Ryan grinned, ridiculously like Wilma when she was nineteen, the year Hank had first proposed to her. Her brother-Ryan’s dad, Lou-had been only fourteen then, a towheaded kid picked on by the bevy of long-legged girls that comprised the Hanson family; Hank remembered playing sandlot ball with him in a weedy field behind the old pit-head. Remembered Wilma in the first miniskirt the town had ever seen (and not all that mini, compared to these days), somehow managing to make it look prim, as if she were laughing at herself. Long slim legs in what looked like a mile and a half of stocking.
“Whole National League’s got Nomo’s timing down now,” added Gordy, as the car doors slid open and the men crowded in.
They continued to argue amicably about baseball as the elevator headed down, not really wanting to think about the endless drop in darkness, the rock whizzing past outside. Everybody talking and thinking about something else with the adeptness of long practice. Young Al Bartolo was showing pictures of his son to Tim Brackett, who was grinning his big slow brilliant gap-toothed grin with the cheerful understanding of a man who’s felt the same high at seeing the little red monkey face of his own child seven times before: “Gina all right?” he asked, and Al nodded.
“She’s fine. It was only a couple hours, and them Lamaze classes she took at Adult Ed work like a champ. Her mom’s over there now, helping her out.”
And Tim’s bright brown eyes in the electric dinginess seemed to say, Wait till his eyes track for the first time, and he looks at you. Wait till the first time he reaches out and grabs your finger. Wait till the first time he throws a baseball to you, or comes into your room at night because he’s had a bad dream and he’s scared. Wait till you see him graduate high school with honors. You’re on the road, my friend, but you don’t know what happiness is yet.
A good man, thought Hank. Not very bright-not the way Ryan was bright-but good.
The doors opened to the yellow blear of electric bulbs, the smell of earth and rock, of coal and mud. The damp touch of cold air on the cheeks. Up close to the downcast the company had put in sprinklers to keep the dust down, and it even worked, though everyone still came out of the mine looking as if they’d been spray-painted, and Hank still spit black and blew black out of his nose for hours after he went off-shift. Still, it was far better than it had been when his father had worked for Applby before him.
There was a little electric tram, like a string of golf carts, to haul everybody out to the coal face, and that was an improvement, too. Hank recalled places in the Green Mountain diggings where the coal bed was thin, the men had had to be trundled through tunnels on a conveyor belt with their tools between their knees and the rock seven inches above their prone backs. The headlamps of the men, and the single glaring light on the front of the tram, glittered on mud and wet rock on the conveyors that bore the coal back to the downcast, flashed on the puddles dripped from the pipes. Glistened on the coal.
And beyond those feeble lights, night blacker than the coal.
By the time they got to the new main, the conveyors had started up in the areas behind them, and in the distant mazes of rooms and pillars machinery started to buzz and clank as other teams got going. No sprinklers here, just the smell of the rock dust that lay like dirty snow on the floor to keep the coal dust down. At least the seam was thick here, nearly five feet. It meant he could stretch his back, if he got down on his knees to do it.
The uneven ceiling pressed down overhead, making the steel props seem feeble and small. The darkness, too, seemed to press in close from all sides, as if the headlamps made a watery wall, a weak denial of some inevitable fact.
Hank’s father had been a miner. He’d started each day with a shot of whiskey; ended it with half a dozen more.
Hank understood.
Almost more than the fear of explosions, fear of the roof falling in, or of a boulder loosening from the ceiling and squashing you. It waited for you, that darkness.
In a way it was worse that there were so few men, that so much of the work was done by machine. Not just because of all the men Hank knew who’d been laid off, whose families had been on food stamps for three or five years, who were trying to make ends meet on what their wives could earn. As Al disappeared to chart butt entries in the new section and Sonny loafed over to his loader, Hank felt an uneasiness that had nothing to do with the logistics of coal or manpower. In the sixties and seventies there’d been lots of guys down here, lots of friends. Voices to keep the silence at bay.
“C’mon, Hank,” Sonny called out as Hank methodically checked over the shearer. “The fucker was all right when you left it yesterday. What you think, the fairies came and fucked with it while you were away?” Hank ignored him. Diesel-okay; hydraulic fluid-okay; oil levels-he checked everything about the big, grimy yellow world-eater before he hit the switches that woke it to deafening life.
Sliding back and forth, chewing at the coal face, the black seam between the gray. Spewing rock and mud and shining black lumps onto the greasy shale floor for Sonny’s loader to pick up, to start their long journey back to the top of the ground. Tim’s headlight swooping and swaying as he shoveled. Shadows dipping, reaching like monster hands.
Ryan and Roop McDonough angled the metal supports upright, wedging them with hunks of shale or working them into shallow drilled sockets in the floor, and Hank thought, It’s no good pretending. No good trying not to think about the weight, and the dark, and the silence.
They were close to a mile down. If the world ended, they wouldn’t know a thing about it until they went back up again.
Chapter Four
GROUND ZERO-7:09 A.M. CDT
“All right, here I am. What is it?” Dr. Fred Wishart strode into the Ops Chamber, the blast doors hissing softly closed behind him. The others were already bent over the electronic schematic that tracked the flow of energy in the Resonance Chamber beyond the dark windows filling the opposite wall. Through the two-inch Plexiglas it looked like curious fleeting blue gleams among and between the narrow, mirrored walls of the maze, here and there a sort of glowing mist. On the schematic he saw half a dozen places where hot spots had glowed violently white, now cooling down to the safer hues of red-orange, dulling back to green. “What happened? What caused it?”
Marcus Sanrio sighed. “The siren song of cause and effect… And if causality were irrelevant, if all were mutable, what then?” His long, sensitive fingers trailed across the tracking schematic, slightly ridged and grooved to accommodate his handicap; the energies electronically mirrored from Resonance showed up on the surface as changes in temperature. Probably, reflected Fred, it was a more accurate system than the colors. “There was a sudden intensification of energy starting in the eighth sector, building up very quickly to burnthrough levels. We ran tap rods into it, and everything is fine.”
“Everything is not fine,” Fred said quietly, “if we don’t know what caused it.” Anything in the nature of a burn-through scared the hell out of him, even the ones that didn’t result in bizarre manifestations like telekinetic energy flows at Sioux burial sites or the resurrection of packs of skeletal prairie wolves. Thank God they’d been able to hush that one up. For security reasons alone they were deadly-sooner or later something like that would occur under circumstances that couldn’t be passed off as some poor Indian with d.t.’s-but what really scared Fred was the fact that they didn’t know why such things occurred. What unknown stresses they might foreshadow. “Was it a malfunction of equipment?”
“We could tell that better,” muttered Jill Pollard, “if we knew exactly how the equipment works. I don’t mean how to increase or decrease the intensity of the energy at the Source, or tapping it off or directing the flow of the field. I mean what is it, exactly? What little electrons or neutrons are bumping into each other; what’s happening at a subatomic level? Why is it happening?”