Hal nodded.
"Yes," he said.
"All right. The other thing to look out for is that the blocks'll still be hot when they come. So don't try to handle them except with tongs. These are tongs…"
He picked up a couple of the spined apparatuses.
"Hold out your hands."
Hal did, and John pushed one of the devices onto the end of each of Hal's gloves. There was a hand-shaped indentation in the end of each device, Hal discovered, into which his suit glove fitted; thumb, forefinger, middle finger, and the last two fingers as a unit - each slipped into one of the four indentations. Experimentally, he flexed the fingers of his right hand and the four clawlike extensions spread and closed in response.
"Waldos," he said.
"No, they're tongs," said John. "Now you use them to pick up the blocks. Watch me. All right, Torchers, get moving!"
He was fitting a pair of the devices onto the gloves of his own suit as he spoke. He barely had them on before the hiss and crackle of the torches burning into the rock exploded up on the ledge; and a moment or two later one of the torchers kicked a block of granite about the size of a grapefruit back over the edge to fall almost at Hal's feet. Easily, John scooped it up in the four pincers of his tongs. He held it out before Hal.
"Don't touch it," he said. "Just look at it. See the vein in it?"
Hal looked. He could see a line of quartz streaking through the piece of granite.
"Is there gold in that?" he asked, fascinated.
"You're damn right," said John, "and probably some silver, but you can't see traces of that. Look, you see the color in the quartz, there?"
Hal squinted at the quartz, uncertain as to what he should be looking for.
"I think so," he said. John tossed the block into the first car.
"You'll learn," he said.
Several more chunks of rock carved from the wall had landed at their feet while they had been talking. John scooped them up, showed them momentarily to Hal and then tossed them into the car. The next one, however, he again held out to Hal for more extended examination.
"See?" he said. "No veining. Those you ditch."
With a flip of his tongs, he threw the last block over against the wall of the tunnel.
"That's sorting," he said, continuing to work steadily now, for now the blocks were coming in a continuous stream off the ledge. "It'll take you a while to learn it, but you'll get it. The team only gets paid for the good ore it brings back. Any dead rock just takes up space in the cars and cuts our production for the day. But don't sweat it to begin with. Just do the best you can for now. The quicker you learn, though, the better off the team's going to be and the more the rest of us are going to like you. Now, you try it with some of these blocks."
Hal tried it. It took no great skill to learn to use the tongs, though it was a little tricky at first, getting a good grip on the blocks without the feeling in his fingers to guide him; and the waldo controls into which his gloves fitted were so responsive that he overcontrolled at first. But within a dozen minutes he was picking up the blocks with fair skill and dropping them into the cars. Sorting, however, was another matter. Whenever he paused to examine the blocks closely, John snapped at him to keep going.
While he was learning, John kept helping him. But Hal picked up speed in handling the blocks swiftly, although he was very aware that he was still rejecting only about one block in ten, whereas John was rejecting more like one in five. Still, the team leader seemed satisfied with just his handling ability; and gradually he let Hal take over more and more of the work until finally he himself was only standing and watching.
"All right," he said at last. "Just keep doing it that way. But take a break now and we'll change crews."
He turned and called up at the crew on the ledge.
"Change!"
The torches hissed and crackled down into silence. Those on the ledge dropped off it and those who had been seated back in the tunnel came forward, pulling their helmets into place and taking the torches from the first workers, climbing up on the ledge to take their place. This time, John was among the torchers, his own helmet pulled into position. He paused for a second, looking over his shoulder, down at Hal.
"Keep your helmet on, until I tell you to take it off," he said. "You hear that?"
"Yes," said Hal.
"All right!" John turned to face the wall and the rest of his crew turned with him. "Let's go!"
So the workshift began. At first Hal sweated over the prospect of handling the stream of blocks without John to back him up. But if there was anything at all in which life had supplied him with experience, it was the process of learning anything new. He quickly became practiced at seizing the blocks firmly with the tongs, so that they did not slip from his grasp or skitter out of reach when he tried to lift them into the cars; and after a while even his choice of the ore-filled blocks, as opposed to those that should be discarded, seemed to improve.
As the shift wore on, the torchers themselves picked up speed. Hal had to struggle anew to not let the blocks coming off the ledge get ahead of him. He succeeded, becoming faster himself. But as he did, the unaccustomed use of the muscles involved in bending and lifting began to build up on him.
Fortunately, he had a chance to stop and catch his breath every fifteen minutes or so when the crews changed. But even with these breaks, as the first half of the shift wore on he began to tire and slow. The lunch break came just in time to save him from getting badly behind the torchers, but food and rest revived him. He started out the second half of the shift keeping up almost easily; but this burst of strength turned out to be temporary. He tired more quickly now than he had in the morning; and to his deep embarrassment the blocks finally got ahead of him to the point where even by working right through a break time, he was losing ground to the torchers.
Sweating, gasping for air inside his suit, he looked longingly every so often at the miners at the rock wall, whom he could see occasionally throwing back their helmets for a brief breath of fresher air. A hundred times he was tempted to lift his own helmet for a second, but the discipline worked into him in his early years helped him to fight off the temptation. Nonetheless, he was literally staggering on his feet, when he finally felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see John standing beside him.
Chapter Nine
"Go take a break," said John. He gave Hal a light shove away from the blocks with which Hal had been working and bent to the task of handling the blocks himself.
On rubbery legs, Hal walked back down the tunnel and slid down the wall into a sitting position on the tunnel floor. He lifted his helmet and breathed more deeply than he could ever remember breathing in his life before.
He had thought John was merely taking over for him. But now he saw not only John, but all the current torchers, knocking back their helmets and coming down off the ledge, which was already too deep to be properly called only a ledge. As he watched, they were joined by the resting crew of torchers and the whole team together began to cut a ramp to the ledge.
They had almost completed this when a train of five empty cars rolled in to join them, with only one passenger aboard; a great, spiderous old man with his helmet thrown back to show oriental features, and tongs at the end of both the long arms depending from his massive, bowed shoulders. This new train braked to a halt beside their own and the old man hopped out. John went over to speak to him; and Hal, too far away to make out what was being said, saw the old man listening with his face at right angle to John's, nodding occasionally and twitching the tongs at the ends of his arms as if impatient to have the conversation over. John finished finally and turned away. The old man took one step to the chunks of rejected rock lying along the base of the rock wall where Hal had thrown them, and attacked them with both sets of tongs.