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They put every available Scot onto an assembly line converting bullets and they had cases and cases of them now.
A hundred assault rifles and five hundred magazines had been cleaned to perfection. They fired without a stutter or dud.
No good against a tank or a thick, lead-glass compound dome, but those assault rifles would be deadly to individual Psychos. With breathe-gas in their blood streams they would literally explode.
He spotted the river that ran out of the gorge. He eased down, following it, the plane's lights flashing on the uneven ice and snow.
They'd been so happy about the assault rifles that they had gone to work on the bazookas. They had found some nuclear artillery shells and had converted their noses over to the bazooka noses, and now they had armor-piercing, nuclear bazookas. There were still a number of those left to make.
Yes, it had been too smooth, too good to be true.
There were no lights on the mine pad ahead.
There was no one visible there at all.
He set the plane down on the pad. The passengers boiled out of it. Their lights darted this way and that.
One of them who had run to the chasm edge called back, his voice thin in the cold darkness: "Jo
Chapter 6
A light shone down from the present edge and confirmed it. The fissure, thirty feet back from the old edge, had simply opened in the earthquake and fallen into the gorge.
The cliff face was no longer overhanging but sloped up toward them.
In the light, the wide edge of the broken-off quartz lode was visible. It was pure white. No gold in the remaining vein. The pocket of gold was gone!
But Jo
They were somehow trapped under them, if they were still alive.
Jo
He looked around, flashing his light. “The hoist! Where is the hoist?”
The entire apparatus used to take out ore and lower and raise men was missing.
Lights played down the mountain. It was not on the slope.
Jo
The hoist was down there in the shaft.
“Be very quiet, everyone,” said Jo
“I thought I heard something,” said the parson, who had come along.
Jo
While Angus and two others were doing that, Jo
Angus had rigged and lowered the intercom. Jo
“Hello the mine!” said the parson.
The intercom mike down there should pick up voices if there was any reply. There wasn't.
“Keep trying,” said Jo
At first there was just the shaft wall sliding by as the picto-recorder went down. Then a piece of timber, then a tangle of cable. Then the hoist!
Jo
The hoist was empty.
A sigh of relief joined the night wind as the tense group saw that no one had been killed in the hoist.
Jo
The picto-recorder swung idly on its cable ninety feet below them. Eyes strained at the viewscreen, begging it for data.
“No drift hole!” said Jo
Pressing a flying platform into service, they flew a three-man crew down to the bottom of the drift. Robert the Fox wouldn't let Jo
One of the men dropped down from the platform and fixed lifting hooks into the cage cable and they pulled it back up to the top of the hole.
They rigged a crane, pulleys, and a winch, and thirty-three minutes later– clocked by the historian who also had sneaked aboard the relief plane– they had the hoist out of the shaft and sitting off to the side.
Jo
They rigged buckets to crane cable and very shortly they had four men down at the bottom. Jo
They tore at the rocks with their hands, filling up buckets that shot aloft to be replaced by empty ones. More tools and welcome sledges came down.
Two hours went by. They changed three of the men twice. Jo
They worked in a blur of speed. The rattle of rocks and thud of sledges freeing them resounded in the dusty hole bottom. The rockfall was thicker than they had hoped.
Two feet into the drift. Three feet. Four feet. Five feet. Maybe the whole drift had collapsed!
They changed crews. Jo
Three hours and sixteen minutes after their arrival at the bottom, Jo
Very faintly it came back: “...air hole...” “Repeat!” shouted Jo
Jo
They bucked the drill into it with the pressure handles. The others would hear it in there and get out of the way.
With a high scream the drill went through.
They dragged it out.
“Air hose!” yelled Jo
Twenty-one minutes later they had the top of the rockfall cleared and could drag men out.
They had to drop the gap farther to get the last one. It was Du
Seventeen men, only one with a serious injury.
They passed them to the top silently in the hoist buckets.
A dust– and sweat-covered Jo
Finally Thor said, “We lost the lode.” Nobody said anything.