First Lensman, E. E. Smith [top 100 novels of all time .txt] 📗

An armored hand waved a signal⁠—voice was utterly useless⁠—up! A valve was flipped; a huge, flat, steel foot arose; a timber slid into place, creaking and groaning as that big flat foot smashed down. Up⁠—again! Up⁠—a third time! Eighteen seconds⁠—less than one-third of a minute⁠—ten inches gained!

And, while it was not easy, two men could hold the burley⁠—in one-minute shifts. As has been intimated, this machine “pimped” for the rotary. It waited on it, ministering to its every need with a singleness of purpose impossible to any except robotic devotion. It picked the rotary’s teeth, it freed its linkages, it deloused its ports, it cleared its spillways of compacted debris, it even⁠—and this is a feat starkly unbelievable to anyone who does not know the hardness of neocarballoy and the tensile strength of ultra-special steels⁠—it even changed, while in full operation, the rotary’s diamond-tipped cutters.

Both burley and rotary were extremely efficient, but neither was either quiet or gentle. In their quietest moments they shrieked and groaned and yelled, producing a volume of sound in which nothing softer than a cannon-shot could have been heard. But when, in changing the rotary’s cutting teeth, the burley’s “fingers” were driven into and through the solid rock⁠—a matter of merest routine to both machines⁠—the resultant blasts of sound cannot even be imagined, to say nothing of being described.

And always both machines spewed out torrents of rock, in sizes ranging from impalpable dust up to chunks as big as a fist.

As the sag lengthened and the checkerwork grew higher, the work began to slow down. They began to lose the time they had gained. There were plenty of men, but in that narrow bore there simply was not room for enough men to work. Even through that storm of dust and hurtling rock the timbermen could get their blocking up there, but they could not place it fast enough⁠—there were too many other men in the way. One of them had to get out. Since one man could not possibly run the rotary, one man would have to hold the burley.

They tried it, one after another. No soap. It hammered them flat. The rotary, fouled in every tooth and channel and vent under the terrific thrust of two hundred thirty pounds of air, merely gnawed and slid. The timbermen now had room⁠—but nothing to do. And Jones, who had been biting at his mustache and ignoring the frantic walkie-talkie for minutes, stared grimly at watch and tape. Three minutes left, and over eight feet to go.

“Gimme that armor!” he rasped, and climbed the blocks. “Open the air wide open⁠—give ’er the whole two-fifty! Get down, Mac⁠—I’ll take it the rest of the way!”

He put his shoulders to the improvised yoke, braced his feet, and heaved. The burley, screaming and yelling and clamoring, went joyously to work⁠—both ways⁠—God, what punishment! The rotary, free and clear, chewed rock more viciously than ever. An armored hand smote his leg. Lift! He lifted that foot, set it down two inches higher. The other one. Four inches. Six. One foot. Two. Three. Lord of the ancients! Was this lifetime of agony only one minute? Or wasn’t he holding her⁠—had the damn thing stopped cutting? No, it was still cutting⁠—the rocks were banging against and bouncing off of his helmet as viciously and as numerously as ever; he could sense, rather than feel, the furious fashion in which the relays of timbermen were laboring to keep those high-stepping jacks in motion.

No, it had been only one minute. Twice that long yet to go. God! Nothing could be that brutal⁠—a bull elephant couldn’t take it⁠—but by all the gods of space and all the devils in hell, he’d stay with it until that sag broke through. And grimly, doggedly, toward the end nine-tenths unconsciously, Lensman Conway Costigan stayed with it.

And in the stope so far below, a new and highly authoritative voice blared from the speaker.

“Jones! God damn it, Jones, answer me! If Jones isn’t there, somebody else answer me⁠—anybody!”

“Yes, sir?” Wright was afraid to answer that peremptory call, but more afraid not to.

“Jones? This is Clancy.”

“No, sir. Not Jones. Wright, sir⁠—top miner.”

“Where’s Jones?”

“Up in the sag, sir. He’s holding the burley⁠—alone.”

“Alone! Hell’s purple fires! Tell him to⁠—how many men has he got on the rotary?”

“Two, sir. That’s all they’s room for.”

“Tell him to quit it⁠—put somebody else on it⁠—I won’t have him killed, damn it!”

“He’s the only one strong enough to hold it, sir, but I’ll send up word.” Word went up via sign language, and came back down. “Beggin’ your pardon, sir, but he says to tell you to go to hell, sir. He won’t have no time for chitchat, he says, until this goddam sag is through or the juice goes off, sir.”

A blast of profanity erupted from the speaker, of such violence that the thoroughly scared Wright threw the walkie-talkie down the waste-chute, and in the same instant the rotary crashed through.

Dazed, groggy, barely conscious from his terrific effort, Jones stared owlishly through the heavy, steel-braced lenses of his helmet while the timbermen set a few more courses of wood and the rotary walked itself and the clinging burley up and out of the hole. He climbed stiffly out, and as he stared at the pillar of light flaring upward from the sag, his gorge began to rise.

“Wha’s the idea of that damn surveyor lying to us like that?” he babbled. “We had oodles an’ oodles of time⁠—didn’t have to kill ourselves⁠—damn water ain’t got there yet⁠—wha’s the big.⁠ ⁠…” He wobbled weakly, and took one short step, and the lights went out. The surveyor’s estimate had been impossibly, accidentally close. They had had a little extra time; but it was measured very easily in seconds.

And Jones, logical to the end in a queerly addled way, stood in the almost palpable darkness, and wobbled, and thought. If a man couldn’t see anything with his eyes wide open, he was either blind or unconscious. He wasn’t blind,