The Rod of Light (Soul of the Robot)

In some passages a powerful draught could be felt. As he moved about the mine, always in the company of others, Jasperodus occasionally encountered air-doors which blocked off one or other of the maze of tunnels. A crowbar was usually left lying near one of these doors to prize it open if anyone needed to go through: sometimes the combined strength of two or three men or robots was needed to shift a door against the differential air pressure. The purpose of the doors, he gathered, was to control the flow of air through the mine. Presumably there was an air-pumping machine somewhere to ensure that the humans had something to breathe.

It was incredible how much was involved in obtaining what was only a modest amount of a crude combustible fuel … but for the use of robots, it was hard to see how the enterprise could ever have been made cost-effective.

Indeed, was it not needlessly elaborate? Jasperodus, when his mind was not distracted by the task in hand, wondered how else the coal field might be exploited. Why not drill shafts straight down to a seam, pump in oxygen, and burn the coal in situ, drawing off the hot gases through an accompanying flue to an on-site power station? Or send down machines to grind it all to dust, which could then be vacuumed up….

Still thinking of escape, he began to draw a mental map of the mine, even though much of it was disused and therefore out of bounds to him. To begin with he had entertained various schemes for smuggling himself through the adit, but Yoshibo had managed to convince him of their unfeasibility. Once underground, the robots were worked to destruction, and not even their defunct carcases were allowed through the screening process at the head of the mine. Instead, they were dismantled and the pieces simply left lying around.

Time passed. Nine months, according to Yoshibo, who meticulously kept count. At first Jasperodus had tried to keep himself clean, washing dirt and dust from his body with water from the thick muddy pools. But eventually he gave up, and became as caked and grimed as the others, as though he had turned to rock.

Then came a break in the pace of work. The face opened up by Number Two rip gave out, as did one of the other three faces. The trouble was that the region was faulted geologically: earth movements in past ages had broken up the seams, making them difficult to work. In fact the whole field had probably been bypassed as unsuitable, in the days when Tergov still mined coal.

While the engineers pondered and argued, wondering in which direction to drive next, the temporarily-redundant robots lay about taking their ease. Jasperodus sought out Yoshibo, and ushered him out of sight of the others. He took him a few yards down one of the many disused passages known as airways—actually the empty and silent approaches to worked-out faces, but functioning now only as part of the air-circulation system.

‘You told me once that escape from here is impossible,’ he said. ‘You were wrong. There is another way out.’

‘Oh? And where is that, do you think?’ Yoshibo stared at the wall to show he was unimpressed.

For answer Jasperodus pointed down the inky black tunnel. ‘It stands to reason. Two reasons, in fact. The first is the air supply. For air to move through the mine, it must enter at one place and leave at another. Preferably the two points should be at opposite ends of the workings—if they were both near the entrance the current would too easily short-circuit. Therefore there is an upshaft on the other side of the mine, installed in the old workings when mining first began. That is where the air pump will be.’

‘Yes, you may be right,’ Yoshibo admitted after he had digested this argument. ‘But even if one could find it, what use would it be? The upshaft may well be a quarter of a mile deep, for that is our present depth. No one could climb such a shaft’

‘That is where reason number two comes in. What would happen to the humans down here if some accident closed off the adit and there was no time to wait for rescue?’

‘They would all die.’

‘No. These humans are experts. They would never trust their lives to one exit. There must be another for emergencies—and logically it will be the same that the air goes out by. So the air shaft will have a lift, or at least steps. All we have to do is find it.’

‘Are you seriously thinking …?’

‘Yes, and you can help me. You have been here for twenty years, you told me. You must be acquainted with many of the abandoned workings. Perhaps you can guess the whereabouts of the air shaft.’

Yoshibo backed off. ‘But the field has been worked for more than fifty years. I have no idea where the shaft is, if it exists … this has never occurred to me till now.’