by JE Gurley
He and Sharon had been married two years and two months before she finally informed him one night that she was tired of coming in second to the Cerberus Project. “That damned hairless mole,” she called it. She had been calm and collected, presenting her case as would a defense lawyer. He had been too busy and too proud to fight her, and too naive to fathom the real reason behind her sudden departure. She left and he continued his work. He tried to fill the void she left in his life with endless hours on the job, hardly noticing how small that void had become. Finally, he realized the reason she had left him was that he had shown her no real love during their marriage.
Their rapid romance and courtship had been mostly at the behest of their two fathers, a merger of local dynasties, and they had merely gone along. In reality, they had nothing in common, and both were much better off out of the marriage. It had cost him half his savings, but he supposed that was a small price for freedom. Since then, he had gone on numerous dates and taken a few lovers, but no loves. Cerberus was his only love for now.
Cerberus was easy to love. It was a marvelous machine. The Honeywell AGT1500 jet turbine produced 11 kilowatts of power. A Tesla thorium generator pumped that up to 60 kilowatts. The U.S. Air Force had developed most of the technology, but he had added a few of his own concepts, such as a sixty-meter-long, Erbium-lined, double-clad optical fiber coiled to fit within the Cerberus’ confined interior. The Cerberus’ laser produced a short-pulsed, polarized beam of light capable of generating 3,000 BTUs/min. of heat. The short-duration, pulsed power reduced internal heat buildup, and the three rotating lasers, one for each of the Cerberus’ namesake mythological guardian of the underworld’s three heads, covered the optimal area for tunnel boring.
He and Vince had already drawn up plans for a much smaller version of the Cerberus, called the Charon, for possible NASA deep-space mining missions. Less than three meters in length, the Charon was nonetheless capable of boring a tunnel a meter in diameter through anything they would find on the moon or Mars. Equipped with a wide array of sensors, the Charon could analyze the composition of the rock to determine its commercial value. It could burrow beneath the lunar surface to excavate living quarters for future lunanauts to protect them from solar radiation.
If the Cerberus was successful.
Driving back to the hotel in Klerksdorp proved more difficult than he thought. Lack of sleep and the glare of the rising sun blinded him. He came within a meter of colliding with a ten-ton ore truck. Only the deafening blast of the truck’s air horn jolted him back to reality in time to swerve into a ditch. The eight-meter-high truck looked like a railroad locomotive as it raced by his window. Luckily, he hadn’t been driving his usual breakneck speed. Neither the automobile nor he suffered any damage, and after a few minutes to calm his jangling nerves, he made it to the hotel in one piece.
When he reached the quiet comfort of his room, he tossed his keys on the nightstand and headed for the bathroom. While relieving himself, he eyed the shower wistfully but considered it too much trouble. Instead, he fell onto the bed fully clothed. He was asleep within seconds.
4
July 4, 2016, 7:00 p.m. Ngomo Mine, Klerksdorp, South Africa –
The Cerberus was less than ten meters from its intended goal. Trace, looking as if he hadn’t slept for the entire four days of tunneling, sat with his feet propped up on one of the desks. His uncombed blond hair stuck out at all angles. His bloodshot blue eyes peered out from within bands of dark circles at his laptop screen. Today, his ubiquitous t-shirt displayed an image of the band Korn. Alan believed Trace’s entire wardrobe consisted of dozens of heavy-metal band t-shirts and faded denim jeans. Numerous coffee stains and blotches of spilled food spotted the image of the metal skull from the band’s DJ Death tour. In spite of Trace’s haggard appearance, Alan didn’t have the heart to exclude him from the grand finale. Of them all, he most deserved to be there for the end.
Alan glanced at the date on the right-hand bottom of his screen, the Fourth of July, Independence Day. For most Americans, it was a day of celebration, fireworks, picnics, and family outings. Alan hoped the date was auspicious for him as well. If they succeeded, it would mean financial independence for Hoffman Industries. Here, in a foreign land, it was simply another date on the calendar. They had no time for celebration.
Nor did they have time for housekeeping. The Shack resembled a college dorm room after a four-day keg party. Styrofoam coffee cups, empty plastic water bottles, and crushed soda cans lay scattered about the trailer like losing betting slips littering the grandstands after a horse race. Take-out food containers spilled over the rim of overfilled garbage cans and onto the floor. Strewn across the desks were half-eaten sandwiches and used condiment packets. A dust of finely trodden potato chips sprinkled the carpet.
Alan glanced at the camera suspended from the ceiling in the corner of the room, wondering if Verkhoen was watching from his office in Pretoria. He was certain the prim and proper CEO would disapprove of their cluttered workplace, but he didn’t care. The Shack was a small piece of America, an embassy on foreign soil. Outside the Shack, they were visitors. Inside it, they were home.
His mind focused on seeing Cerberus through the job. He caught a glimpse of himself in one of the monitor screens and noticed he could do with a shave. He rubbed his hand over the three-day stubble and quickly dismissed the idea. Later.
“Eleven-hundred-ninety-eight meters. Two meters to go,” Trace called out, as all eyes in the room focused on the monitor screens. “One-point-five meters.”
To Alan, Trace sounded like a NASA astronaut calling out a docking procedure. He had one eye on the GPS reading and the other on the monitor. So far, they were right on the nose of their projected position.
“Touchdown,” Trace announced, raising his arms in the air like a referee making a call.
Alan’s shouted ‘Yahoo!’ startled everyone. “We did it.”
The uneasy tingling sensation living in the in the pit of his stomach the past week slowly faded. Oddly, he felt no adrenaline rush. He simply felt relief. He had lived on caffeine and nervous tension for so long that success was anticlimactic.
He leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers across the top of his head. “Okay, shut her down.”
He watched the bars on the power graph drop to zero, as Vince began shutting down the turbine and laser array. For the first time in a long time, he felt contentment.
His respite was short-lived. A red light on one of the monitors began blinking rapidly. Simultaneously, an alarm sounded. He shot forward in his seat.
“What the hell is that?” he shouted. The Cerberus’ outboard camera showed a dust storm raging around the machine.
Vince slapped his computer keyboard with the palm of his hand, silencing both the alarm and the blinking light. “I don’t know,” he replied, as his fingers danced across the keyboard. “It looks as if the Cerberus surged forward five meters past the designated stopping point, just before I cut power.”
Alan shook his head, quickly running numbers through his head. “That can’t be right. It would take twenty minutes to bore that far. Check your readings again.”
Vince double-checked his screen, frowned, and scratched his head. “They’re correct.”
Alan watched the monitor screen for several minutes. Slowly, the dust dissipated, and the readings returned to normal. Everything checked out. He shrugged his shoulders at the short-lived enigma.
“I don’t know. The GPS might be off a little.” He hoped not. Such an error would cripple the Cerberus’ effectiveness. He chose to go with the next best reason. “We might have hit a layer of softer rock. There’s no indication of moisture. It doesn’t seem to be a seep; still, we might want to wait a while before we send anyone down there.”
If the Cerberus had bored into an underground aquifer, it could flood the new tunnel; however, that was Verkhoen’s concern, not his. He looked at Vince, Bill, and Trace and grinned. “We did it, guys.”
&nb
sp; “Your father will be proud,” Vince replied.
“Yes, he will be.” His father. He had forgotten. He sat down in front of his laptop and brought up his father’s image on the screen. His father, probably everyone at Hoffman Industries, had been watching the Cerberus’ progress on Skype. “We did it, Dad. The Cerberus did it.”
The noise level of the celebratory din at Hoffman Industries drowned out his father’s words, but from the gleam in his eyes, Alan guessed his father was proud of him. That was enough for him. His father continued speaking and gesturing at the crowd of people gathered in the company warehouse. It looked as if every employee was on hand for the party. The phone rang. He turned down the volume on his laptop and answered. Verkhoen was on the other end.
“Congratulations, Mr. Hoffman,” he said in his clipped Boer voice. “Your machine worked as well as you claimed. How long before I can send down a crew?”
Alan checked the readouts again. The temperature was stabilizing quickly, and there was no sign of seepage. Whatever they had hit didn’t seem dangerous, but he didn’t want to take any chances.
“I would wait about eight or nine hours,” he replied. “The tunnel is still hot. I’ll send down a man in a heat suit in a couple of hours to check out the Cerberus and take a few core samples.”
“Good. One of our security personnel will accompany him. He can assist your man if needed.”
Alan knew Verkhoen wasn’t sending a security man down just to lend a helping hand. If there was a rich vein of gold down there, he intended to see no one helped themselves to a nugget or two. Alan laughed at the absurdity. Gold nuggets were the last thing on his people’s minds right now. They had spent three years working with him developing the Cerberus. They wouldn’t leave its side until convinced everything was working perfectly; besides, the gold in this case was invisible, a few ounces per ton. Someone could walk out with a truckload of ore and not have enough for gold fillings.
“Thank you, but that isn’t really necessary. My people are used to mines.”
“Nevertheless, I insist,” Verkhoen replied.
Alan gave up arguing. Verkhoen was in charge. “All right. I’ll pick one of my engineers to go. I’ll join him after a few hours sleep.”
Trace raised his hand and waved it frantically above his head. “I’ll go.”
As badly as Alan wanted to go himself, he knew it would look too much like vanity if he insisted on going first. Alan looked at Trace and shook his head. “You’re dead on your feet. You’re going back to the hotel for some sleep. Maybe you could change shirts, too.”
Trace pulled the front of his t-shirt out to look at it and grinned. “It’s just food,” he said.
“I’ll go, boss,” Vince said.
At twenty-six years old, Vince was the youngest of the three engineers, with all the inexhaustible exuberance of youth and the skill of an engineering wizard. He had designed most of the Cerberus’ remote systems and the laser alignment guide. Without his help, Cerberus would be just another idea on the drawing board like its little brother, Charon. Of them all, he most deserved the chance to be the first person on scene.
“Okay, Vince, but stay away from Pellucidarian women if you find any.”
Vince laughed. “All of them except Dian the Beautiful. If I see Doctor Perry, I’ll tell him you said hello.”
Vince’s infatuation with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s legendary land at the center of the earth had been a standing joke since he had joined the firm. He had tried many times, unsuccessfully, to convince Alan of the possibility of giant cavern systems deep in the earth, sealed away for eons, perhaps holding treasures of proto-bacteria or lichens loaded with the next cure for cancer or AIDS.
Alan didn’t claim to be an expert, and his biology was limited to required college courses, but he tried to stay informed by reading the latest scientific journals. While he considered the likelihood of sealed, deep-cave systems a remote likelihood, recent deep-rock discoveries of various extremophiles hinted at the possibility. He felt it unlikely that anything larger than bacteria could survive the rigors of the depths or the inevitable decline of a species through DNA decay. Without fresh input of from different strains of DNA, mutations would eventually eliminate a species due to climatic or environmental pressures.
While Vince waited for the security guard to arrive, Alan decided a shower and a few hours of sleep on fresh, clean sheets would go a long way in restoring his health and personal hygiene.
“See you guys later,” he said. He checked his watch – eight p.m. “Bill, you keep an eye on Vince. When Trace gets back, it’s your turn for a few hours off. In eight hours, we’ll all go down and check things out.”
Bill nodded, broke a rare smile, and continued monitoring the readings from the Cerberus as the machine cooled down after its four-day ordeal. His taciturn manner belied his keen wit and proclivity to wax eloquently on any subject ordinary or arcane after a few beers. Some mistook his laid-back manner for laziness, but after twenty-five years as an engineer, his efficiency and knowledge of his profession made the job look easy. A smile was about as celebratory as he got.
Before Alan could leave, Trace stopped him. “There was something odd about those last few meters of rock.”
Trace’s solemnity alarmed him. “What was that?”
“The stratum was more like kimberlite than the igneous or dolomitic rock we expected. The Cerberus practically ripped through it like butter.”
“Kimberlite? But that’s found in diamond formations. The nearest diamond mine is a hundred kilometers from here.”
“Nevertheless,” Trace insisted.
Trace was seldom wrong, but Alan dismissed the information as interesting but requiring no immediate action. He had no problem with exceeding expectations. “Okay, tell Vince to be careful. Have him take some samples for analysis.” He grinned. “We just dig ‘em. After that, it’s Verkhoen’s problem.”
He received a few hearty pats on the back as he left the tiny control trailer. The sounds of jubilation followed him across the parking lot to his car. Even some of the workers, having learned of the breakthrough, shouted their congratulations. His success elated him, but something nagged at him, something he couldn’t put a finger on. Maybe it was just the usual post-partum depression of seeing his baby delivered, but he knew he had missed something important. He shook his head to clear it. He was too exhausted to think clearly. He needed a few hours of uninterrupted sleep to regain his momentum. He would take a fresh look at the data later.
The night was cloudy and cool with no moon. Ominous dark clouds scuttled across the sky hinting at rain. He smiled. Where he would be in a few hours, four-thousand meters underground, weather wouldn’t be a problem. He drove past the yawning, three-hundred-meter-deep open pit, abandoned when the sloping gold vein dove deep into the earth and became too difficult to mine by conventional methods. Now, it saw new life as an armada of heavy haulers raced up and down the roadway winding along the pit’s steep sides hauling ore.
In another first for gold mining, Van Gotts Corporation had bored a one-and-a-half-kilometer-long shaft from 70 Level to the pit and installed a heavy-duty belt conveyor to move the ore from the depths of the mine to the pit. There, bucket loaders filled large ore haulers for transport to the crushers. Ore mined from 65 Level or higher dropped through a converted airshaft to the skip lift room on 65 Level, which delivered the ore directly to the surface conveyors. Electric locos pulling ore carts hauled ore mined from the lower levels to the belt conveyor. The ingenious split-delivery system had saved millions of dollars and freed the elevators for three work shifts.
Back in his room at the Protea Hotel, one of two hotels in Klerksdorp, Alan checked to see what time it was in Nevada – one p.m. – and made a phone call to his father. They hadn’t had much chance to talk during the celebrating, and he wanted a few words in privacy, away from the crowd. His father answered on the second ring.
“Hello, Dad.”
“Alan,” his fathe
r barked into the receiver. The background noise of the continuing festivities drowned him out. “Let me go someplace a little quieter,” he yelled. “They’re breaking out the champagne here.” Less than a minute later, with the din of the celebration at a tolerable level, he said, “Nice job, son. You did it.”
Alan’s heart swelled with pride at his father’s praise. He was thirty-two years old; nevertheless, it felt good to have his father acknowledge his accomplishments. They had been rare lately. “No, we did it, Dad.”
“It was difficult to keep people’s minds on the job this past week,” his father continued. “Everyone made excuses to drop by my office to watch the progress on my computer.”
“I hope you and mother got some sleep.”
His father laughed. It sounded good to hear mirth from his father where there had been only unspoken anxiety for so long. “Oh, a few hours here and there. Your mother was worse. She insisted on checking in every few hours. I’ve never seen her so concerned. What about you?”
“I’ve been living on coffee and adrenaline. I’m going to get a few hours sleep, and then join Vince down in the mine to check on the Cerberus.”
“You be careful. Verkhoen has a reputation for cutting corners. Watch yourself.”
His father’s voice took on a darker tone that puzzled Alan. While his father was usually a good judge of character, Verkhoen seemed a nice enough person to Alan, cold and calculating, but reputable. He wished he had FaceTimed his father to see the expression on his face.
“I will,” he promised. He wanted to query his father more thoroughly about Verkhoen, but decided it could wait as he stifled a yawn so wide it made his jaw ache. “I’ve got to get some sleep now. Talk to you later.”