CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Next he met with Sry, the mining maven. Sry had his contingent of men moving the mining equipment to where they were digging.

Sry said, “It’ll take us most of this morning to get it all set up, and then we’re good to go.”

“That quickly?”

“The people of Hrrrm have been mining for thousands and thousands of years. It’s not that hard to follow blueprints, schematics, and diagrams.”

He brought Mike to the face of the wall they were going to begin digging into. Sry tapped the granite then echoed Brux’s sentiment. “If granite was as in demand as liquid zukoh, we would be the richest people in the galaxy.”

“How does this work that the tunnels don’t collapse?” Mike knew little about the complexities of digging into a mountain beyond the horror stories he remembered from Earth of cave-ins and deaths of miners in coal country.

Sry smiled. “Any ordinary planet colonization does this. Way cheaper than building above ground.” Sry tapped the front of his communicator. He showed Mike the complex geometric pattern that emerged. Sry explained. “In essence all the strongest seams are mapped for you. You just point your digger and follow. In our case here on good old, lovely 6743-0A, it’s easier than many planets as the whole damn thing is just solid granite and is for most of the way within a thousand miles of us. This is where other colonies started. Each successive one built on what others built. That often happens. If gray-granite rooms were considered a luxury, this could be a tourist destination.”

“How does this reverse gravity thing actually work?”

Mike had listened to explanations in the training sessions of how the reverse gravity flow eliminated all the waste. Now as then, after another fifteen minutes of listening to Sry, the most he could figure out was, a guy threw an on switch here, crushed granite went in one end of a tube, and came out the other end on the plain. He didn’t care that he didn’t know the dynamics of it, just that someone could make it work.

Sry could.

Sry also showed Mike his own digger and the section he would be assigned to. It was down one of the offshoots from the storage room.

Sry pointed to the nearest digging machine. “See,” Sry said, “state of the art.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

Sry explained, “What we are doing is digging a city. Essentially we hope to hollow out the whole range.”

“Why not just keep digging down?” Mike asked.

Sry said, “It’s much less efficient. The laser diggers and vacuum shovels use more energy pulling materials up from the ground than down from above or sideways.”

On a digger, a worker would sit on a back ledge of what looked to Mike to be a man sized fan. The fan blades faced toward what was to be tunneled. The driver sat and directed the machine which had already been programmed by a computer based on the geologist’s reports on precisely where to dig.

Sry showed him where to sit. Mike had trained on a simulator in the training camp before going on the ship. He thought he could handle it. Sry gave him a couple of run-throughs. The computer did the hard part of figuring out where to go. Any driver had to sit there and turn it on or press the computer key, and make sure the gravity flow tube kept working so the residue got back to the surface.

After they were done, Sry showed him some of the smaller laser diggers. They were designed to do touch-up work, or get in spaces the larger diggers couldn’t. Mike looked at the front. It looked like a large flashlight with vicious teeth.

Before Mike left, Sry motioned to a couple of the other diggers. “This is Grith and Eph,” Sry said. “They have requests.”

Grith was a man in his forties. He was an artist from a Religionist part of the galaxy. He was a random choice. He’d learned his digging skills in the training camp and on the ship on the way here.

Grith said, “I saw one of the old tunnels leading off from the storage room. It’s one of the larger ones. I’d like to create a mural there.”

Mike couldn’t think of a reason to say no, so he said, “Sure, as long as it doesn’t take time from your digging.”

Grith smiled. “I’ll only work after hours. Thanks.”

Mike turned to Eph. He was the oldest man in the colony. Another random pick from a Religionist world. He was bald on top of his head with thick gray hair on the back and sides. He was as thin as most of them.

Eph said, “I was a sculptor on my world. I’d like to make a Story Wall.”

“What’s that?” Mike asked.

“Starting at the entrance to the colony, I’d like to put the name of each person who is here and their biography.”

“Wouldn’t that take forever?”

Eph gave a grim smile. “I’m not going anywhere, and I don’t think any of us ever will. I’ll talk to each man, interview them, and get what they want put up there. Maybe some won’t even want their names, but I think leaving a history of who was here and the story of who we are is important. Yes, I know we can cram it onto electronics, but I think we need something visual to remember ourselves. It will be etched into the cave walls forever, a Story Wall. I’ve got a tool kit for sculpting.” He explained it to Mike. When he finished Mike understood what Eph could do was sort of like the original Guttenberg printing press. That is the language of Hrrrm using letters that could be moved around. Except this was far more high tech using a computer to set the words and then burning them into the concrete.

“Burning them?” Mike wasn’t sure he understood the Hrrrm idiom correctly.

Eph said, “Like a series of pin-point chisels attached to a computer.”

Mike said, “I can’t wait to see it.”