“Same difference.” Li Minsheng swept his hand about them. “To those who’ve never been below, it’s all the same. We’re all dirty coalmen. Do you remember how badly we wanted to become engineers?”
“Those were the days of record-chasing production,” Liu Xin said. “We brought our fathers lunch. It was the first time we’d been down the shaft, and it was so dark down there. I asked my father and those standing near him, ‘How do you know where the coal seam is? How do you know where to dig the tunnels? And how are you able to get two tunnels dug from different directions to meet so precisely so far down?’ And your father answered, ‘Child, no one knows except for the engineers.’ And when we got to the surface, he pointed out a few men carrying hard hats and clipboards, and said, ‘Look, those are engineers.’ Do you remember that, Minsheng? Even we could see that they were different. The towels around their necks, at least, were a bit whiter. We’ve achieved that childhood dream now. Of course, it’s not all that glorious, but we have to at least fulfill our duty and accomplish something. Otherwise, won’t we be betraying ourselves?”
“That’s enough,” Li Minsheng said, standing up with a sudden anger. “I’ve been doing my duty this whole time. I’ve been accomplishing things. But you? You’re living in a dream! Do you really believe you can bring miners up from the mines? Turn this mine into a gas field? Say all that theory is correct and your test succeeds. So what? Have you calculated the cost of the thing? Also, how are you going to lay tens of thousands of kilometers of pipe? You realize that we can’t even pay rail shipping fees these days?”
“Can’t you take the long view? In a few years, or a few decades…”
“The hell with the long view! The people here aren’t certain about the next few days, much less the next few decades. I’ve said before that you live on dreams. You’ve always been that way. Sure, back in your quiet old institute headquarters in Beijing you can have that dream, but I can’t. I live in the real world.”
Li Minsheng turned to leave, then added, “Oh, I came to tell you that the director has arranged for us to cooperate with your experiment. Work is work, and I’ll do it.” Then he set off down the hill without looking back.
Liu Xin silently surveyed the mine where he had been born and spent his childhood. Its towering headframes and their enormous top wheels spinning, lowering large cages down the shaft out of sight; rows of electric trams going in and out of the entrance to the shaft where his father had worked; a train outside the coal-separator building easing past more piles of coal than he could count; the cinema and soccer field where he had spent the best moments of his youth; the huge bathhouse—only miners had ones so large—where he had learned how to swim in water stained black from coal dust. Yes, he had learned to swim in a place so far from rivers and oceans.
Turning his gaze toward the distance, he saw the spoil tip, the accumulation of more than a century’s worth of shale dug out of the mine. It seemed taller than the surrounding hills, with smoke rising where the sulfur heated the rain…. All of it black, blanketed over time in a layer of coal dust. It was the color of Liu Xin’s childhood, the color of his life. He closed his eyes, and as he listened to the sounds of the mine below, time seemed to stop.
Dad’s mine. My mine…
The valley was not far from the mine, whose smoke and steam were visible beyond the ridge during the day, whose glow projected into the sky at night, and whose steam whistles were always audible. Liu Xin, Li Minsheng, and Aygul stood in the center of the desolate valley. In the distance, a herder was driving a flock of scrawny goats slowly along the foot of the mountain. Beneath the valley lay the small isolated coal seam that Liu Xin wanted to use for his subterranean gasified coal extraction experiment, found by Li Minsheng and the engineers in the geology department after a month of combing through mountains of materials in the archives.
“We’re pretty far from the main mining area, so we’ve got fewer geological details on it,” Li Minsheng said.
“I’ve read the materials, and from what we have now, the experimental seam is at least two hundred meters from the main seam. That’s acceptable. We should get to work,” Liu Xin said excitedly.
“You’re not an expert in mining geology, and you’re even less familiar with the actual conditions here. I advise you to be more cautious. Think about it some more.”
“There’s nothing to think about. The experiment can’t proceed,” Aygul said. “I’ve read the materials too. They’re too sketchy. The separation between exploratory boreholes is too large, and they were made in the sixties. They need to be redone, to prove conclusively that the seam is independent, before the experiment can begin. Li and I have drawn up an exploratory plan.”
“How long until exploration is complete, according to your plan? And how much more investment is needed?”
Li Minsheng said, “At the geology department’s current capacity, at least a month. We didn’t run the investment numbers. To estimate… at least two million or so.”
“We have neither the time nor the money for that!”
“Then put in a request to the ministry.”
“The ministry? A bunch of bastards in the ministry want to kill this project! The higher-ups are anxious for results, so I’m dooming the entire project if I go back and ask for more time and a bigger budget. Instinct tells me there won’t be major problems, so why not take a little risk?”
“Instinct? Risk? Not on a project like this! Dr. Liu, do you realize where we’re starting this fire? You call that a small risk?”
“I’ve made my decision!” Liu Xin cut him off with a wave of his hand and walked off alone.
“Engineer Li, why aren’t you stopping that madman? The two of us are on the same side,” Aygul said.
“I’m going to do what I’m required to,” Li Minsheng said.
Three hundred men were at work in the valley. Besides physicists, chemists, geologists, and mining engineers, there were a few unexpected experts. Aygul led a coal-seam fire brigade of more than ten members, and there were two entire drilling squads from Renqiu Oil Field in Hebei Province, as well as a number of hydraulic-construction engineers and workers who would erect subterranean firebreaks. On the work site, in addition to tall rigs and piles of drilling poles, there were piles of cement bags and a mixer, a high-pressure slurry pump whining as it injected liquid cement into the ground, rows of high-pressure water and air pumps, and a spiderweb of crisscrossing multicolored pipes.
Work had been progressing for two months, and an underground cement curtain more than two thousand meters long had been constructed surrounding the seam. Liu Xin had thought of adapting hydraulic engineering technology used in waterproofing the foundation of dams to the subterranean firewalclass="underline" high-pressure cement was injected underground, where it hardened into a tight fireproof barrier. Within the curtain, the drills had sunk nearly a hundred boreholes, each directly into the seam. The holes were connected by pipes that split into three prongs attached to different high-pressure pumps that could inject water, steam, or compressed air.
The final bit of work was the release of the “ground rats,” as they called the fire sensors. The curious gizmos, Liu Xin’s own design, resembled not rats but bombs. Each was twenty centimeters long with a bit at one end and a drive wheel at the other, and once released into the borehole, it could drill nearly a hundred meters farther into the seam and reach its designated location autonomously. Operable even under high temperatures and pressures, it would transmit the parameters at its location back to the master computer once the seam was ignited via seam-penetrating infrasound. More than a thousand of these ground rats had been released into the seam, half of which were positioned outside of the fire curtain to detect potential breaches.