Andrew managed to break the sledge loose from the ice. He took two turns of cable around the head of it.
“Grab hold!” yelled Jonnie.
Andrew grabbed the slippery sledge handle with his mittened hands.
Jonnie jumped the passenger plane up twenty feet, pulling Andrew up and leaving the end of the cable dangling over Dunneldeen.
“The captain abandons ship!” said Dunneldeen and grabbed the cable end.
Jonnie put the passenger plane up slowly. It would not do to whip-snap the two men off into the roiling river to be swept under the ice.
Andrew was hanging to the sledge twenty feet below the passenger plane. Dunneldeen was dangling forty feet below on the same rope.
“I think this clamp is slipping!” wailed Doctor MacDermott in the back.
The iced mittens of the men below were certainly slipping. It was impossible to raise them a thousand feet to the top of the gorge. Jonnie looked wildly at the river.
The flying platform below exploded in a violence of orange flame.
The passenger plane bucked in the concussion.
Jonnie looked down at the men. The flames had hit Dunneldeen. His leggings were on fire!
Jonnie swept the plane downriver. With frantically racing fingers he brought it to forty-five feet above the snow-coated ice of the stream. Was that ice thick enough?
He dipped the plane. Dunneldeen struck the deep snow. Jonnie dragged him a hundred feet through the drifts on the river to put the fire out.
He saw a shelf beside the river, narrow and snow-covered.
Bringing the plane within feet of the canyon wall, he lowered Dunneldeen onto it and then dropped further.
Andrew's gloves, which had been slipping down the sledge handle inch by inch, let go, and he fell the last ten feet. He almost went off the ledge. Dunneldeen grabbed him.
Jonnie, battling the wind, turned the plane around and brought the open door to the ledge.
The two men scrambled in, helped by Doctor MacDermott.
Andrew reeled in the cable and got the side door shut. Jonnie vaulted the plane two thousand feet up and maneuvered to land at the pad on the top.
Doctor MacDermott was stammering with apologies to the two men. “I could not find a second rope.”
“Think nothing of it,” said Dunneldeen. “I even got a sleigh ride out of it!”
Doctor MacDermott was clucking over his charred leggings, terribly relieved to find Dunneldeen was just singed and not badly burned.
“I had my chance to be a hero,” said Doctor MacDermott “and I muffed it!”
“You did just fine,” said Andrew. “Just fine.”
Jonnie got out of the plane and walked over to the canyon edge. They followed him. The shift crew was also staring down, their faces shiny from the perspiration of strain. It had been a wild thing to watch.
Shaking his head, Jonnie looked down a thousand feet to where the edge of the staircase was imbedded in the bank. The flying platform had vanished under the ice. The snow around the place was pockmarked with the impacts of broken bits and blackened from the explosion.
Jonnie faced Dunneldeen and the crew. “That,” said Jonnie, “is that!”
The shift boss and Dunneldeen said, almost in chorus, “But we can't quit!”
“No more of these acrobatics in thin air,” said Jonnie. “No more hanging over this edge with our hearts in our throats. Come with me.”
They followed him back to the pad. He pointed straight down. “Below us,” said Jonnie, “that vein is extending into the cliff. It 's a pocket vein. Pockets of gold probably occur every few hundred feet. We're going to put a shaft down to that vein. Then we're going to drift along that vein underground to the cliff edge and try to recover that gold from behind!”
They were silent. “But that fissure out there...we can't blast: it would knock the face of the cliff off.”
“We're just going to have to use drills.
Point drills to go in with parallel holes. Then vibrating spades to literally cut the rock. It will take time. We can work hard and maybe get there.”
Underground? It dawned on them it was a great idea.
The shift boss and Dunneldeen started making plans to fly in drilling machinery and scrapers and bucket conveyors. Waves of relief began to spread. The shift change crew flew in and when they heard about it they cheered. They had hated hanging by their heels in greedy space with little return to show.
“Get it set up and rolling before the next pass-over of the drone,” said Jonnie. "Terl's gone crazy but he's a miner. He'll see what we're doing and hold off. It 's like taking rock out with teaspoons, so we'll work this all three shifts around the clock. It'll be easier to work underground in this weather anyway. We'll use the dig-out to enlarge this flat space. Now where's a transit so we can get the exact direction down and over for the dig?”
The sound of the plane revved up. Dunneldeen was going back for pilots and equipment.
We might make it yet, thought Jonnie.
Chapter 3
A worried Zzt watched Terl and a swarm of mechanics working over the old bomber drone.
The huge underground garages and hangars resounded with the whine of drills and clang of hammers.
Since the last semiannual personnel intake, Zzt had gotten his mechanics back; aside from exchanging recon drones for refueling every three days (a drone he considered useless), his work was not backlogged. Terl had left the transport chief and section alone until now. Terl himself had serviced the twenty battle planes in the outside field. So aside from this present unexpected project, Zzt had little about which to complain.
But this idiocy! The bomber drone? He knew he had better speak.
Terl was in the huge plane's control room working with presets of buttons. He was covered with grease and sweat. He had a small remote keyboard in his hand, and he was punching settings into the main panels of the ship.
"Scotland...Sweden," Terl was saying, consulting his tables and notes and pushing ship buttons. There were no seats in the place for it would never be piloted, and Terl was hunched uncomfortably on a balance motor housing.
"...Russia...Alps...Italy...China...no. Alps...India...China...Italy...Africa..."
"Terl," said Zzt timidly.
“Shut up,” snapped Terl, not even looking up.
"...Amazon...Andes...Mexico...Rocky Mountains! Rocky Mountains one, two, and three!”
"Terl," repeated Zzt. “This bomber drone has not been flown in a thousand years. It 's a wreck.”
“We're rebuilding it, aren't we?” snarled Terl, finishing his presets and standing up.
“Terl, maybe you don't know that this was the original conquest drone. It was the one that gassed this planet before our takeover.”
“Well, I’m loading it with gas canisters, ain't I?"
“But Terl, we've already conquered this planet a thousand or more years ago. You release kill gas now, even in just a few places, and it might hit our own minesites."
“They use breathe-gas," snapped Terl, shouldering by Zzt and walking back into the huge plane. Workmen were trundling up big gas canisters from deep underground storage. They had to burnish them gingerly to get the crud of ages off them. Terl energetically directed the workers hooking them in place. “Fifteen canisters! You've only brought fourteen. Get another one!” Some workmen rushed off and Terl was hooking wires up to the canister release valves, muttering to himself, checking color coding.
“Terl, they only kept this drone as a curiosity piece. These things are dangerous. It 's one thing to remote-guide a recon drone with its small motors– they don't override the controls! But this thing has motors like a dozen ore freighters. The signals it sends back to a remote get overridden by its own motors. It could charge around and release gas almost anyplace. They're too erratic for competent use. And once you start them you can't stop them. Like transshipment firing, they're irreversible.”