The underdwelling

Breed just chuckled. “Goddamn idiots. I turn my back for one minute and you both fall in a pissing hole.”

By then Jurgens was there with a big flashlight. “What in the hell happened?” he said.

Boyd took in a breath, let it out slow. “Maki picked up a rock and the ground just fell away.”

“Yeah, I picked up a rock and the ground fell away,” Maki reiterated for clarity. “That’s what happened. If Boyd hadn’t grabbed me…”

Jurgens was near the edge with his flashlight, shining it around down there. The dust was so thick in the beam it looked like smoke from a bonfire, clotted with specks of swirling dust and debris.

“That’s a funny looking hole,” Breed said.

And it was. As Jurgens played the light around, they all could see what Boyd already had: that it was nearly circular, smooth and glossy like it had been burned through the rock and not dug with tools. It almost looked like the inside of a foundry smokestack.

“Looks artificial,” Maki said.

Boyd looked at him. “Way down here?”

“It’s not artificial,” Jurgens explained. “Glacial meltwater tunneled it out thousands of years ago. The water constantly funneling through it smoothed it out.”

Lots of miners had crowded into the drift and were muttering about the hole. All work had ceased back in the stope. The generators and compressors were still running, but that was about it.

“Let’s find out how deep it is,” Jurgens said.

Since there was no high tech echo-sounding equipment handy, he called out for 500 hundred feet of rope. When it got there five minutes later, Jurgens got out his tape measure and marked off the rope every ten feet with a black magic marker. Then he began to lower it down there with a stone tied to the end for weight. Nobody said a word as he did so. 420 feet of rope went down before it hit bottom.

“Pretty damn deep,” Breed said. “You’d have been nothing but one ugly shitsplat at the bottom, Maki.”

“All right,” Jurgens said. “Clear this drift, you men. I want it cleaned out and shored up. And call up to Russo. I want a winch and a basket down here.”

“What for?” Maki said.

“Because somebody’s going down there.”

7

Right away, Maki jumped on that one, rode it for all it was worth. “Well, it ain’t gonna be me,” he said as they cleared out the drift. “It ain’t gonna fucking be me. Every time some shit job shows up, goddamn Jurgens calls for me. Like I got the biggest shovel and I don’t mind the smell. Well, believe you me, Boyd, I ain’t going down there. No way in hell am I going down there.”

“So don’t,” Boyd told him. “He can’t make you.”

“Damn straight he can’t. I’d like to see him try. I’d be all over him. He doesn’t want to get me going, no sir. I’d jump his shit and stomp it flat. It would take three cops to get me off him. You can take that to the bank. Hell, yes.”

“Take it easy,” Boyd said.

“I ain’t taking it easy. I know how that guy works. He’s always had it in for me. But not this time, not this time. He tries and I’ll call the Union. I’ll shove a dozen grievances right up his ass sideways, that’s what.”

Jurgens came walking up. “C’mon, boys, we got work to do here. Let’s go.”

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.”