“And how long is that likely to take?” I asked. “You see, we’re anxious to get to prospecting as soon as possible.”
“Not so long,” he said. “You lay off the luxuries like whiskey and soap and water, it shouldn’t take you more than a year or two, three at the outside.” And if I didn’t know better, I would have sworn that Captain Merriwether smiled, but I think it was just a trick of the light from the incandescent bulb.
Chapter Three
And so we began our term of indentured servitude in the Deirdre mine. In retrospect—that distant height from which the road of one’s life looks less rutted, and the muddy patches not so deep—it seems that we were fortunate in our servitude, at least for a while. As the perspicacious reader may have noticed, there was a lot Bemis and I didn’t know about the mining trade, in fact it would have taken a thorough search of the territory to find something about it that we did know. When it came to the gritty details of extracting the riches of the Moon, rumor, wild fantasy, and a selection of harebrained schemes was about all we had in stock, and thus our time served in the Deirdre taught us a great deal. The lessons did not always come easily, more of the opposite in fact, but in the end we got our money’s worth, even if we didn’t know it at the time.
In honor of our ignorance, we were assigned a task that I thought more suited to a mule than a pair of men in pressure suits. All work of any significance in the Deirdre, except that of Mister Kent and Mister Lovelace, who was master of the mine’s resonance engine, was done in the vacuum, and there was no pressure gear on hand that would suit a mule, or any mule available to object to it, so Bemis and I were elected. The job consisted in hauling hods full of ice, metal ore, or tailings out of the various tunnels where they had been discovered and up to a depot where the goods could be further inspected, consolidated, then shoveled into a series of ore carts. These were then hauled up to the surface—by the power of a traction engine, when it was operational, or by the power of the men who had loaded them when it wasn’t, which we soon learned was most of the time. It is a measure of the unpleasantness of the hod work that loading, and even propelling, the two-ton ore carts was considered better work than hod carrying—more of a job for a horse or an Irishman than a mule. The Deirdre had a fully functional traction engine which could have been used: it was at the heart of the dust boat. And it is a measure of the importance they assigned to the rescue (or capture, depending upon your point of view) of future hod carriers and ore cart wranglers that they did not for a moment consider dismantling the dust boat in order to use its traction engine to haul out ore.
Our work began deep in the mine, although not in its profoundest depths—we were too green as yet to plumb that netherworld—at a wide place in a pitch-dark tunnel where rock, ore, or some other material had been dug out. While we removed this material to the upper realms, we inspected it eagerly, hoping to distinguish the several species involved, namely ice, metal ores, and tailings—so already we were learning. We were not responsible for definitively identifying any of these, indeed as “baby miners” we were discouraged from doing so, but the estimable Perkins, who was in charge of our instruction, was kind enough to present examples of each, so that we might not confuse them in the performance of our duty and eat into the profits of the mine.
The ice ore looked like vaguely lustrous black or gray lumps, sometimes as big as a man’s head, and often shot through with blots and streaks of white. I had expected ice ore to be white, or perhaps green, and some of the best pieces were indeed nearly white, but most were shot through with dust and other impurities, and that made them harder to distinguish from the ordinary rock. Ice ore was a fairly regular, and welcome, passenger in our hod. The iron ore (for it was usually iron, not gold, silver, or even lead, alas) was generally darker, harder, and sometimes streaked with color, and was a less frequent traveler in the hod. The tailings consisted of dust, gravel, and a great many pieces of brownish-gray rock with nothing in particular to recommend them. This useless material was disappointingly ubiquitous, and there was always plenty of it available to fill up our hod. Forever on the lookout for a way to improve the quality, and reduce the effort, of my work, I asked Perkins why they didn’t leave the tailings where they had started instead of hauling it all to the surface for deposition onto the seven hills.
“Inside of a week, all the tunnels would be choked with the stuff,” he said through his suit’s radio, as he instructed us in how to load the hod: large rocks on the bottom, not too full, but not too light, and try to transport only one species of material at a time, so as not to undo the careful triage our more skilled colleagues had performed.
“Why not dig out a place beside the tunnel to dump it in?” I instructed.
Perkins chuckled, and the beam of his lamp swept side to side as he shook his head. “And where would you put the tailings from that, ya silly booger?” he said. “You just tote your hod and leave the thinking to me and the captain.” I offered that a mine that came with more ore in it and a good deal less tailings was the obvious solution, but Perkins was not amused, so I picked up the front end of the hod and we started up the tunnel.
There was more to this simple work than met the eye, and none of it in the procedure’s favor. Then again, very little met the eye in that dungeon, unless it was formally introduced while one’s headlamp was satisfactorily charged. It was a question, for instance, whether the job was worse going up or coming down. Each leg of the journey had its partisans, but I had trouble making up my mind, even after weeks of intensive study. Heading up-tunnel required a deal of heavy lifting, an entertainment to which I have never been much devoted. Plus, if one failed in his duty while manning the rearward position, even for an instant, he caused ore (or more likely tailings) to rain onto his helmet; while if one was in the van and lost his grip, the hod would capsize and loose its entire contents onto the man behind. Needless to say, I preferred the van when I could get it.
The down-tunnel leg might seem the nicer work, but it had its pitfalls as well. The tunnels were generally steep and occasionally precipitous, which was bad enough on the up leg, during which the lead man often had to climb while holding the handles of the hod behind him at the level of his boots, and the man behind had to hold his end over his head, if the roof would permit it. But things were arguably worse going down, despite an empty hod, because stumbling over a precipice and rolling on down the tunnel until stopped by something very hard was a regular feature of the trip. And so was losing one’s way. This, like much that takes place on the Moon, is actually worse than it sounds.
You see, the tunnels split off from one another as they penetrate downhill into the rim, because digging, or blasting, a new tunnel was the way to find more ice. This is good news for the man headed out, as he could simply keep going uphill and trust that the tunnels would tend to unite and reduce his chances of making a wrong turn. But going downhill produced the opposite effect, as each new bifurcation provided a fresh opportunity to go wrong and end up lost in the depths.
And as I’ve said, this can be, and often is, worse than it sounds, for being lost in an overgrown rabbit warren inside the Moon is not the pleasant adventure that being lost in the woods, or the Gobi desert, is back home. In the Gobi desert, one cannot run out of air. Water maybe, but not air. Even spelunking the Carlsbad caverns will not deprive you of air—but the Moon will do it gladly given half a chance. On Earth, not even the dead of night will deprive you entirely of light. There are always the stars, or if those should fail, you can strike a match and take your bearings—but let your lamp battery expire under the Moon, and you will see nothing, no matter how long you may wait for your eyes to adapt. Nor can you strike a match, as you could in the Carlsbad caverns, because there is no air to support its combustion.
But surely, you say, one can call for help—but in this you would be mistaken, because the radio in your pressure suit, despite its best intentions, cannot communicate through solid rock. I could talk to Bemis, if we managed to g
et lost while lugging the same hod, but everyone else in the Deirdre was as beyond hearing as a man in the grave. Or nearly so. If one left his suit radio active, ghostly echoes and strange snatches of conversation could sometimes be heard, and if one found himself in one of the rare straight stretches of tunnel, he could hear transmissions from the far end preternaturally well—but things like that never happened when you were lost.
I know all this not from the tales of others, but because I experienced it myself, and more than once. Not the ultimate calamity of running out of air, fortunately—I passed on that—but I bought the rest of the package time and again.
Oddly enough, the first thing you do, or should do, upon deciding that you have got lost (invariably through taking a wrong fork on a downward run), is to extinguish your helmet lamp. One may indulge in a round of cursing either before or after this step, but it’s best to keep it concise, for you may wish you had the air back in an hour or so. You want to think about conserving what light you have left, to say nothing of your air, and you want to do it while there’s something left of it to conserve. Although it is arduous, and frightening, to make your way in total darkness, it is, for once, less difficult than it might sound, assuming that you know which way is up. If you do, it is just a matter of groping along the tunnel you have chosen to get lost in, crawling on hands and knees when in doubt about the footing, and each of you keeping a glove against one wall of the passage, which is never out of reach when it is there at all. When a tunnel’s wall suddenly disappears, it is cause for celebration, and the lighting of a helmet lamp, for a gap in the wall signals the meeting of two tunnels, or their parting, if you were headed down, and is an opportunity to locate yourself, and an opportunity for disappointment.
The Deirdre’s miners, having lost themselves often enough in the past, had scratched signs on the walls at a good many junctions to aid in navigation. So, if you encountered a gap in the walls, you turned on a lamp and peered around, looking, as the saying goes, for a sign. If one was present, and one or the other of you could puzzle out the meaning of a message along the lines of “B6+2” to any good effect, you then knew where you were. If not, or if there was no sign to be found, then the disappointment came, and after a round of oaths, the lamp would get extinguished and on you would go as before, until the next gap in the walls appeared. Oh, and don’t leave the hod behind where you can’t find it again, or the first mate will dock your share in the profits and you will see another week or two added to your sentence to cover the loss. Don’t leave your hod partner behind either, even if you don’t care for him overly much, as recollection of his abandonment will haunt you in later years, if his ghost doesn’t get the job done first.
There was legend surrounding this brand of mishap, and as Calvin and I made up the latest batch of indentured greenhorns, we were deemed ripe for the telling of it. As with most such stories, it was likely apocryphal, but no less entertaining, and disturbing, for that. The tale was offered to us late one evening, or so claimed the holy clock in the engineering cave, whose pendulum had been precisely truncated so it could tell proper time (that is, Earth time) in the Moon. We lounged beneath the dim electric bulb in the steamy, sweltering comfort of the communal bed chamber—which, when the hammocks were stowed and a sheet metal table installed, was also the mess hall, as well as saloon and gambling den when Mister Lang was not around. The tale was told, with much encouragement and occasional embellishments from his mates, by a fellow named Gottschalk. He was one of the oldest, and by that I mean longest interred, crewmen of the Deirdre, a man who had chosen to follow Captain Merriwether, Lang, and Perkins into outer space to plunder the bowels of the Moon rather than continue in the dying whaling trade. (Whale oil is a drug on the market in the age of the resonance engine.) Gottschalk, whom the men called Chalk, had a substantial and livid collection of tattoos decorating his hide, which advertised, falsely now, his lost profession. These gave his weathered countenance a ghoulish aspect in the jaundiced light, which only served to enhance the impact of his tale.
“Not everyone’s so lucky as you two pups,” he began. We were briefly notorious for losing ourselves, then reappearing on our own steam, with less than an hour of air and even less battery life remaining to us. “More’n one man has come ta grief carryin’ hod, and that’s a fact. But they’s one such I recall that was remarkable, and is a mystery to this day.” He looked around at his mates, eyes shining. “You’ve heard tell a the man, I ‘spect, even if he was a’fore yer time. Do ya recollect his name, shipmates?” (This is known on the lecture circuit as ginning up the crowd.)
“Perkins,” said a wag. It goes without saying, I suppose, that Perkins was not present.
“No,” piped up another. “It’s Lang I’d not mind seein’ lost. Leastwise for a week or so.” Mister Lang was absent as well, and good-humored laughter followed. Lang, although a bit of a hard horse, was not truly disliked by the men, but the formalities must be observed in these matters or discipline will soon disintegrate.
“Naw,” said Chalk. “As you well know, his name were Jones, John Jones, but fer the sake a the tellin’ we’ll call him jonah, for that’s what he was, shipmates, sure’s yer born.”
This is a handle freighted with great significance in the sailing trade, and I knew, even if Chalk hadn’t made it clear, that jonah was not so much the poor fellow’s name as it was his occupation, at least in the Deirdre. You see, a jonah, if by some chance you do not know it, is a jinx, or more accurately, a man whom the rest of the crew believes to be a jinx, and once a soul is labeled thus, his life becomes a misery of distrust and isolation, or worse. In my experience, which is admittedly slim in this line, the jonah has rarely performed any specific act to earn his ignominy, although some such act may be alleged. Typically he finds the reputation accreting to him like barnacles attaching themselves to a ship’s hull, and once it has stuck, it is just as hard to remove.
“So Jones was assigned to carry hod, as despite bein’ a jonah he were still pretty raw.” Chalk glanced at Bemis and me. “Now as you well know, totin’ ore up-tunnel is a two man job, an’ when Jones was on hod duty the man on the other end of the sticks nearly always come ta grief, by an’ large.” He glanced again at the two of us. “That means one way or t’other. The two a them would lose their way and nearly suffocate.” Calvin and I looked at each other then, trying to calculate who would dare call the other jonah first and beat the rush. “Or the other man would put a boot wrong and pitch down a shaft, or tear open his suit on a outcropping an’ lose a leg to the vacuum, or else come down with scurvy, the bloody flux, or the gripin’ gut.” All ills, no matter how incidental, are the jonah’s fault, you see, especially, but not exclusively, if he is detected anywhere within a few hundred miles of the calamity. “Nothin’ would happen ta Jones,” Chalk continued, “‘cept the gettin’ lost, a course, but always to his shipmates, this bein’ one of the ways a jonah is discovered ta begin with.”
The men around me made noises of agreement, as the rules governing such travesties of justice were understood by all. I considered briefly whether I should contrive to sustain an injury, and thus insure myself against jonah-hood, but I decided to bide my time and purchase the policy only if the calamity looked imminent, as the premium was costly.
“As ya might figger,” continued Chalk, “it soon was thought a trial ta be assigned ta haul ore with the man, and men were known ta cause their own selves a injury just ta duck the duty, and this only added to his evil reputation, don’tcha see.” My sympathies had migrated considerably since the start of the tale, and were now firmly with the hapless John Jones. “Still, jonah or no, there needs ta be a man on the other end of the hod, so somebody was always coming down with the croup or bustin’ a hose on his gear, always somethin’, one way or t’other. One day a man named Murphy, who was a Irishman I believe, was aft of the hod, with Jones in front an’ spangin’ rocks offen Murphy’s helmet fer his trouble no doubt, an’ natur’ly, Jones being what he was, they g
ot themselves lost, down in old D2 that was mostly played out even then. So Jones an’ poor Murphy takes off down a false spur, as a jonah will do, and was lost. Anyhow, they didn’t come back in a time Mister Perkins thought fit, an’ word went out that they was likely to be lost. The men figgered there were no great harm in losing Jones, and some dared say we was all the better for it, but the man Murphy was well liked. Carried an honest hod, he did, an’ could sing them moldy Irish ditties so’s Mister Lang hisself would find a tear in his eye.
“Well, me and another man—” another man who was conveniently absent, and thus unavailable to corroborate the tale, I noted, “—we was sent down ta see if we could fetch ‘em a’fore their air gave out. This was afore we’d marked the junctions proper, ya understand.”
Bemis and I had tried to use some of these markings in our recent adventure, and had struggled to interpret them correctly. In the end we had survived through the intervention of a higher power, namely, dumb luck.
“Trouble was,” continued Chalk, “they was blastin’ a new hole at the end a D3, on account a the cap’n likin’ the look a some rock from a outcropping down there which he reckoned might hold some heavy metals. We, the other man an’ myself sent down ta D2, was somewhat vexed by this, as blastin’ can knock loose a deal a rock even a fair distance away. A man was sent to tell Lang and his party they was supposed to lay off on the detonations for a spell, ‘til Murphy and Jones was recovered, or gave up for dead, but there bein’ a jonah aboard, the man took a wrong fork hisself an’ ended up in D1, where they wasn’t a soul, for it was played out.
The Deirdre Page 4