“Clean out the lower tier of the Kon-I-Gut caves in Central Asia so that visitors can go there.” began Thor Ahn.
“Build a road to Lake Mental across the steep mountain ridge,” continued Diss Ken, “renew a grove of old bread trees in the Argentine, explain the causes for the appearance of big octopuses in the region of the recent lift near Trinidad….”
“And destroy them!”
“That’s five, what’s the sixth?”
The two lads turned somewhat bashful.
“We are both proficient at music,” began Diss Ken, blushing, “and… we have been asked to collect material on the ancient dances of the Island of Bali and resuscitate them musically and choreographically.”
“By that do you mean select girls to dance them and form a troupe?” laughed Darr Veter.
“Yes,” admitted Thor Ahn, unwillingly.
“An interesting job. But that’s a group job, like the road to the lake, isn’t it?”
“Yes, we’ve got a good group. Only… they want you to be their mentor, too. It would be fine if you only agreed!”
Darr Veter doubted his abilities with regard to the last of the six tasks. The lads, however, their faces beaming, danced for joy and assured him that “Zieg Zohr himself” had promised to guide the sixth task.
“In a year and four months I’ll find myself something to do in Central Asia,” said Darr Veter, pleased at the happy faces of the two youngsters.
“It’s a good thing you’re not Director of the Outer Stations any more,” exclaimed Diss Ken, “I never thought I’d be working with such a mentor!..” The lad suddenly blushed so furiously that his forehead was covered with tiny beads of perspiration and Thor even moved away from him with an expression of reproach. Darr Veter hurried to help Grom Orme’s son over his faux pas. “Have you got plenty of time?”
“No, we were given three hours off and we brought a man here who is ill with a fever he caught in our swamps.” “Is there still fever here? I thought….” “It’s very rare and only occurs in the swamps,” put in Diss, very hurriedly, “that’s what we’re here for!”
“So we still have two hours left. Let’s go into the town, you’ll probably want to go to News House.”
“Oh, no. We’d like you to… answer our questions — we have got them ready and you know how important it is when we are selecting our life’s work.”
Darr Veter gave his consent and the three of them went to the Guest Hall and sat in one of its cool rooms fanned with an artificial sea breeze.
Two hours later another coach took Darr Veter farther on his way; tired out he dozed on a sofa on the lower deck. He woke up when the train stopped in the City of Chemists. A huge structure in the form of a star with ten glazed glass-covered radial buildings stretching from it rose up over an extensive coal-field. The coal that was extracted here was processed into medicines, vitamins, hormones, artificial silk and fur. The waste products went for the manufacture of sugar. In one of the rays of the Star the rare metals germanium and vanadium were extracted from the coal — there was no end to the things that could be got out of that valuable black mineral!
One of Darr Veter’s old friends who worked as a chemist in the fur ray came to the station to meet him. Once, long before, there had been three happy young mechanics working on the fruit-gathering machines in Indonesia. Now one of them was a chemist in charge of a laboratory in a big factory, the second had remained a fruit-grower and bad invented a valuable new pollination process and the third, Darr Veter, was once more returning to Mother Earth, only deeper down this time, into the mines. The friends spent no more than ten minutes together, but even such a meeting was much pleasanter than meetings on the TVP.
He had not much farther to go. The Director of the latitudinal air lines listened to his persuasion with the ‘friendly helpfulness that was typical of the Great Circle Era. Darr Veter flew across the ocean and arrived on the western section of the Spiral Way south of the seventeenth branch, at the dead end of which he transferred to a hydroplane to continue his journey.
High mountains came right down to the sea. The gentler slops at the foot were terraced with white stone to hold the soil and were planted with rows of southern pines and Widdringtonia in alternate avenues of bronze and bluish-green needles. High up the bare rocks, there were clefts to be seen in which waterfalls sent up clouds of water dust. Buildings painted bright orange or yellow with bluish-grey roofs stretched at intervals along the terraces.
Jutting out into sea there was an artificial sand-bank at the end of which stood a wave-washed tower. It stood at the edge of the continental shelf which in those parts ended in a submarine cliff a good thousand metres deep. From the tower an extremely thick concrete pipe, strong enough to withstand the pressure in the depths of the ocean, led down vertically. At the bottom the pipe rested on the summit of a submarine mountain that consisted almost entirely of pure rutile or titanium dioxide. The processing of the ore was done under the water, inside the mountain. All that reached the surface was slabs of pure titanium and waste products that spread far into sea, turning the water a muddy yellow. The hydroplane tossed on the yellow waves in front of the landing stage on the southern side of the tower, and Darr Veter waited his opportunity to jump on to the spray-soaked platform. He went upstairs to the railed gallery where several people, not on duty, gathered to welcome the newcomer. Darr’ Veter had imagined the mine to be in complete isolation but the people who met him were not at all the anchorites his own mood had led him to expect. The faces that greeted him were happy even if they were somewhat tired from their exacting work. There five men and three women — so women worked there, too!
Before ten days had passed Darr Veter had settled down to his new job.
The mine had its own power plant — in the depths of the abandoned workings on the mainland there was an old nuclear power station type E, or type 2, as it used to be called, which did not have a harmful fall-out and was, therefore, useful for local stations.
A most involved complex of machines was housed in the stone belly of the submarine mountain and moved forward as it bit into the friable reddish-brown mineral. The most difficult work was at the bottom of the installation where the ore was automatically extracted and crushed. The machine received signals from the central control post in the upper storey where all the data on the work of the cutting and crushing apparatus, on the changing hardness and viscosity of the extracted rock as well as information from the flotation tables were accumulated. Depending on the changing metal content in the ore, the crushing and washing arrangements were accelerated or decelerated. The work had to be done by mechanics as the entire control could not be passed over to cybernetic machines owing to the small area protected from the sea.
Darr Veter was given the job of mechanic, testing and setting the lower assembly. He spent his daily tours of duty in semi-dark rooms, packed with indicator dials, where the pump of the air conditioning system could scarcely cope with the overwhelming heat made worse by the increased pressure due to the inevitable leakage of compressed air.
After work Darr Veter and his young assistant would make their way to the top, stand for a long time on the balcony breathing in the fresh air, then take a bath, eat and go each to his own room in one of the houses at the pithead. Darr Veter had tried to renew his study of the new cochlear branch of mathematics but, as time went on, he began to fall asleep more and more quickly, waking up only in time for work. As the months passed he began to feel better. He seemed to have forgotten his former contact with the Cosmos. Like all other workers at the titanium mines he got pleasure out of seeing off the rafts that transported the ingots of titanium. Since the polar ice-caps had been reduced, storms all over the planet had decreased in violence so that many cargoes could be transported on sea-going rafts, either pulled by tugs or self-propelled. The staff of the mines changed but Darr Veter, with two other mining enthusiasts, stayed for another term.