Pyle, a thin young man, seemed overcome with a fit of ague. He was trembling in every limb and his eyes rolled wildly, returning again and again to the fading patch on Vogel's cheek where the foreman had struck him.
"We're going to dig with our bare hands.” said Foley. "We have hours of life left to us, and it's a sin to waste them. Something may happen.”
"Yes," said Pyle shrilly, “something may happen." He flung himself on a wall and clawed at the chinks of rock, tearing them from their bed. On Foley's nod the two others silently fell in beside the boy and picked at surface. The foreman watched for a moment and picked up a long drill that trailed a useless length of wire. Hefting it, he unscrewed its bit and handed it to Pyle. "You can use this crow-bar, he said. "I'll look for more."
All together they tore into the wall, and slowly a new tunnel, at a forty; five degree angle with the old, was formed.
“SIX THOUSAND feet or more on the vertical to go," said Vogel pantingly as he bore down on his improvised wedge. "And we've dug about fifty feet in two hours… My guess is that we've got just about ten hours more to live."
Rawson, a huge chunk of ore in his arms, paused. "I thought that we weren't going to talk about it," he said evenly.
Pyle had been tearing at the rock frantically; without stopping he panted, "Something might happen. Don't fight now. Something might happen." It was his constant liturgy. Rawson wondered if he were going mad. At best they were keeping themselves occupied; no one really believed, he was sure, that help would come in time. He hefted the rock and walked back to the mouth of their ragged tunnel.
"Drop it here," said Foley, who was stacking the excavated ore. The little space they had was nearly filled with it.
The big American let the rock fall at the mouth of the peristaltic tube, now silent and still. "How long does the respirator work?" he asked abruptly.
"It depends. Twenty hours, sometimes. In any case, not long enough for us . . . Let's get back to the diggings."
Foley flashed his head-lamp over the ceiling of their new tunnel. "I don't like that flow-bulge," he said. "Get a stick of timber if you can find one long enough."
Rawson rummaged through the piles of wreckage and wrenched out a slender beam. "Will this do?" he asked.
Foley eyed it. "It's long enough, at least," he said. "Jam it in—there." The prop was shoved against the ceiling, and they swung their bodies against it to batten it into place. Then they waited to see. Slowly the beam arced under a pressure greater than the soft Callistan timber was cut to resist; as the men stood aside it snapped with the noise of a gunshot.
"Even at this, light gravity rock flows when there's a mile of more rock in over it. Our ceiling's descending faster than I thought; it's pretty hard to estimate when you've been used to working with shoring."
Rawson was staring in fascination at the roof of their tunnel, his headlamp making a glaring spot of green radiance on the dead-black ore. Foley clapped him on the shoulder. "Get back to the face," he said.
Again they were scratching at the yielding wall of rock, tearing fragments from it bodily and prying others loose with cunning leverage.
Rawson felt a shortness of breath, and wondered about the respirators. Twenty hours, maybe, he thought. Suddenly he had to speak.
"Foley," he cried, "why don't we try a blast?"
The foreman looked at him blankly; then his face seamed into a grim smile. "If the others are willing," he said. "Only you have to realize that would be pretty close to suicide for us, without shoring. If it comes clear we'll have gained fifteen feet or so in a hundredth of the tune it'd take us this way. If it doesn't ... All in favor?"
"Why not?" said Vogel. And, flatly, "I hope it fails!"
Pyle coughed nervously. "If you think there's a chance. . . ."
"That settles it, I think," said Foley. "Hold your crowbar while I tap." They bit slowly into the wall, making a ragged drill-hole. Silently Foley produced a gleaming capsule of trinite and rammed it in.
"Stand back to the mouth of the tunnel," he said. They retreated; Foley was left alone in the triple glare of their headlamps. He raised his improvised sledge—the grip of an electric drill—and slammed it down against the protruding stump of the crowbar.
In one awful moment, as Rawson saw it, there was the clashing jump of the bar, the reticulated explosion across the face of the rock, and the roaring collapse of their tunnel as Foley sprang clear of danger.
THEY surveyed the wreck blankly. A long silence was broken by a sobbing wail from Pyle. "Trapped," he choked. "More than a mile under the surface of this damned moon!"
"Last chance gone," said Vogel grimly. "Now we sit down and die."
"So nobody was fooled?" asked Foley quietly. "Well, keep your heads now, at any rate. If we're going to die let's do it like little gentlemen."
"A pair of dice or a deck of cards would help," said Rawson. "Or we can play word-games like 'Ghosts' if you know how to spell. I don't. I never could win at that game."
Foley sat down placidly, his back propped upon the pile of ore that choked the silent peristaltic tube. "I don't know the game," he said. "Do you think we ought to pray?"
Pyle was aimlessly turning-over his head-lamp, which he had taken from his sweaty hat, and the solid flare of green from the lens swung over the men and their cramped quarters. His hands were twitching.
"Put that damned thing down!” Vogel was irritated.
"No" said Pyle stubbornly. Then he cried out; turned to Foley suddenly. "Listen!" he yelled. "This lamp is a radium-exciter!”
"Sure it is.” said Foley.
"Yeah, but listen! The tunnels are crawling with radium. Can't we open lamp and take out the element? And turn it on the walls and blast our way to the surface?"
Vogel and Rawson looked up. Foley glanced at them, and slowly shook his head.
"No go," he said. "You could start the action, but how could you control it? The whole mine’d burn up, and it wouldn't stop then—it would go on to all the other ores around that are rich in radium."
"And there are a lot of those." said Rawson, suddenly seeing the impossibility of the scheme. "The whole planet's radioactive. It would he another sun, and we don't need one. Shelve the idea for reference,"
Pyle nodded slowly, staring at them. There was a shattered look on his face, and his eyes gleamed in the light of their lamps, "I see," he whispered. "You don't want to be saved. You won't take a chance for your own lives."
"There's no chance in it," said Rawson harshly. "You open that lamp and the planet goes up in flames before you can say scat. That means that everybody on the planet dies, and a lot of people on the other moons of Jupiter die too. And then there's no radium at all to cure the Sickness except what they can get on Mercury and Deimos. Forget it!"
Pyle stood up, still turning the lamp over in his trembling hands. Slowly he said, "If you won't, I will." He took a tool from his pocket and pried at the lens of his light.
Vogel sprang to his feet and snatched the device from Pyle's hands. "Sit down," he ordered angrily, "or I’ll knock you down.” The younger man looked at his empty hands for a moment, and with the swiftness of a madman snatched Vogel’s lamp, cap and all, from his head, and darted to the other end of the tunnel. He scrabbled madly at the rock, and hit a weak spot, a spot they hadn’t tried because it led down to the lower galleries of the mine. He quickly enlarged it, and rolled through,
The three started in pursuit, following the bobbing green light that Pyle was carrying, and came to a confused halt when it winked out.
"We'd better go back," said Foley wearily, "The tunnels branch out down there—we'd never find him." Draggingly they returned to the place of the second cave-in, to stare blankly at the tumbled rocks.