United States or Turkey ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The jack-hammer crew gave us a line on where we might find Bruzinski, and I expect for a while there I led the way. After another ten-minute stroll, durin' which we dodged a string of coal cars being shunted down a grade, we comes across three miners chattin' quiet in a corner. One of 'em turns out to be the mine-boss. "Hey, Joe!" says Llanders. "Somebody wants to see you."
He stepped down through the breach; the others began dragging equipment out of the trucks shovels and picks and crowbars and sledges, portable floodlights, cameras, sketching materials, an extension ladder, even Alpinists' ropes and crampons and pickaxes. Hubert Penrose was shouldering something that looked like a surrealist machine gun but which was really a nuclear-electric jack-hammer.
The door, one of the double sliding things the Martians had used, was closed. Selim von Ohlmhorst tried it, but it was stuck fast. The metal latch-parts had frozen together, molecule bonding itself to molecule, since the door had last been closed. Hubert Penrose came over with the jack-hammer, fitting a spear-point chisel into place.
There's a knack about mining, like everything else you've got to know just how to drive your holes in order to break the most ground but give me a jack-hammer and enough men to muck out after me and I can sink from sixteen to twenty feet a day, depending on the rock. But here, of course, I'm working lone-handed and only make about three feet a day."
Only in one spot, off in what Llanders calls a chamber, we finds two men workin' a compressed air jack-hammer, drillin' holes. "They'll be shooting a blast soon," says Llanders. "Want to wait?" "No thanks," says I prompt. "Mr. Fiske is in a rush." Maybe I missed something interestin', but with all that rock over my head I wasn't crazy to watch somebody monkey with dynamite.
But on Mars there was no native labor; the last Martian had died five hundred centuries ago. Something started banging like a machine gun, four or five hundred yards to her left. A solenoid jack-hammer; Tony Lattimer must have decided which building he wanted to break into next.
Word Of The Day