“Jonnie, laddie!” said Dunneldeen. “You can stop worrying yourself about scraping uranium out of the dirt! There's a full nuclear arsenal, complete with assorted bombs, intact, just thirty miles north of here! We found the map and a plane just checked it out! Now all we've got to worry about is blowing off our innocent little heads and exploding this whole planet in the bargain!”
Chapter 5
Disaster struck in the form of an earthquake on Day 32 of the new year.
Shortly after midnight, the tremor awakened Jonnie. Equipment on his bureau in the London Palace Elite Hotel rattled together and he sat up in his bed. The prolonged throb of vibration was still occurring!
The old building groaned.
The rumble of the earthquake traveled on. It was followed by a second, lesser tremor a half-minute later, and then that was gone.
It was not too unusual in the Rockies. No damage seemed to be done in the old mining town.
Uneasy, but not really alarmed, Jonnie pulled on buckskin pants and moccasins and, throwing a puma skin over his shoulders, sprinted through the snow to the Empire Dauntless.
The duty sentry's light was on. The young Scot was tapping a buzzer key that activated the communication system to the mine: it was a directional laser radio, limited to an exact width and undetectable beyond these mountains.
The Scot looked up. His face was a bit white. “They don't answer.” He tapped the key again more rapidly as though his finger by itself could shoot the beam through. “Maybe the receiver pole got twisted in the quake.”
In minutes, Jonnie had a relief crew routed out, spare ropes and winches assembled, blankets and stimulants packaged and being loaded on the passenger plane. Strained faces turned repeatedly toward the mine even though it was far out of their line of sight. They were worried for the mine duty shift: Thor, a shift leader named Dwight, and fifteen men.
The night was black as coal; even the stars were masked by high, invisible clouds. It was no mean stunt flying these mountains in the dark. The instruments of the mine plane glowed green as the ship vaulted upward. The image screen painted a blurred picture of the terrain ahead. Jonnie adjusted it to sharpness. Beside him a copilot made some console plane weight corrections. Jonnie was depending on his eyes to avoid the first mountain slope. He flipped on the plane's beam lights. They struck the snow slope and he eased the plane up over it.
He knew that things had been going too well.
They had been making real progress in their preparations. They were far from ready, but what they had accomplished had been miraculous.
He hunted ahead for the next mountainside, checking the viewscreen. Good lord, it was dark! He checked his compass. The men in the back were tense and silent. He could almost feel what they were thinking.
The top knolled flipped by under them. A little too close. Where was the next one?
The assault rifles he had at first considered worthless were proving the very thing. With a great deal of ingenuity they had salvaged the ammunition. They had drawn out the bullets from the case and tapped out the primer. By careful experimentation they had found out how to substitute a blasting cap in the bottom of the shell case. At first they had thought they would also need powder and had blown up a rifle trying it– no casualties. It turned out that the blasting cap was enough to fire a bullet at high velocity.
Jonnie swerved the plane to avoid a suddenly looming cliff and went a little higher. If he went too high he could lose his way entirely if lights were out at the mine. His lights might also become visible at the compound. Stay low. Dangerous, but stay low.
Then they had taken the bullets and drilled a small hole in the nose and, wearing radiation suits, inserted a grain of radioactive material from a TNW. They had covered this with a thin bit of melted lead. In this way a man could carry the ammunition without danger of radiation hitting him.
But when it was fired, oh my! They tried it on breathe-gas in a glass bottle, and did that breathe-gas explode!
Too low, Jonnie had recognized a lone scrub on a ridge. He lifted the plane over it. They were on course. Hold down the speed. Don't have another disaster flying in the dark.
The bullets were also armor-piercing to some degree and, when fired into a breathe-gas vial two hundred yards away, caused a violent reaction that brought concussion all the way back to them.
They put every available Scot onto an assembly line converting bullets and they had cases and cases of them now.
A hundred assault rifles and five hundred magazines had been cleaned to perfection. They fired without a stutter or dud.
No good against a tank or a thick, lead-glass compound dome, but those assault rifles would be deadly to individual Psychos. With breathe-gas in their blood streams they would literally explode.
He spotted the river that ran out of the gorge. He eased down, following it, the plane's lights flashing on the uneven ice and snow.
They'd been so happy about the assault rifles that they had gone to work on the bazookas. They had found some nuclear artillery shells and had converted their noses over to the bazooka noses, and now they had armor-piercing, nuclear bazookas. There were still a number of those left to make.
Yes, it had been too smooth, too good to be true.
There were no lights on the mine pad ahead.
There was no one visible there at all.
He set the plane down on the pad. The passengers boiled out of it. Their lights darted this way and that.
One of them who had run to the chasm edge called back, his voice thin in the cold darkness: "Jonnie! The cliff face has gone!”
Chapter 6
A light shone down from the present edge and confirmed it. The fissure, thirty feet back from the old edge, had simply opened in the earthquake and fallen into the gorge.
The cliff face was no longer overhanging but sloped up toward them.
In the light, the wide edge of the broken-off quartz lode was visible. It was pure white. No gold in the remaining vein. The pocket of gold was gone!
But Jonnie was thinking right now of the crew. They had not reached the fissure, for the avalanche had exposed no tunnel.
They were somehow trapped under them, if they were still alive.
Jonnie raced back to the shaft edge. It yawned blackly, a large circle of emptiness, silent. The shaft was about a hundred feet deep.
He looked around, flashing his light. “The hoist! Where is the hoist?”
The entire apparatus used to take out ore and lower and raise men was missing.
Lights played down the mountain. It was not on the slope.
Jonnie approached the hole more closely. Then he saw the slide marks of the cross timbers that had supported the hoist cage over the hole.
The hoist was down there in the shaft.
“Be very quiet, everyone,” said Jonnie. Then he bent over and cupped his hands and shouted down, “Down there! Is any one alive?” They listened.
“I thought I heard something,” said the parson, who had come along.
Jonnie tried again. They listened. They could not be sure. Jonnie turned on his belt radio and spoke into it. No answer. He saw Angus in the rescue team. “Angus! Drop an intercom on a cable down into that hole.”
While Angus and two others were doing that, Jonnie pulled a picto-recorder out of the rescue gear. He found more cable and extended its leads.
Angus had rigged and lowered the intercom. Jonnie signaled to the parson. The place was broadly lit now with lamps the relief crew had put on poles. The parson's hand was shaking as he held the intercom mike.