First Lensman by E. E. Smith (epub e ink reader .TXT) 📕

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, snakelike, 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. Loudspeakers 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