It is strange that the fundamental operations of working metalliferous veins have changed so little throughout the ages. Or is it? Ores came into being with the crusts of the planets; they change appreciably only with the passage of geologic time. Ancient mines, of course, could not go down very deep or follow a seam very far; there was too much water and too little air. The steam engine helped, in degree if not in kind, by removing water and supplying air. Tools improved—from the simple metal bar through pick and shovel and candle, through drill and hammer and low explosive and acetylene, through Sullivan slugger and high explosive and electrics, through skoufer and rotary and burley and sourceless glow, to the complex gadgetry of today—but what, fundamentally, is the difference? Men still crawl, snake-like, to where the metal is. Men still, by dint of sheer brawn, jackass the precious stuff out to where our vaunted automatics can get hold of it. And men still die, in horribly unknown fashions and in callously recorded numbers, in the mines which supply the stuff upon which our vaunted culture rests.
But to resume the thread of narrative, George Washington Jones went to Eridan as a common laborer; a mucker. He floated down beside the skip—a "skip" is a mine elevator—some four thousand eight hundred feet. He rode an ore-car a horizontal distance of approximately eight miles to the brilliantly-illuminated cavern which was the Station of the Twelfth and lowest level. He was assigned to the bunk in which he would sleep for the next fifteen nights: "Fifteen down and three up," ran the standard underground contract.
He walked four hundred yards, yelled "Nothing Down!" and inched his way up a rise—in many places scarcely wider than his shoulders—to the stope some three hundred feet above. He reported to the miner who was to be his immediate boss and bent his back to the skoufer—which, while not resembling a shovel at all closely, still meant hard physical labor. He already knew ore—the glossy, sub-metallic, pitchy black luster of uraninite or pitchblende; the yellows of autunite and carnotite; the variant and confusing greens of tobernite. No values went from Jones' skoufer into the heavily-timbered, steel-braced waste-pockets of the stope; very little base rock went down the rise.
He became accustomed to the work; got used to breathing the peculiarly lifeless, dry, oily compressed air. And when, after a few days, his stentorian "Nothing Down!" called forth a "Nothing but a little fine stuff!" and a handful of grit and pebbles, he knew that he had been accepted into the undefined, unwritten, and unofficial, yet nevertheless intensely actual, fellowship of hard-rock men. He belonged.
He knew that he must abandon his policy of invisibility; and, after several days of thought, he decided how he would do it. Hence, upon the first day of his "up" period, he joined his fellows in their descent upon one of the rawest, noisiest dives of Danapolis. The men were met, of course, by a bevy of giggling, shrieking, garishly painted and strongly perfumed girls—and at this point young Jones' behavior became exceedingly unorthodox.
"Buy me a drink, mister? And a dance, huh?"
"On your way, sister." He brushed the importunate wench aside. "I get enough exercise underground, an' you ain't got a thing I want."
Apparently unaware that the girl was exchanging meaningful glances with a couple of husky characters labelled "BOUNCER" in billposter type, the atypical mucker strode up to the long and ornate bar.
"Gimme a bottle of pineapple pop," he ordered bruskly, "an' a package of Tellurian cigarettes—Sunshines."
"P-p-pine...?" The surprised bartender did not finish the word.