“How does it mine the coal?” asked Corrie. The Mole, having come within a couple of meters of the window, was now backing silently away again down the tunnel.
Rob nodded his head at the receding creature. “See the rear end there? Those tentacles handle the narrow seams. One of them can chew along a layer that’s only a few centimeters thick. The head end handles the big seams. As you’d expect, the teeth regenerate continuously — it’s tough work, crunching up coal, but I suppose it’s not much different from a beaver, chewing through wood. The Mole stores the ground-up coal in the main body pouch, and when it’s full it takes it back to a central storage area and dumps it.”
“And it eats, like an ordinary animal? What does it feed on?”
“Mostly coal — what would you expect? It takes about one percent of what it mines to drive its own metabolism, so it’s very efficient. It’s a bit like a bee, eating some of the nectar and taking most of it back to the hive. The only other thing it needs is water, and there’s a supply of that at the storage areas.” Rob put his hands to the controls. “Ready to descend the rest of the way? There’s nothing more to see here, or until we get to Way Down.”
Corrie nodded, but she was still gazing along the tunnel where the Mole had disappeared into the darkness. “Won’t it be coming back to mine?”
“Not here. They don’t mine coal this close to the Way Down shafts. I asked Chernick to send it towards us, just so we could see it. He grumbled a bit — said it wasn’t kind to the Mole, it’s not happy if you take it away from its job. It’s on the way back to the seam now, a mile or two away. Chernick rotates the Moles among the different coal types, he says that for some reason they do better if they’re rotated. One week on anthracite, one on bituminous, one on lignite. I suppose they pick up different trace elements they need from different types of coal. I’ll have to ask him about it sometime — he almost thinks like a Coal Mole himself.”
“But if the Moles don’t like to stop, why was Chernick willing to send one over here for you?” Corrie had turned from the window and was looking at Rob with big, pale eyes.
“I suppose it’s all right to tell you.” Rob felt a sudden desire to impress her. “But I’d rather you didn’t talk about it to other people. Chernick feels he owes me. He uses one of my patented ideas in the Coal Moles, and he says he could never have got it from anyone else. It makes the whole idea of the Moles possible.”
He was surprised by her reaction. Corrie’s face lit with a quick flash of total comprehension.
“The Spider,” she said. “The thing that you developed for the extrusion process. I know that Regulo has been trying to decide how it works for years, and he’s failed. It’s partly biological and partly machine, isn’t it? In the same way that the Coal Moles are mainly animal but part electronic. The Spider is a machine with a biological component.”
Rob had seen that lightning flash of understanding illumine her face, and been shocked by it. He drew in a deep breath, rubbed at his dark beard and looked with new respect at those alert, pale-blue eyes.
“I’ll bet people do that all the time with you,” he said wryly. “You look about eighteen, and you stare at them with those big eyes and ask innocent questions. They want to show off a bit, the way I did a moment ago, and before they know what’s happening they’ve spilled something important. Well, the damage is done. I won’t deny it, even though it has been a well-kept secret. The Spider has a key bio component where logically there would be a computer. I suspect that Regulo’s people have been going mad trying to come up with a microprocessor with a high enough level of parallel processing — that was my bottleneck for about six months. Who are you going to tell?”
Corrie looked demure — another part of her trap, Rob thought, at the same time as he admired it.
“I wouldn’t dream of spreading it about,” she said. “Though if you don’t mind too much I’d like to tell Regulo. He’s been stewing on that gadget for years, and he’s too proud to ask when he thinks he ought to be able to deduce something for himself.”
“That’s all right.” Rob smiled. “He’ll curse himself, but he shouldn’t. All the techniques to make the Spider and the Moles were developed in the past five years. I doubt if Regulo has caught up with them yet, because a lot of them aren’t anywhere in the literature. Feel free to tell him, if you want to.”
“He won’t talk,” Corrie said quickly. “I know that. It won’t make any difference to your relationship with Regulo Enterprises, either — he told me that he wants the man who invented the Spider a lot more than he wants the use of the Spider itself. Regulo buys brains, not gadgets. You’ve seen the sign on his desk? IDEAS-THINGS-PEOPLE. He says that he’s interested in the world in that order. But he also says that only people have ideas, so I suppose his sign could just as well say PEOPLE-IDEAS-THINGS.”
“Did you ever tell him that?”
“Once. He said that people are only interesting because of the ideas they have.”
As they talked the elevator had been descending steadily. Corrie’s words were interrupted by a gentle bump.
They had reached Way Down. The natural cavern, twelve miles beneath the Yucatan Peninsula, should not have existed. Every geophysicist had agreed on that point. The pressure of surrounding rocks should have closed it instantly, even if some violent movement within the earth had led to its temporary creation. Gabry-Poussin had the same reaction, when his seismic measurements first pointed to the existence of a great chamber, half a mile across and three hundred feet high, in the basement rock of Central America. Then he had looked again at the data.
In the famous debate before the Geological Society of Punta Arenas, Kasrov had conclusively proved that the chamber was a theoretical impossibility. At the end of Kasrov’s presentation, Gabry-Poussin had confined his reply to a single sentence: “Your logic is impeccable, Professor, and proves that geophysics needs a new theoretical basis.”
Now there were new theories in plenty, about the local gravity anomalies, the peculiar plate tectonics, the inexplicable temperature inversion from depths of five to fourteen miles, the odd depth to basement of the whole region — and they added to an incomplete explanation that reinforced Gabry-Poussin’s original comment.
While the theorists pondered, the practical side of the world took over. The first shaft to Way Down had been drilled in search of scientific data. The second one, ten times as wide, aimed at commercial exploitation. It had an exotic setting, a limited capacity, a good deal of mystery, and always a hint of danger. What more could be asked for a luxury club and secret hideaway for the world’s wealthiest?
The elevator shaft that Rob and Corrie had used was a little way from the main entrance, at the very end of the vaulted chamber. They had to walk a hundred meters across the smooth basalt floor before reaching the official entry point. Above them hung the great central chandeliers, drawing their power from generators on the surface far above. Just before they reached the main reception point, Rob paused and turned again to Corrie.
“I don’t want to make the same mistake twice about what you know,” he said. “You must have a lot more scientific training than you admit to, just to see that connection so fast between the Spider and the Coal Moles. What is your real specialty?”
Corrie grinned at him. “Aw, I’m just a little old go-fer for Regulo, you know that. But I am a licensed engineer — and my graduation project was in large space structures. And I do have engineering on both sides of the family, if you believe in heredity as a major influence. One thing about me, though—”