Part IX
Chapter 1
The snows were late, but when they came they made up for it with a violent, howling vengeance that almost stopped the work at the lode.
The staircase was not working. Jonnie had helped all he could, flying an overheating platform to drive in the pins, hanging from safety wires over the yawning chasm, encouraging the others. They had almost made it, had even taken out another ninety pounds in gold, when the first real storm of winter hit them. Under winds of near hurricane force, driving frozen pellets as hard as bullets, almost shaking the very mountains themselves, the staircase had collapsed. Fortunately it had just been abandoned during a shift change when it went, and there were no casualties.
They were waiting now for a lull in the storm to see what else they could do.
It was mandatory that they appear industrious, for it was the opinion of Robert the Fox that Terl would not act violently unless it appeared there was no hope. But just now the driving snow masked any pictures the recon drone might take in its daily overfly.
Besides, it was not vital, they all assured him, that Jonnie be there. Long ago the planning had provided that three who looked like him keep up the appearance that he was always there. One of these three was always visible to the recon drone– each one to his own watch. It had even been Thor who had held up the sign, not Jonnie. Three watches were vital, for no crew could stand it for more than two hours in this bitter cold.
So Jonnie was not there today. Through the driving storm, he and three others were heading for a place once called "Uravan."
The historian, Doctor MacDermott, was developing quite a knack for picking up information out of the tattered remains of books. He even had a young Scot, an accomplished scout, assigned to him now just to go off and dig up ancient maps and books. And MacDermott had found a reference that said that Uravan had one of the world's largest uranium deposits.” It was supposed to be west and slightly south of the base about two hundred twenty miles, just beyond and a bit southwest of an enormous, distinctive plateau.
Uranium!
So Jonnie and one of the pilots and Angus MacTavish were on their way in a personnel plane. Who knew, they might be lucky.
Angus MacTavish was delighted. He was the one who figured out man-mechanics and got things working.
Jonnie had trained him and another half-dozen Scots in electronics and they were all good at that and mechanics, but it was Angus MacTavish who was the star. Pugnacious, never knowing the meaning of defeat, a bundle of enthusiastic black-haired optimism, Angus was quite certain they would find mountains of uranium right there, all ready to shovel into a bag and cart off.
Jonnie didn't think so. In the first place they had no protection from radiation yet, so they were a long way from shoveling anything. But a uranium mine might have enough left around to test breathe-gas. He wisely refrained from dampening Angus's enthusiasm. All they were out for was, in fact, a scout to find a place to test breathe-gas.
The storm made visibility very poor. The passenger craft bucketed along, battered by the machine-gunning of occasional local storms. The plane had damn-all in the way of instruments and it was all contact flying. A time or two a peak would flash by a mite too close, but from way up high it was a carpet of turbulent whiteness and one might lose his bearings. Fortunately the storm was blowing eastward and its worst furies were past by the time they had gone a hundred miles.
They burst out of a cloud into clear weather. The panorama of the western Rockies spread out, glistening in the late morning sun, breathtaking in its beauty.
“Scotland may be the best land in the world,” said the copilot, “but 'tis never like this!”
Jonnie punched their speed up to about five hundred, and the white vast world fled by. He spotted the plateau, estimated from the ancient schoolbook map he held where Uravan might be. Even in the snow they could make out where an ancient, curving road had been. He spotted the southeast point where the road forked and, down to treetop level and counting the white-coated remains of towns, brought them to the mounds and dumps that must be Uravan. He landed in front of some buildings, the plane crunching into the fresh snow.
Angus MacTavish was out of the door like a running buck, his kilt flying behind him. He dashed into one ruined building after another and suddenly came speeding back.
His voice thin in the sharp air, he yelled, " 'Tis Uravan!" He held up some tattered scraps of paper.
Jonnie reached in back and got out a breathe-gas cartridge and the equipment. He and Angus had worked half the night making a remote control that would turn the regulator on and off. All they had to do was find a hot radiation spot, back off, turn on the remote, and see whether they got a flash of exploding breathe-gas. Jonnie also got out some shovels, climbing ropes, and mine lamps.
Running all over the place like a hunting hound, Angus was tracking down likely spots. There were ore dumps. There had been fences but these had long since rusted away.
They tried repeatedly. They would scoop out an old dump and put the breathe-gas cartridge down, back off, release some breathe-gas, and see whether it flashed in a small explosion.
After a dozen tries, Angus became convinced it must be a spent cartridge. He switched it on in front of his face and promptly turned blue with coughing. No, it wasn't a spent cartridge. They went down in pits. They scrambled into drifts long since unsafe.
They used up five cartridges of breathe-gas.
No explosions.
Jonnie felt a bit disheartened. He let Angus and the pilot go on with the experiments while he wandered around through the ruins. It was all so badly decayed there was difficulty in recognizing what the buildings had been used for. How Angus had found paper simply added up to Angus: it must have been protected by being preserved under something.
Then Jonnie started to get suspicious. In all this area he had only found one pitiful remnant that might have been a body, merely teeth fillings and buttons lying in a certain pattern in a room.
No remains of file cabinets. No distinguishable remains of machinery aside from some decayed hoists. But no bodies save that one.
He went back to the plane and sat down. This place had been mined out before the Psychlo attack. And it had been mined out with such care that the waste dumps weren't even hot.
Angus came streaming back shouting: “It works! It works!” He was carrying something that had been framed.
Jonnie got out and looked at it. One corner of the ancient frame was not charred. Inset into the dilapidated mounting was a piece of ore. It had a brass plate under it, mostly undecipherable. There must have been a leaded glass face on the frame once, for a scrap of it remained in a corner.
He carried it over to a rock and sat down and studied it. The ore was brown and black. It had been mounted as an exhibit on a lead background. He held the inscription this way and that. He couldn't make out more than that it was the “first” something. And then a person's name he couldn't make out either. He turned the plate in another way and then saw the letters at the top more plainly. They said
"PITCHBLENDE."
“Look!” said Angus. “Let me show you.” He took the frame from Jonnie and put it about thirty feet away. He pointed the breathe-gas cartridge at it and came back to Jonnie. He flipped on a remote switch. The breathe-gas emission exploded!