Industrial Evolution
For the Glorious House of Sinanju
With special thanks and acknowledgement to Tim Somheil for his contribution to this work.
Copyright
First published in the United States in 2004 by Worldwide
First published in Great Britain in ebook by Sphere in 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7515-6086-2
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2004 Warren Murphy
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Sphere
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DZ
Contents
Dedication
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 35
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Epilogue
About the Authors
Chapter 1
To make matters worse, the phone kept ringing. The man with the craggy face and the salt-and-pepper hair ignored it, but the ringing became unendurable. With a curse he tried to lift himself, felt his arm muscles turn to wet noodles, and his cheekbone smacked hard on the iron floor. As he lay helpless, the throbbing pain and the chirping of the phone melded into a song of agony.
He was dying, no doubt about that, but couldn’t he at least die in peace? He just had to find a way to get to that telephone and yank it out of the wall—only then could he settle down to suffocate in peace and quiet.
It took all his strength, but somehow he made his cold, trembling arms drag him to the control console and grab at the telephone.
“Who is it?”
“Thank God I found you!”
“How did you reach me? Zee phone has not worked from zee beginning.”
“How? Calling a hundred times a day for a week, that’s how! Five times I actually got a ring, and then the signal went out. Anyway, how’s it going?”
The gray-haired man collapsed, gasping, in the padded chair. “I am dying, that is how I am doing.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Cancer?”
“Asphyxiation.”
“Never heard of it. Is it, you know, painful?”
“It is not pleasant.”
“Well, how much time did they give you? I mean, do you think you’ll have time to finish helping me, you know…”
“Senator Herbie, my son was correct. You are a dweeb. Zee dweebiest. Right at this moment I am buried alive, maybe twenty meters under zee desert. If I could help anybody—”
“What do you mean, buried? How did this happen? What’s being done about it?”
“I don’t know what is being done about it I haven’t heard a word from the world above until you called.
I pray to zee heavens that your voice is not the last one I hear—”
“What about Jack? Isn’t he digging you out? I should go help him! Well, I would, except I have these burned feet, you understand. I’ll hire people, though. Lotsa Mexicans down there, right? Shouldn’t cost too much. What do you pay them, like two dollars a day? We’ll i get eight of them. Five, maybe. How long would it j take?”
Mercifully, the signal faded. The phone display said the batteries were depleted. Thank the heavens for small favors, he thought, and flopped onto the floor to expire in blessed silence.
But his peace didn’t last for long. Wouldn’t you know, if it wasn’t the phone it was the front door. Somebody was knocking insistently.
“Go away!” he shouted. No, he didn’t shout, because he couldn’t. Couldn’t even speak anymore. Had to have imagined shouting. Did that mean the knocking was his imagination, too? Now it was a grinding sound. Now it was a crackling hiss. A cutting torch? He passed out not caring.
The smell of canned air woke him, and there was a rubber mask attached to his face. He was breathing again, real oxygen, and he realized that the sound of a cutting torch had been an actual cutting torch.
He was still inside the Mighty Iron Mole, but now his son was with him. Just as improbable were the floating stars in primary colors, about the size of basketballs, that faded and flared with every flicker of his eyeballs.
Next time he regained consciousness the red, blue and purple stars were gone, and the green star had stabilized into a typical plastic glow stick around the neck of the phantom of his son.
“Hiya, Pops!” Jack Fast was grinning.
Jacob Fastbinder III tried to make his eyes work better. The details of the mole’s interior were crisp. He lifted one heavy arm and poked the teenager in the shoulder. Jack Fast felt real, too.
“Yep, it’s really me. I got here just in time, too. The atmospheric toxins were at lethal levels. You were almost a goner.”
“How?”
“I made an earth drill.”
Of course. The teenage boy simply built his own mechanical mole and used it to drill down into the earth and rescue his father. Why not? the old man thought. He was surely mad, and he poked at the figment of his imagination again.
“Ow!” The kid grabbed his abused nostril.
“Not real.”
“Am too.”
“Hallucination.”
“Take that!” Jack poked his father in the stomach hard, and Fastbinder bent double, hacking. When he stopped coughing he realized the oxygen mask was gone. Jack was holding it. The air in the Iron Mole smelled stale but breathable, and Fastbinder was standing on his own two feet.
“I don’t understand. How could you do it?”
“Come on and look.”
They stepped out of Fastbinder’s Iron Mole and into a tunnel. When Jack turned on his battery lantern, the tunnel sparkled as if it were a room of diamonds.
“Neat, huh?”
“Magnificent!” Fastbinder’s eyes fell on the device that created the tunnel, and he was astounded again.
The vehicle had three pairs of treads. It rode on two heavy-duty treads, while two steel supports each lifted another pair of smaller treads to the roof of the tunnel, not quite touching the fragile-looking crystalline walls. The treads were all welded against a gleaming stainless-steel compartment shaped like a stubby rocket. A tapered point extended toward Fastbinder, and when he peered through the treads at the other end he saw another tapered end.