And Maki, true to form, almost knocked Boyd down getting to it. “I’ll take care of it, Mr. Jurgens.”
Boyd just shook his head.
They hit it pretty hard. In about two hours they had the drift widened to accommodate a portable winch that was pushed in there on lengths of track. Once the ceiling was braced up, there was nothing to do but wait and see what Jurgens decided next.
Jurgens was gone for about twenty minutes, but when he returned he had McNair, the paleobiologist, with him. McNair was a short, round little guy with a shaggy gray beard. He looked more like a prospector than a scientist, but he would do in a pinch.
“Okay,” Jurgens said. “Dr. McNair and I are going down. I’d like a couple volunteers to go with us.”
Not a man moved. Maybe they didn’t like that aged odor whispering up from the shaft and maybe it was something else, the idea that whatever was down there had not been disturbed in a very long time. Like the depths of an Egyptian tomb with a curse on it.
“I’ll go,” Boyd said.
“Me, too,” Breed chimed in.
“Good, good,” Jurgens said. “Probably nothing down there, but we need to have a look. We got caves or subsidence, we might have to cancel this drift altogether.”
Maki looked from Boyd to Breed again and again. Then over at Jurgens. There was something brewing in him. He was ancy and wide-eyed. “I’m going, too,” he said.
“I don’t need you,” Jurgens told him flat out.
“I got seniority over Breed and Boyd,” Maki said. “If anybody goes down, it should be me. I’m the most experienced.”
One of the miners giggled at that.
“I am. I been here longer than most. I got the seniority.”
Jurgens said, “This isn’t a matter of seniority, Maki.”
“I’m going. I’m the one that should go.”
Boyd laughed. “An hour ago you were bitching that you didn’t want to go.”
“I never said any such thing.”
Jurgens sighed. “All right, Maki. You can go.” He just caved-in, knowing that if he didn’t allow it Maki would whine and stomp his feet and make a general nuisance of himself like a spoiled brat until he got his way. And that would burn precious time.
Once the basket was hooked up to the winch, Jurgens and McNair went down. They took a walkie-talkie with them and called up that it was okay for the others to descend.
“You sure you want this?” Boyd said to Maki.
“Yeah, they’ll need me.”
Which was silly. Did anybody really need Maki? The only reason he was going was because he was still playing the big balls game, trying to show Boyd what a tough customer he was. It was silly. Absolutely silly.
They all wore rubber boots, helmets, and raingear. They took flashlights and gas masks. McNair and Jurgens had taken cameras, gas detectors, and Coleman battery lanterns down with them. It was a long ride down through that cloying darkness, the basket bumping around in the narrow shaft.
About half way down, Breed said, “Hey, Maki? Your mother have any kids that lived?”
And down they went into the underworld.
8
When they touched bottom, Boyd was glad to see the lights from the lanterns. They lit up the gloom enough so that he could see right away that this was going to be no quick excursion. For there was a tunnel down there leading off into the earth.
“Limestone cave,” Jurgens said. “Just like I thought.”
That meant trouble for future mining operations and he didn’t like it. McNair, on the other hand, was clearly excited.
“You boys ready for a hike?” he said, snapping a few photographs with a flash.
Jurgens and McNair led from the front and the others followed behind down a long, low-ceilinged passage that seemed to wind all over the place, the roof sloping so low at times they had to duck down. The gas detectors told them the air was fine, but they kept their masks handy. You just never knew. Their lights bobbed and threw illumination onto cold, black rock that had known nothing but darkness for God only knew how long. It was chilly and damp down there and they splashed through puddles, feeling less like miners and more like cave explorers. Now and again, McNair and Jurgens would pause and study the strata.
“We’re still in that Permian seam,” McNair said.
Jurgens looked at him. “Way down here?”
“Oh yes.”
Boyd was bothered by that and he wasn’t sure why.
So, these are Permian rocks…what of it? he told himself. You tripped over ‘em on the surface you wouldn’t have known if they were Permian or Triassic or Devonian for that matter. Rocks are fucking rocks.
And that sounded good, sounded reasonable, but it wasn’t buying beans. Because he was getting that feeling low in his belly again like something had curled up and gone to sleep, and now it was waking up.
His knowledge of geology was mainly from a high school class where they had grown crystals and collected fossil seashells. That was the extent of it. Yet, the idea of the Permian rocks was eating away at him. Maybe it was the atmosphere of the place…the age, the silence broken only by dripping water, that smell of entombed things only now bursting free. It made no sense. Regardless, he felt claustrophobic again, almost manically so. Like he had been buried alive.
Breed and Maki weren’t saying much.
No bickering, no whining from Maki, and no insults from Breed. Boyd figured that was a pretty good barometer. It told him that they were feeling the forbidding atmosphere of this place same as him.
McNair and Jurgens led them into what looked like a stope that had been chiseled from the limestone, but Jurgens said it was probably hollowed by subterranean waters long, long ago. Just how long he did not even begin to speculate. And you could plainly hear the disappointment in his voice. A network of underground caves was bad news. It meant maybe abandoning the series of drifts above and channeling in a different direction. Things the company would not like because that meant time and money. Things Jurgens was supposed to be saving them whenever possible.
The stope went on for maybe another fifty or sixty feet, the floor littered with debris and collapsed shelves of rock that had fallen in long ago. Some were so big they had to climb right over the top of them. But they pushed on, the lanterns creating jumping shadows that crept along the crumbling walls.
Then it opened up into a massive cavern.
Boyd just whistled at the sight of it.
“Holy shit,” Maki said.
It was incredible. They stood there in awe, feeling like the first men to set eyes on the Carlsbad Caverns. Before them was an immense grotto. Even with the long-barreled flashlights, they could barely see the roof above. It had to have been well over a hundred feet straight up. There were huge stalactites and stalagmites, great shelves of rock that had been sculpted and polished by eons of dripping water into great columns and blobby, candleflow heaps of stone. Minerals sparkled in the walls. Crystal formations rose like pillars of salt. Great boulders the size of two-story houses had been perfectly rounded by ancient waters. There was a briny stink in the air.
“Gentlemen,” McNair said, “we are about to step into the history books.”
Maki just stood there with his mouth hanging open as the flashlights scanned about, their beams thick with suspended dust and droplets of moisture. He swallowed, licking his lips. “Did somebody dig this out?” he said.
“No, no, this is a natural cavern,” McNair was quick to point out before imaginations started running wild. “All of what we’ve seen so far has been channeled out of the limestone by ancient floodwaters. This cavern, too. It’s really incredible.”
“But that shaft I almost fell down…it was so smooth and round.”
“That could have been volcanic rock laid down by a lava flow,” Jurgens pointed out. “Lava can form shapes that look man-made if it rapidly cools.”