Battlefield Earth Part 45

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 pa.s.sed 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." n.o.body said anything.

Chapter 7.

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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s.

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 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 pa.s.s-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 b.u.t.ton.

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.

Chapter 8.

A very hungover Terl sat beside the drone receiver in his office, woodenly taking the lode scans out of the roller.

He had slept the sleep of the very drunk both last night and this morning, and he had not felt any earthquake, nor had anyone informed him of it since the compound was proof against such slight tremors, and it had been much more severe in the mountains.

What little pleasure he got in life these days was looking at the scan photos, even though they showed only a bit more waste ore around the shaft and a little activity.

He was no closer to solving the puzzle of Jayed than he had been when the fellow arrived. The endless searching and trying to figure out the reasons I.B.I. might have an interest here had cost Terl weight, had sunken in and dulled his eyes, and had put a tremor in his talons when he lifted the all-too-frequent kerbango saucepans to his mouthbones. His hatred of this planet with its accursed blue skies and white mountains deepened day by day. This routine moment at the scanner, taken only after locking all doors and checking with a debug probe, was his only hopeful instant in the day.

Terl raised the scan picture to the light. It took him a moment or two to realize it was different today. Then he quivered with abrupt shock.

The face of the cliff had avalanched. There was no lode lode there. there.

He didn't have yesterday's pictures. He always tore them up promptly. He tried to estimate how much of the face was gone. The incline of it was different. He couldn't estimate how deep the sheer-off had cut into the cliff.

There was a hole. That would be the drift. They had been drifting along the vein.

He was about to put the photo down to think about it when he noticed the mineral side scan trace. The primary purpose of a recon drone was not surveillance. It scanned ceaselessly for minerals and recorded them on a trace. This trace was different.

Indeed it was different. He knew the lode trace: the jagged spectrum of gold gold. He quickly ran the trace into the a.n.a.lyzing machine.

Sulphur? There was no sulphur in that lode. That gold was not a sulphide gold compound. Carbon? Fluorine? What in the name of the c.r.a.p nebula...none of these minerals were in that area!

He wondered whether he was looking at the six-common-mineral formula of what the Psychlos called "trigdite." None of the explosives or fuels were imported from Psychlo. They were dangerous to transship and easy to make on this planet. The little factory stood about ten miles south of the compound, served by the power lines from the distant dam, and every now and then a crew went down to combine the elements into fuel cartridges and explosives. So all these elements were present on this planet.

He ran it through the scanner again to get the exact balance of the mix.

Trigdite!

Terl's unbalanced wits instantly leaped to a wrong conclusion. Trigdite was the commonest trace one got around any Psychlo mine. It would almost be unusual not to find it as it hung in the rocks and air after blasting.

He leaped from his chair and ripped the scan photo to bits in savage paws. He threw down the fragments. He stamped on them. He pounded his fists against the wall.

The vicious rotten animals had blown the face of the cliff off! Just to spite him! just to get even with him! They'd destroyed his lode!

He collapsed in the chair.

He heard a knocking at his door and Chirk's worried voice, "Whatever is the matter, Terl?"

Suddenly he realized he must get control of himself. He must be very cold, very clever.

"The machine broke," he shouted, a clever explanation.