"We got to the mine infirmary, and your father was already there, looking at Mother Crosbie’s ankle. Saying it was only sprained, not broken. He put it into a foam-cast just to keep it safe for a few days, then gave her a talk about staying off the leg, making sure she had good circulation to the toes, blah, blah, blah."
"This was in the infirmary?" I asked.
"Where else?"
The infirmary was a single-room dome clustered in with Rustico’s other outbuildings, all above ground. "How did Dads end up in the mine when the cave-in happened?"
"You don’t know?" Lynn’s hand stopped stroking my hair for a moment. "My own brother carried a copy of the report over to your compound."
"Which he gave to my mother. Who went into shrieking hysterics and tried to scratch my face to ribbons." I closed my eyes, remembering. "She screamed it was all my fault for leading a life of sin. God’s revenge or something like that… not that she spent much effort believing in God, but she devoutly believed I was utter dirt."
"You believed it too," Lynn murmured softly. "We all look forward to the day you change your mind."
Not a direction I wanted the conversation to go. "The point is," I said, "I never heard the exact details of Dads’s death."
"You actively avoided finding out. Because you knew it would be more fun having Freudian episodes thirty years later."
"Twenty-seven years. I could tell you the number of days, but that would be showing off."
Lynn pretended to tweak my nose. "What a one you are. If I tell you what happened that day, do you promise to get over all your psychological traumas in the blink of an eye?"
"Yes, Mom-Lynn." I took her hand and squeezed it to me.
"Then here’s what I know… and I was on the spot through the whole thing. Not underground, of course, but I was plunk there in the infirmary when they started bringing up survivors. I heard all the details…"
Lynn’s story.
Dads was talking Mother Crosbie through the care and maintenance of sprains, when suddenly he stopped mid-sentence. "Damn!" he said. "They’ve hit a…"
("Hit what?" I asked. "And who’s they?"
"He must have meant the miners," Lynn replied. "The official explanation for the cave-in was they’d broken into a pocket of natural gas."
"But how did Dads know?"
Shrug.)
The next thing Lynn knew, Demoth was shaking. Not hard — just a teeny tremor, like the rumble when an ore-wagon goes by. Considering the number of ore-wagons trundling around the mine’s upper compound, Lynn didn’t realize anything was wrong till Dads sprinted for the door. Seconds after he left, alarms went off full-hoot in the classic SOS pattern: three short, three long, three short.
Lynn’s parents were both miners. She knew the signals meant "Cave-in."
Mother Crosbie shouted, "Damn it!" and tried to hobble out of the infirmary — scrambling to help whoever’d got trapped down the mine. Sharr made it to the door first and barred the way: "No, no, too dangerous"… which was just a scared daughter talking, because Sharr didn’t know bugger-all about what’d happened, any more than anyone else did at that point.
Mother and daughter squabbled for a bit, Sharr in panic, her mother going on about how other miners might need her; then the company nurse barreled into the room and said everyone was deputized to help him get ready to receive wounded. Sharr’s mother let herself be persuaded she’d be more help in the infirmary than limping underground, slowing down the rescue teams. They all began to set up cots, break out medical supplies, that sort of thing… as if they were doing bed duty at the Circus again.
When everything was ready, they waited.
The first survivors arrived half an hour later. "Like a bomb going off," one said: a tunnel wall had blown clean out, cutting off half the afternoon shift on the other side of a thousand tons of rubble. The casualties arriving at the infirmary had broken arms, legs, ribs… but they’d still been standing on the lucky side of the explosion. At least they hadn’t been trapped. Now anyone who could dig was down in the caved-in tunnel, frantically using lasers and ultrasound powderers to flake away the rock-fall, aiming toward those who’d been walled in.
"Did you see Dr. Smallwood?" Lynn asked a survivor. Lynn, Lynn, heartsore in love with me even then. She worried about Dads for my sake.
A gashed-up miner told her, "Smallwood was down there before anyone else. Checking us over. Making sure we were safe to move."
The ground shook again. Precious lightly. A tiny settling in the earth, nothing more. Down in the mine the rescuers backed off fast, pulling well up the tunnel to safer ground… all but Henry Smallwood, who was fixing an immobilization collar around the neck of a man who might have broken his spine. A tiny section of the tunnel roof collapsed, almost nothing at all — a token scattering of rock that separated Smallwood from the other rescuers for a bit.
Clearing away that rock took at most ten minutes. They found the man Dads had been working on, out cold but still alive. They also found my father: dead as haddock, though there wasn’t a mark on him. The official diagnosis two days later said his heart failed from stress… all keyed-up, and when the roof came down, the jolt of fear must have been too much for him. Still, the miners told everyone he’d died in the cave-in. Call it tribute to a man who’d been right there with them, doing whatever he could.
One last thing the rescue team found when they broke through the baby cave-in: all the missing miners. The ones who’d been on the other side of the big cave-in, trapped behind tonnes of debris. The debris was still there, as solid as ever. Somehow the miners had passed through ten meters of hard-choked stone.
"Somehow they’d passed…" I sat bolt up again.
"Faye," Lynn said, putting her arms round my neck. "You know miners. They invent folklore — all that time down in the dark. My parents were forever talking about queer things in the mine: eerie lights, strange sounds…"
"I never heard stories like that."
"No? Maybe the miners didn’t want those tales getting back to your father. He might knock off points from their psych profiles, next time Rustico sent them for a fitness checkup."
"But how did the miners get past the rockfall?" I asked.
"Someone saw a light," Lynn answered. "They turned off their lanterns to see it better, then followed the light forward. Next thing they knew, they were past the blockage." She gave my shoulder a quick squeeze. "Of course it sounds odd, dear one, but remember they were dizzy and disoriented. All of them injured, and maybe more gas fumes in the air. The second tremor just dislodged enough of the rockfall for them to climb over — and the light they were heading for was probably the torch-wand your father used."
"If the rockfall had enough of a gap for them to climb over," I said, "why did the rescue team think the blockage was still solid?"
"Because they only gave it a quick glance. No one wanted to hang around in that tunnel. They hustled everyone out and didn’t go back till robot crews shored up everything safely."
"Still…"
Lynn smiled. "Yes, Faye, it’s all puzzling-queer. But things get confused during crises. People get confused. They look back and say, ‘Christ, how did that happen?’ But it did happen, so there has to be a rational explanation."
"The Mines Commission must have held an inquiry," I said. "About the cave-in… the law requires an official review."
"Yes," Lynn agreed. "And what they reviewed was the mine’s safety systems. Whether the explosion could have been prevented. Whether emergency response procedures were good enough. They didn’t waste time questioning a lucky break."