with a thousand feet of chasm gaping below him, he wound the blasting cord through the pins. Presently he had a big circle on the vein.

He fixed an electric firing wire to the cord and let it pay out as they reeled him up.

He was pressed for time. It would be at most half an hour before the recon drone came over and the smoke must be cleared.

The firing wire was run to the plane. He made everyone including himself get into the plane in case more cliff went.

“Stand by!” he shouted.

He pressed the firing button.

Smoke and flame flashed on the cliff face. White quartz and country rock blasted toward the other wall of the canyon.

The ground shook.

No more cliff fell.

Jonnie took the plane up and into the height and position the recon drone would be.

They had a black hole in the cliff side.

It looked like the drift had reached the lode.

They landed again to look busy with equipment. The smoke of the blast dissipated in the mountain air.

The rumble of the drone grew louder in the distance.