Projecting straight up from the top of the head frame was a neat array of six tubes. Each of these was fattened at its top by a construct that Saskia could not help likening to the flash suppressor on the muzzle of a carbine.
A white-hat drove her and the lord mayor in a small ATV to the head frame’s ground-level entrance, where T.R. awaited them, sporting a huge ornate Flying S belt buckle. Looking up from this perspective it was evident that those six tubes were arranged in a radial pattern, like the barrels on a Gatling gun. They ran straight down into the mine shaft. Because the six barrels, at about one meter, were so much smaller in diameter than the shaft, which was big enough to swallow a small house, there was abundant space in between them for other stuff. The exact allocation of that space had obviously been the topic of much brain work among engineers. Through a kind of verbal osmosis, Saskia had picked up a new bit of technical jargon: “routed systems,” which was engineer-speak for long skinny things like pipes and wires that had to go from one place to another. The results of the lucubrations of the routed systems engineers were summarized in a cross-sectional diagram posted near the door: a big circle with the six smaller circles of the gun barrels evenly spaced around its periphery, and everything else a fractal jigsaw puzzle of advanced industrial cramming and jamming. But the biggest single rectangle in the whole diagram was the elevator shaft. Second biggest was a circle labeled “shell hoist.”
“Y’all do your homework?” T.R. asked, not the least bit seriously, as they got into the elevator. The outward-facing door was solid, but the walls were open steel mesh.
He was referring to a set of YouTube links he’d shared with them last night on the topic of how mine shafts were dug.
“I actually did click through,” Bob admitted. “I’ve a toddler-like weakness for construction equipment.”
Saskia shook her head. “I don’t.”
“Start at the top,” T.R. said. “Place charges. Blow shit up. Scoop out the spoil. Repeat. The whole rig for setting the charges and scooping up the spoil gets lowered into the shaft by this”—he slapped one of the steel members of the head frame—“as you go.
That’s the point of this”—slap, slap—“to move stuff up and down. Line the walls with reinforced concrete a few feet at a time on your way down. Pretty simple really. Just got to keep at it.”
He pulled the elevator’s door shut behind them. The three of them fit into it without touching each other. Four would have been a crowd. “Anyone claustrophobic?” T.R. asked. This was merely a formal courtesy, as event planners had already asked Saskia （and presumably Bob） this question three times in the last twenty-four hours. Both she and Bob shook their heads. T.R. hit the “down” button, overhead machinery whined, and they began to descend. “We had a head start on digging this hole,” T.R. continued, “because of an old abandoned coal mine that was already here. But it was only four hundred feet deep, and not wide enough.”
“But you just had to use it anyway, I’ll wager,” Saskia said. “Because of the symbolism.”
T.R. nodded, but didn’t respond other than to get a slightly mischievous look on his face. Their surroundings were clearly observable through the lift’s steel mesh walls. The shaft became more and more crammed, as per the diagrams, during the first few meters’ descent, as various underground pipes, conduits, ducts, and cables sprouted through its walls and turned vertically downward. Past a certain point, though, it didn’t get any more crowded, because it couldn’t. Horizontal stripes and numbers had been painted on things so that you could tell you were moving. A panel on the lift’s wall gave the depth belowground in meters and showed their progress on a cutaway diagram.
“Not the world’s fastest elevator,” T.R. remarked. “Obviously, the device is not manned when it’s running. It is as automated as a zillion bucks’ worth of robotics can make it. So whisking people up and down was not a priority for us.”
“And if I understand the nature of your plan—” the lord mayor began to ask.
“Our plan, Bob. Our plan.”
“It will be running all the time. Nonstop.”
T.R. nodded. “The design spec is for it to run for two years with ninety percent uptime before it needs an overhaul.”
Bob furrowed his brow. “How do you overhaul something like this?”
“There’s always a way,” T.R. answered. “But the real answer is, you probably don’t. Just fill it up with dirt and build another one. Remember, in two years the world is gonna be a different place. A cooler place, for one thing.” He looked at Saskia. “I had my eye on some of your old coal mines for a while. Down in the southeastern corner of your country. Some nice deep shafts there. Saves some digging. Great symbolism. Decided against it though.”