First Lensman, page 23
part #2 of Lensman Series
“Wright!” he bellowed, the echoes resounding deafeningly all up and down the narrow tube. “You up there ahead of me?”
“Yeah!” that worthy bellowed back.
“More men left than I thought—how many—half of ’em?”
“Just about.”
“Good. Sort out the ones you got up there by trades.” Then, when he had emerged into the now brilliantly illuminated stope, “Where are the timber-pimps?”
“Over there.”
“Rustle timbers. Whatever you can find and wherever you find it, grab it and bring it up here. Get some twelve-inch steel, too, six feet long. Timbermen, grab that stuff off of the face and start your staging right here. You muckers, rig a couple of skoufers to throw muck to bury the base and checkerwork up to the hanging wall. Doze a sluiceway down into that waste pocket there, so we won’t clog ourselves up. Work fast, fellows, but make it solid—you know the load it’ll have to carry and what will happen if it gives.”
They knew. They knew what they had to do and did it; furiously, but with care and precision.
“How wide a sag you figurin’ on, Supe?” the boss timberman asked. “Eight foot checkerwork to the hangin,’ anyway, huh?”
“Yes. I’ll let you know in a minute.”
The surveyor came in. “Forty one minutes is my best guess.”
“From when?”
“From the time the pump failed.”
“That was four minutes ago—nearer five. And five more before we can start cutting. Forty one less ten is thirty one. Thirty one into sixty nine point two goes. …”
“Two point two three feet per minute, my slip-stick says.”
“Thanks. Wright, what would you say is the biggest sag we can cut in this kind of rock at two and a quarter feet a minute?”
“Um … m … m.” The miner scratched his whiskery chin. “That’s a tough one, boss. You’ll hafta figure damn close to a hundred pounds of air to the foot on plain cuttin’—that’s two hundred and a quarter. But without a burley to pimp for ’er, a rotary can’t take that kind of air—she’ll foul herself to a standstill before she cuts a foot. An’ with a burley riggin’ she’s got to make damn near a double cut—seven foot inside figger—so any way you look at it you ain’t goin’ to cut no two foot to the minute.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t check my figures, but you do. So we’ll cut five feet. Saw your timbers accordingly. We’ll hold that burley by hand.”
Wright shook his head dubiously. “We don’t want to die down here any more than you do, boss, so we’ll do our damndest—but how in hell do you figure you can hold her to her work?”
“Rig a yoke. Cut a stretcher up for canvas and padding. It’ll pound, but a man can stand almost anything, in short enough shifts, if he’s got to or die.”
And for a time—two minutes, to be exact, during which the rotary chewed up and spat out a plug of rock over five feet deep—things went very well indeed. Two men, instead of the usual three, could run the rotary; that is, they could tend the complicated pneumatic walking jacks which not only oscillated the cutting demon in a geometrical path, but also rammed it against the face with a steadily held and enormous pressure, even while climbing almost vertically upward under a burden of over twenty thousand pounds.
An armored hand waved a signal—voice was utterly useless—up! A valve was flipped; a huge, flat, steel foot arose; a timber slid into place, creaking and groaning as that big flat foot smashed down. Up—again! Up—a third time! Eighteen seconds—less than one-third of a minute—ten inches gained!
And, while it was not easy, two men could hold the burley—in one-minute shifts. As has been intimated, this machine “pimped” for the rotary. It waited on it, ministering to its every need with a singleness of purpose impossible to any except robotic devotion. It picked the rotary’s teeth, it freed its linkages, it deloused its ports, it cleared its spillways of compacted debris, it even—and this is a feat starkly unbelievable to anyone who does not know the hardness of neocarballoy and the tensile strength of ultra-special steels—it even changed, while in full operation, the rotary’s diamond-tipped cutters.
Both burley and rotary were extremely efficient, but neither was either quiet or gentle. In their quietest moments they shrieked and groaned and yelled, producing a volume of sound in which nothing softer than a cannon-shot could have been heard. But when, in changing the rotary’s cutting teeth, the burley’s “fingers” were driven into and through the solid rock—a matter of merest routine to both machines—the resultant blasts of sound cannot even be imagined, to say nothing of being described.
And always both machines spewed out torrents of rock, in sizes ranging from impalpable dust up to chunks as big as a fist.
As the sag lengthened and the checkerwork grew higher, the work began to slow down. They began to lose the time they had gained. There were plenty of men, but in that narrow bore there simply was not room for enough men to work. Even through that storm of dust and hurtling rock the timbermen could get their blocking up there, but they could not place it fast enough—there were too many other men in the way. One of them had to get out. Since one man could not possibly run the rotary, one man would have to hold the burley.
They tried it, one after another. No soap. It hammered them flat. The rotary, fouled in every tooth and channel and vent under the terrific thrust of two hundred thirty pounds of air, merely gnawed and slid. The timbermen now had room—but nothing to do. And Jones, who had been biting at his mustache and ignoring the frantic walkie-talkie for minutes, stared grimly at watch and tape. Three minutes left, and over eight feet to go.
“Gimme that armor!” he rasped, and climbed the blocks. “Open the air wide open—give ’er the whole two-fifty! Get down, Mac—I’ll take it the rest of the way!”
He put his shoulders to the improvised yoke, braced his feet, and heaved. The burley, screaming and yelling and clamoring, went joyously to work—both ways—God, what punishment! The rotary, free and clear, chewed rock more viciously than ever. An armored hand smote his leg. Lift! He lifted that foot, set it down two inches higher. The other one. Four inches. Six. One foot. Two. Three. Lord of the ancients! Was this lifetime of agony only one minute? Or wasn’t he holding her—had the damn thing stopped cutting? No, it was still cutting—the rocks were banging against and bouncing off of his helmet as viciously and as numerously as ever; he could sense, rather than feel, the furious fashion in which the relays of timbermen were laboring to keep those high-stepping jacks in motion.
No, it had been only one minute. Twice that long yet to go. God! Nothing could be that brutal—a bull elephant couldn’t take it—but by all the gods of space and all the devils in hell, he’d stay with it until that sag broke through. And grimly, doggedly, toward the end nine-tenths unconsciously, Lensman Conway Costigan stayed with it.
And in the stope so far below, a new and highly authoritative voice blared from the speaker.
“Jones! God damn it, Jones, answer me! If Jones isn’t there, somebody else answer me—anybody!”
“Yes, sir?” Wright was afraid to answer that peremptory call, but more afraid not to.
“Jones? This is Clancy.”
“No, sir. Not Jones. Wright, sir—top miner.”
“Where’s Jones?”
“Up in the sag, sir. He’s holding the burley—alone.”
“Alone! Hell’s purple fires! Tell him to—how many men has he got on the rotary?”
“Two, sir. That’s all they’s room for.”
“Tell him to quit it—put somebody else on it—I won’t have him killed, damn it!”
“He’s the only one strong enough to hold it, sir, but I’ll send up word.” Word went up via sign language, and came back down. “Beggin’ your pardon, sir, but he says to tell you to go to hell, sir. He won’t have no time for chitchat, he says, until this goddam sag is through or the juice goes off, sir.”
A blast of profanity erupted from the speaker, of such violence that the thoroughly scared Wright threw the walkie-talkie down the waste-chute, and in the same instant the rotary crashed through.
Dazed, groggy, barely conscious from his terrific effort, Jones stared owlishly through the heavy, steel-braced lenses of his helmet while the timbermen set a few more courses of wood and the rotary walked itself and the clinging burley up and out of the hole. He climbed stiffly out, and as he stared at the pillar of light flaring upward from the sag, his gorge began to rise.
“Wha’s the idea of that damn surveyor lying to us like that?” he babbled. “We had oodles an’ oodles of time—didn’t have to kill ourselves—damn water ain’t got there yet—wha’s the big. …” He wobbled weakly, and took one short step, and the lights went out. The surveyor’s estimate had been impossibly, accidentally close. They had had a little extra time; but it was measured very easily in seconds.
And Jones, logical to the end in a queerly addled way, stood in the almost palpable darkness, and wobbled, and thought. If a man couldn’t see anything with his eyes wide open, he was either blind or unconscious. He wasn’t blind, therefore he must be unconscious and not know it. He sighed, wearily and gratefully, and collapsed.
Battery lights were soon reconnected, and everybody knew that they had holed through. There was no more panic. And, even before the shift-boss had recovered full consciousness, he was walking down the drift toward Station Eleven.
There is no need to enlarge upon the rest of that grim and grisly affair. Level after level was activated; and, since working upward in mines is vastly faster than working downward, the two parties met on the Eighth Level. Half of the men who would otherwise have died were saved, and—much more important from the viewpoint of Uranium, Inc.—the deeper and richer half of the biggest and richest uranium mine in existence, instead of being out of production for a year or more, would be back in full operation in a couple of weeks.
And George Washington Jones, still a trifle shaky from his ordeal, was called into the front office. But before he arrived:
“I’m going to make him Assistant Works Manager,” Clancy announced.
“I think not.”
“But listen, Mr. Isaacson—please! How do you expect me to build up a staff if you snatch every good man I find away from me?”
“You didn’t find him. Birkenfeld did. He was here only on a test. He is going into Department Q.”
Clancy, who had opened his mouth to continue his protests, shut it wordlessly. He knew that department Q was—
Department Q.
XV
Costigan was not surprised to see the man he had known as Birkenfeld in Uranium’s ornate conference room. He had not expected, however, to see Isaacson. He knew, of course, that Spaceways owned Uranium, Inc., and the planet Eridan, lock, stock, and barrel; but it never entered his modest mind that his case would be of sufficient importance to warrant the personal attention of the Big Noise himself. Hence the sight of that suave and unrevealing face gave the putative Jones a more than temporary qualm. Isaacson was top-bracket stuff, ’way out of his class. Virgil Samms ought to be taking this assignment, but since he wasn’t—
But instead of being an inquisition, the meeting was friendly and informal from the start. They complimented him upon the soundness of his judgment and the accuracy of his decisions. They thanked him, both with words and with a considerable sum of expendable credits. They encouraged him to talk about himself, but there was nothing whatever of the star-chamber or of cross-examination. The last question was representative of the whole conference.
“One other thing, Jones, has me slightly baffled,” Isaacson said, with a really winning smile. “Since you do not drink, and since you were not in search of feminine … er … companionship, just why did you go down to Roaring Jack’s dive?”
“Two reasons,” Jones said, with a somewhat shamefaced grin. “The minor one isn’t easy to explain, but … well, I hadn’t been having an exactly easy time of it on Earth … you all know about that, I suppose?”
They knew.
“Well, I was taking a very dim view of things in general, and a good fight would get it out of my system. It always does.”
“I see. And the major reason?”
“I knew, of course, that I was on probation. I would have to get promoted, and fast, or stay sunk forever. To get promoted fast, a man can either be enough of a bootlicker to be pulled up from on high, or he can be shoved up by the men he is working with. The best way to get a crowd of hard-rock men to like you is to lick a few of ’em—off hours, of course, and according to Hoyle—and the more of ’em you can lick at once, the better. I’m pretty good at rough-and-tumble brawling, so I gambled that the cops would step in before I got banged up too much. I won.”
“I see,” Isaacson said again, in an entirely different tone. He did see, now. “The first technique is so universally used that the possibility of the second did not occur to me. Nice work—very nice.” He turned to the other members of the Board. “This, I believe, concludes the business of the meeting?”
For some reason or other Isaacson nodded slightly as he asked the question; and one by one, as though in concurrence, the others nodded in reply. The meeting broke up. Outside the door, however, the magnate did not go about his own business nor send Jones about his. Instead:
“I would like to show you, if I may, the aboveground part of our Works?”
“My time is yours, sir. I am interested.”
It is unnecessary here to go into the details of a Civilization’s greatest uranium operation; the storage bins, the grinders, the Wilfley tables and slime tanks, the flotation sluices, the roasters and reducers, the processes of solution and crystallization and recrystallization, of final oxidation and reduction. Suffice it to say that Isaacson showed Jones the whole immensity of Uranium Works Number One. The trip ended on the top floor of the towering Administration Building, in a heavily-screened room containing a desk, a couple of chairs, and a tremendously massive safe.
“Smoke up.” Isaacson indicated a package of Jones’ favorite brand of cigarettes and lighted a cigar. “You knew that you were under test. I wonder, though, if you knew how much of it was testing?”
“All of it.” Jones grinned. “Except for the big blow, of course.”
“Of course.”
“There were too many possibilities, of too many different kinds, too pat. I might warn you, though—I could have got away clear with that half-million.”
“The possibility existed.” Surprisingly, Isaacson did not tell him that the trap was more subtle than it had appeared to be. “It was, however, worth the risk. Why didn’t you?”
“Because I figure on making more than that, a little later, and I might live longer to spend it.”
“Sound thinking, my boy—really sound. Now—you noticed, of course, the vote at the end of the meeting?”
Jones had noticed it; and, although he did not say so, he had been wondering about it ever since. The older man strolled over to the safe and opened it, revealing a single, startlingly small package.
“You passed, unanimously; you are now learning what you have to know. Not that we trust you unreservedly. You will be watched for a long time, and before you can make one false step, you will die.”
“That would seem to be good business, sir.”
“Glad you look at it that way—we thought you would. You saw the Works. Quite an operation, don’t you think?”
“Immense, sir. The biggest thing I ever saw.”
“What would you say, then, to the idea of this office being our real headquarters, of that little package there being our real business?” He swung the safe door shut, spun the knob.
“It would have been highly surprising a couple of hours ago.” Costigan could not afford to appear stupid, nor to possess too much knowledge. He had to steer an extremely difficult middle course. “After the climax of this buildup, though, it wouldn’t seem at all impossible. Or that there were wheels—plenty of ’em!—within wheels.”
“Smart!” Isaacson applauded. “And what would you think might be in that package? This room is ray-proof.”
“Against anything the Galactic Patrol can swing?”
“Positively.”
“Well, then, it might be something beginning with the letter” he flicked two fingers, almost invisibly fast, into a T and went on without a break “M, as in morphine.”
“Your caution and restraint are commendable. If I had any remaining doubt as to your ability, it is gone.” He paused, frowning. As belief in ability increased, that in sincerity lessened. This doubt, this questioning, existed every time a new executive was initiated into the mysteries of Department Q. The Board’s judgment was good. They had slipped only twice, and those two errors had been corrected easily enough. The fellow had been warned once; that was enough. He took the plunge. “You will work with the Assistant Works Manager here until you understand the duties of the position. You will be transferred to Tellus as Assistant Works Manager there. Your principal duties will, however, be concerned with Department Q—which you will head up one day if you make good. And, just incidentally, when you go to Tellus, a package like that one in the safe will go with you.”
“Oh … I see. I’ll make good, sir.” Jones let Isaacson see his jaw-muscles tighten in resolve. “It may take a little time for me to learn my way around, sir, but I’ll learn it.”
“I’m sure you will. And now, to go into greater detail. …”
* * *
Virgil Samms had to be sure of his facts. More than that, he had to be able to prove them; not merely to the satisfaction of a law-enforcement officer, but beyond any reasonable doubt of the hardest-headed member of a cynical and skeptical jury. Wherefore Jack Kinnison and Mase Northrop took up the thionite trail at the exact point where, each trip, George Olmstead had had to abandon it; in the atmosphere of Cavenda. And fortunately, not too much preparation was required.
