Is he going to take me to the top, Mark wondered, and throw me off? He hadn’t the strength to resist.
The elevator came up, not down, rising from some basement level. Bennett pulled back the accordion gate, shoved Mark aboard, followed him, and started them down again. The elevator, a cage in a cage, moved slowly downward, through an excavation only minimally built on, beams and posts to support the work above. Then it ran through a kind of floor, which should have been the bottom of the excavation but was not, and descended through darkness, and then into a different kind of light, an interior dim light, as the elevator descended into a tunnel.
The tunnel was very rough, the earth walls and floor uncovered, the plywood sheets of the ceiling crudely shored up. Temporary electric wire sagged from light fixture to light fixture along one side. The tunnel started here at the elevator and continued for about twenty-five feet into darkness. At the other end was a massive bulldozer with a deep scoop mouth, faced this way and filling the tunnel, looking impossible here.
A side tunnel led off from this one, and that’s where Bennett moved Mark, with pokes and prods. In the smaller tunnel stood a low rubber-wheeled tram. Two men with shovels were filling the tram with dirt and rubble thrown back to them by four other men digging at the face of the tunnel. The men wore only shorts and shoes; it was hot down here.
Bennett spoke in an Asian dialect to one of the men filling the tram, who stopped, nodded, and looked at Mark with pleased interest. He was thin and harsh-eyed, and the sweat ran down his face and chest.
Bennett turned away without a look at Mark, and the worker came over to push his shovel into Mark’s hands and point at the pile of dirt. Mark understood; this is my new job with Curtis Construction.
He stepped over to the dirt pile, which kept growing from the work of the men at the tunnel face, and started to dig, throwing the dirt into the tram. The dirt was surprisingly heavy, the job an immediate strain on his back and shoulders. He watched the other man working here, and tried to imitate his moves; stand where he could throw the dirt to the side, which used only the arms, instead of to the front, which strained the back.
The man, Li, waved a hand to attract Mark’s attention, and then did a little hand-running gesture: work faster. All right. Mark worked faster, and Li went off to get another shovel.
There was no day or night. There was no time passing, it was all the same; dig and dig and dig. The crew he’d been working with went away, replaced by another, but they didn’t let him stop working. He was exhausted, he fell down sometimes, but they would merely give him angry kicks and make him get back to it.
From time to time there was food, and they let him join them, and it was always cooked rice and bowls of lukewarm water. He was starving, he ate everything they gave him, and it was never enough. They aren’t feeding me as though I’m a prisoner, he thought, they’re feeding me as though I’m a work animal that must be kept in fuel for a little while, until it dies.
Back in the main tunnel there was a portable toilet, so at last he could go to the bathroom like a human being, but if he stayed in there more than a minute they pounded on the door, and cuffed him on the side of the head when he came out.
Sometimes he would fall and simply be too weak to rise, no matter what they did, so then they would let him sleep where he was, for a while; never for long enough. His body, not used to this kind of labor, screamed with pain. His hands were bloody shreds, but he had to keep holding the shovel, bending, lifting, throwing. The pain was awful, but when he stopped the pain they gave him to force him to go on was worse.
The tunnel they were digging was almost as large around as the main one behind them, but even more primitive, as though no one intended to use it for long. While the men at the face dug, burrowing downward and forward from the top, and Mark and one other man filled the tram, other men removed and replaced and emptied the tram, and other men worked with the beams and the plywood to shore up the ceiling and hold back the bulging walls.
After a while, the men digging at the face came to something solid, which pleased them. Mark didn’t dare spend too much time looking, but it seemed to be some sort of underground wall, possibly of concrete, convex, curving toward them. Excited, the men cleared more of it, working their way down the wall across a narrow band, not bothering to clear to left and right. They threw dirt back more quickly than ever, and Mark worked and worked.
Then everyone stopped while another man arrived, a more important man, in shirt and long pants, and carrying something that looked at first like a space-age machine gun. Everyone stepped out of his way, and Mark leaned, grateful, against the tram, and the man stepped over to the newly reached wall. He aimed his machine at it, and it was some sort of high-powered laser, shooting a thread-thin beam too bright to look at directly.
The man was very skilled. He scored the concrete wall with a kind of long narrow vertical oval, perhaps four feet high, a foot and a half wide, just large enough for a man to slide through. He scored several times on the same line, cutting at an angle inward, until he’d sliced all the way through. Then Li came forward with two metal handles, which were fastened with screws to the concrete. Grasping the handles, two of the men lifted the cut section out and away, and Mark saw there was some sort of dim-lit room beyond it. A cool breeze came in from that room, like the sympathetic touch of an angel. Mark cried, feeling that touch, but no one noticed or cared.
Bennett appeared, from the main tunnel. Mark looked at him like a beaten dog, but Bennett paid him no attention. He went through the new opening into that distant room, spoke back into the tunnel, and the man with the laser and four other men went through, carrying shovels and a rolled-up length of canvas. The cut-away piece of wall was put back snugly into place, and the nice cool breeze stopped, and work began again.
It was some time later that the laser man was there once more. More of the wall had been exposed, completely clearing it on the left, and the laser man scored a vertical line down that side, as though to open the wall completely to the same size as the tunnel. This time, though, he didn’t cut all the way through, just drew that line partly into the concrete, to make it weak.
Then it was another time. The plug in the concrete wall was sometimes open, sometimes shut. Men brought back heavy loads of dirt wrapped in the length of canvas. Men went through with their tools, and later they came back.
The clearing of the wall on this side was nearly done.
Mark looked up and Luther went by. He stumbled, he seemed dazed, he looked at Mark without recognition and moved on, shoved by Bennett.
Luther? Mark tried to think. Was Luther here? Had he forgotten? Was Jerry here? He tried to think, but it was very hard to think.
A hand smacked him across the back of the head. He bent over the shovel, and worked.
5
No one noticed that Luther was missing until they were in the elevator on the way back up to lobby level. Kim was thinking how strangely ordinary the tunnel had seemed, like somebody’s wine cellar, only longer, or the basement under a very old house, and then she found herself thinking about poor Luther, how remote he seemed these days, how he didn’t seem to react to or even much notice anything around him. And then she realized he wasn’t there. “Luther!” she said.
Everybody looked at her, not knowing what she meant, and then they all made the same discovery. Mr. Hang, the building manager, gave them a look more exasperated than accusing, and said, “There was one more of you!”