The employment office of any concern with personnel running into the hundreds of thousands is a busy place indeed, even when its plants are all on Tellus and its working conditions are as nearly ideal as such things can be made. When that firm's business is Colonial, however, and its working conditions are only a couple of degrees removed from slavery, procurement of personnel is a first-magnitude problem; the Personnel Department, like Alice in Wonderland, must run as fast as it can go in order to stay where it is. Thus the "Help Wanted" advertisements of Uranium, Incorporated covered the planet Earth with blandishment and guile; and thus for twelve hours of every day and for seven days of every week the employment offices of Uranium, Inc. were filled with men--mostly the scum of Earth.
There were, of course, exceptions; one of which strode through the motley group of waiting men and thrust a card through the "Information" wicket. He was a chunky-looking individual, appearing shorter than his actual five feet nine because of a hundred and ninety pounds of weight--even though every pound was placed exactly where it would do the most good. He looked--well, slouchy--and his mien was sullen.
"Birkenfeld--by appointment," he growled through the wicket, in a voice which could have been pleasantly deep.
The coolly efficient blonde manipulated plugs. "Mr. George W. Jones, sir, by appointment.... Thank you, sir," and Mr. Jones was escorted into Mr. Birkenfeld's private office.
"Have a chair, please, Mr. ... er ... Jones."
"So you know?"
"Yes. It is seldom that a man of your education, training, and demonstrated ability applies to us for employment of his own initiative, and a very thorough investigation is indicated."
"What am I here for, then?" the visitor demanded, truculently. "You could have turned me down by mail. Everybody else has, since I got out."
"You are here because we who operate on the frontiers cannot afford to pass judgment upon a man because of his past, unless that past precludes the probability of a useful future. Yours does not; and in some cases, such as yours, we are very deeply interested in the future." The official's eyes drilled deep.
Conway Costigan had never been in the limelight. On the contrary, he had made inconspicuousness a passion and an art. Even in such scenes of violence as that which had occurred at the Ambassadors' Ball he managed to remain unnoticed. His Lens had never been visible. No one except Lensmen--and Clio and Jill--knew that he had one; and Lensmen--and Clio and Jill--did not talk. Although he was calmly certain that this Birkenfeld was not an ordinary interviewer, he was equally certain that the investigators of Uranium, Inc. had found out exactly and only what the Patrol had wanted them to find.
"So?" Jones' bearing altered subtly, and not because of the penetrant eyes. "That's all I want--a chance. I'll start at the bottom, as far down as you say."
"We advertise, and truthfully, that opportunity on Eridan is unlimited." Birkenfeld chose his words with care. "In your case, opportunity will be either absolutely unlimited or zero, depending entirely upon yourself."
"I see." Dumbness had not been included in the fictitious Mr. Jones' background. "You don't need to draw a blue-print."
"You'll do, I think." The interviewer nodded in approval. "Nevertheless, I must make our position entirely clear. If the slip was--shall we say accidental?--you will go far with us. If you try to play false, you will not last long and you will not be missed."
"Fair enough."
"Your willingness to start at the bottom is commendable, and it is a fact that those who come up through the ranks make the best executives; in our line at least. Just how far down are you willing to start?"
"How low do you go?"
"A mucker, I think would be low enough; and, from your build, and obvious physical strength, the logical job."
"Mucker?"
"One who skoufers ore in the mine. Nor can we make any exception in your case as to the routines of induction and transportation."
"Of course not."
"Take this slip to Mr. Calkins, in Room 6217. He will run you through the mill."
And that night, in an obscure boarding-house, Mr. George Washington Jones, after a meticulous Service Special survey in every direction, reached a large and somewhat grimy hand into a screened receptacle in his battered suitcase and touched a Lens.
"Clio?" The lovely mother of their wonderful children appeared in his mind. "Made it, sweetheart, no suspicion at all. No more Lensing for a while--not too long, I hope--so ... so-long, Clio."
"Take it easy, Spud darling, and be careful." Her tone was light, but she could not conceal a stark background of fear. "Oh, I wish I could go, too!"
"I wish you could, Tootie." The linked minds flashed back to what the two had done together in the red opacity of Nevian murk; on Nevia's mighty, watery globe--but that kind of thinking would not do. "But the boys will keep in touch with me and keep you posted. And besides, you know how hard it is to get a baby-sitter!"
It is strange that the fundamental operations of working metalliferous veins have changed so little throughout the ages. Or is it? Ores came into being with the crusts of the planets; they change appreciably only with the passage of geologic time. Ancient mines, of course, could not go down very deep or follow a seam very far; there was too much water and too little air. The steam engine helped, in degree if not in kind, by removing water and supplying air. Tools improved--from the simple metal bar through pick and shovel and candle, through drill and hammer and low explosive and acetylene, through Sullivan slugger and high explosive and electrics, through skoufer and rotary and burley and sourceless glow, to the complex gadgetry of today--but what, fundamentally, is the difference? Men still crawl, snake-like, to where the metal is. Men still, by dint of sheer brawn, jackass the precious stuff out to where our vaunted automatics can get hold of it. And men still die, in horribly unknown fashions and in callously recorded numbers, in the mines which supply the stuff upon which our vaunted culture rests.
But to resume the thread of narrative, George Washington Jones went to Eridan as a common laborer; a mucker. He floated down beside the skip--a "skip" is a mine elevator--some four thousand eight hundred feet. He rode an ore-car a horizontal distance of approximately eight miles to the brilliantly-illuminated cavern which was the Station of the Twelfth and lowest level. He was assigned to the bunk in which he would sleep for the next fifteen nights: "Fifteen down and three up," ran the standard underground contract.
He walked four hundred yards, yelled "Nothing Down!" and inched his way up a rise--in many places scarcely wider than his shoulders--to the stope some three hundred feet above. He reported to the miner who was to be his immediate boss and bent his back to the skoufer--which, while not resembling a shovel at all closely, still meant hard physical labor. He already knew ore--the glossy, sub-metallic, pitchy black luster of uraninite or pitchblende; the yellows of autunite and carnotite; the variant and confusing greens of tobernite. No values went from Jones' skoufer into the heavily-timbered, steel-braced waste-pockets of the stope; very little base rock went down the rise.
He became accustomed to the work; got used to breathing the peculiarly lifeless, dry, oily compressed air. And when, after a few days, his stentorian "Nothing Down!" called forth a "Nothing but a little fine stuff!" and a handful of grit and pebbles, he knew that he had been accepted into the undefined, unwritten, and unofficial, yet nevertheless intensely actual, fellowship of hard-rock men. He belonged.
He knew that he must abandon his policy of invisibility; and, after several days of thought, he decided how he would do it. Hence, upon the first day of his "up" period, he joined his fellows in their descent upon one of the rawest, noisiest dives of Danapolis. The men were met, of course, by a bevy of giggling, shrieking, garishly painted and strongly perfumed girls--and at this point young Jones' behavior became exceedingly unorthodox.
"Buy me a drink, mister? And a dance, huh?"
"On your way, sister." He brushed the importunate wench aside. "I get enough exercise underground, an' you ain't got a thing I want."
Apparently unaware that the girl was exchanging meaningful glances with a couple of husky characters labelled "BOUNCER" in billposter type, the atypical mucker strode up to the long and ornate bar.
"Gimme a bottle of pineapple pop," he ordered bruskly, "an' a package of Tellurian cigarettes--Sunshines."
"P-p-pine...?" The surprised bartender did not finish the word.
The bouncers were fast, but Costigan was faster. A hard knee took one in the solar plexus; a hard elbow took the other so savagely under the chin as to all but break his neck. A bartender started to swing a bung-starter, and found himself flying through the air toward a table. Men, table, and drinks crashed to the floor.
"I pick my own company an' I drink what I damn please," Jones announced, grittily. "Them lunkers ain't hurt none, to speak of ..." His hard eyes swept the room malevolently, "but I ain't in no gentle mood an' the next jaspers that tackle me will wind up in the repair shop, or maybe in the morgue. See?"
This of course was much too much; a dozen embattled roughnecks leaped to mop up on the misguided wight who had so impugned the manhood of all Eridan. Then, while six or seven bartenders blew frantic blasts upon police whistles, there was a flurry of action too fast to be resolved into consecutive events by the eye. Conway Costigan, one of the fastest men with hands and feet the Patrol has ever known, was trying to keep himself alive; and he succeeded.
"What the hell goes on here?" a chorus of raucously authoritative voices yelled, and sixteen policemen--John Law did not travel singly in that district, but in platoons--swinging clubs and saps, finally hauled George Washington Jones out from the bottom of the pile. He had sundry abrasions and not a few contusions, but no bones were broken and his skin was practically whole.
And since his version of the affair was not only inadequate, but also differed in important particulars from those of several non-participating witnesses, he spent the rest of his holiday in jail; a development with which he was quite content.
The work--and time--went on. He became in rapid succession a head mucker, a miner's pimp (which short and rugged Anglo-Saxon word means simply "helper" in underground parlance) a miner, a top-miner, and then--a long step up the ladder!--a shift-boss.
And then disaster struck; suddenly, paralyzingly, as mine disasters do. Loud-speakers blared briefly--"Explosion! Cave-in! Flood! Fire! Gas! Radiation! Damp!"--and expired. Short-circuits; there was no way of telling which, if any, of those dire warnings were true.
The power failed, and the lights. The hiss of air from valves, a noise which by its constant and unvarying and universal presence soon becomes unheard, became noticeable because of its diminution in volume and tone. And then, seconds later, a jarring, shuddering rumble was felt and heard, accompanied by the snapping of shattered timbers and the sharper, utterly unforgettable shriek of rending and riven steel. And the men, as men do under such conditions, went wild; yelling, swearing, leaping toward where, in the rayless dark, each thought the rise to be.
It took a couple of seconds for the shift-boss to break out and hook up his emergency battery-lamp; and three or four more seconds, and by dint of fists, feet, and a two-foot length of air-hose, to restore any degree of order. Four men were dead; but that wasn't too bad--considering.
"Up there! Under the hanging wall!" he ordered, sharply. "That won't fall--unless the whole mountain slips. Now, how many of you jaspers have got your emergency kits on you? Twelve--out of twenty-six--what brains! Put on your masks. You without 'em can stay up here--you'll be safe for a while--I hope."
Then, presently: "There, that's all for now. I guess." He flashed his light downward. The massive steel members no longer writhed; the crushed and tortured timbers were still.
"That rise may be open, it goes through solid rock, not waste. I'll see. Wright, you're all in one piece, aren't you?"
"I guess so--yes."
"Take charge up here. I'll go down to the drift. If the rise is open I'll give you a flash. Send the ones with masks down, one at a time. Take a jolly-bar and bash the brains out of anybody who gets panicky again."
Jones was not as brave as he sounded: mine disasters carry a terror which is uniquely and peculiarly poignant. Nevertheless he went down the rise, found it open, and signalled. Then, after issuing brief orders, he led the way along the dark and silent drift toward the Station; wondering profanely why the people on duty there had not done something with the wealth of emergency equipment always ready there. The party found some cave-ins, but nothing they could not dig through.
The Station was also silent and dark. Jones, flashing his head-lamp upon the emergency panel, smashed the glass, wrenched the door open, and pushed buttons. Lights flashed on. Warning signals flared, bellowed and rang. The rotary air-pump began again its normal subdued, whickering whirr. But the water-pump! Shuddering, clanking, groaning, it was threatening to go out any second--but there wasn't a thing in the world Jones could do about it--yet.
The Station itself, so buttressed and pillared with alloy steel as to be little more compressible than an equal volume of solid rock, was unharmed; but in it nothing lived. Four men and a woman--the nurse--were stiffly motionless at their posts; apparently the leads to the Station had been blasted in such fashion that no warning whatever had been given. And smoke, billowing inward from the main tunnel, was growing thicker by the minute. Jones punched another button; a foot-thick barrier of asbestos, tungsten, and vitrified refractory slid smoothly across the tunnel's opening. He considered briefly, pityingly, those who might be outside, but felt no urge to explore. If any lived, there were buttons on the other side of the fire-door.
The eddying smoke disappeared, the flaring lights winked out, air-horns and bells relapsed into silence. The shift-boss, now apparently the Superintendent of the whole Twelfth Level, removed his mask, found the Station walkie-talkie, and snapped a switch. He spoke, listened, spoke again then called a list of names--none of which brought any response.
"Wright, and you five others," picking out miners who could be depended upon to keep their heads, "take these guns. Shoot if you have to, but not unless you have to. Have the muckers clear the drift, just enough to get through. You'll find a shift-boss, with a crew of nineteen, up in Stope Sixty. Their rise is blocked. They've got light and power again now, and good air, and they're working on it, but opening the rise from the top is a damned slow job. Wright, you throw a chippie into it from the bottom. You others, work back along the drift, clear to the last glory hole. Be sure that all the rises are open--check all the stopes and glory holes--tell everybody you find alive to report to me here...."
"Aw, what good!" a man shrieked. "We're all goners anyway--I want water an'...."
"Shut up, fool!" There was a sound as of fist meeting flesh, the shriek was stilled. "Plenty of water--tanks full of the stuff." A grizzled miner turned to the self-appointed boss and twitched his head--toward the laboring pump. "Too damn much water too soon, huh?"
"I wouldn't wonder--but get busy!"
As his now orderly and purposeful men disappeared, Jones picked up his microphone and changed the setting of a dial.
"On top, somebody," he said crisply. "On top...."
"Oh, there's somebody alive down in Twelve, after all!" a girl's voice screamed in his ear. "Mr. Clancy! Mr. Edwards!"
"To hell with Clancy, and Edwards, too," Jones barked. "Gimme the Chief Engineer and the Head Surveyor, and gimme 'em fast."
"Clancy speaking, Station Twelve." If Works Manager Clancy had heard that pointed remark, and he must have, he ignored it. "Stanley and Emerson will be here in a moment. In the meantime, who's calling? I don't recognize your voice, and it's been so long...."
"Jones. Shift-boss, Stope Fifty Nine. I had a little trouble getting here to the Station."
"What? Where's Pennoyer? And Riley? And...?"
"Dead. Everybody. Gas or damp. No warning."
"Not enough to turn on anything--not even the purifiers?"
"Nothing."
"Where were you?"
"Up in the stope."
"Good God!" That news, to Clancy, was informative enough.
"But to hell with all that. What happened, and where?"
"A skip-load, and then a magazine, of high explosive, right at Station Seven--it's right at the main shaft, you know." Jones did not know, since he had never been in that part of the mine, but he could see the picture. "Main shaft filled up to above Seven, and both emergency shafts blocked. Number One at Six, Number Two at Seven--must have been a fault--But here's Chief Engineer Stanley." The works manager, not too unwillingly, relinquished the microphone.
A miner came running up and Jones covered his mouth-piece. "How about the glory holes?"
"Plugged solid, all four of 'em--by the vibro, clear up to Eleven."
"Thanks." Then, as soon as Stanley's voice came on:
"What I want to know is, why is this damned water-pump overloading? What's the circuit?"
"You must be ... yes, you are pumping against too much head. Five levels above you are dead, you know, so...."
"Dead? Can't you raise anybody?"
"Not yet. So you're pumping through dead boosters on Eleven and Ten and so on up, and when your overload-relief valve opens...."
"Relief valve!" Jones almost screamed, "Can I dog the damn thing down?"
"No, it's internal."
"Christ, what a design--I could eat a handful of iron filings and puke a better emergency pump than that!"
"When it opens," Stanley went stolidly on, "the water will go through the by-pass back into the sump. So you'd better rod out one of the glory holes and...."
"Get conscious, fat-head!" Jones blazed. "What would we use for time? Get off the air--gimme Emerson!"
"Emerson speaking."
"Got your maps?"
"Yes."
"We got to run a sag up to Eleven--fast--or drown. Can you give me the shortest possible distance?"
"Can do." The Head Surveyor snapped orders. "We'll have it for you in a minute. Thank God there was somebody down there with a brain."
"It doesn't take super-human intelligence to push buttons."
"You'd be surprised. Your point on glory holes was very well taken--you won't have much time after the pump quits. When the water reaches the Station...."
"Curtains. And it's all done now--running free and easy--recirculating. Hurry that dope!"
"Here it is now. Start at the highest point of Stope Fifty Nine. Repeat."
"Stope Fifty-Nine." Jones waved a furious hand as he shouted the words; the tight-packed miners turned and ran. The shift-boss followed them, carrying the walkie-talkie, aiming an exasperated kick of pure frustration at the merrily-humming water pump as he passed it.
"Thirty two degrees from the vertical--anywhere between thirty and thirty five."
"Thirty to thirty five off vertical."
"Direction--got a compass?"
"Yes."
"Set the blue on zero. Course two hundred seventy five degrees."
"Blue on zero. Course two seven five."
"Dex sixty nine point two zero feet. That'll put you into Eleven's class yard--so big you can't miss it."
"Distance sixty nine point two--that all? Fine! Maybe we'll make it, after all. They're sinking a shaft, of course. From where?"
"About four miles in on Six. It'll take time."
"If we can get up into Eleven we'll have all the time on the clock--it'll take a week or more to flood Twelve's stopes. But this sag is sure as hell going to be touch and go. And say, from the throw of the pump and the volume of the sump, will you give me the best estimate you can of how much time we've got? I want at least an hour, but I'm afraid I won't have it."
"Yes. I'll call you back."
The shift-boss elbowed his way through the throng of men and, dragging the radio behind him, wriggled and floated up the rise.
"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 sluice-way 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 chit-chat, 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--
