Dr Stevens had enjoyed studying history when he was a boy at school. Sometimes he wished he was still there. But now he was a man and had the responsibilities of a man.
He turned from the window. His headache was starting to trouble him again. He wished Hinks would hurry and come to take orders, because he had to get rid of this headache.
There was a tap on the door and Hinks entered. ‘You wanted me, sir?’ Hinks was over six feet tall, and very broad-shouldered. He had a face like an ex-boxer who had lost too many fights.
The headache was very bad now. ‘I want you to... ‘ Dr Stevens knew he was swaying slightly with the pain. ‘I want you to...’
‘Are you all right, sir?’ Although Hinks asked the question politely there was ice in his voice. There always was.
‘The mine,’ said Dr Stevens, ‘nobody must go down the mine.’
‘I’ll see to it,’ said Hinks, grinning. The prospect of any kind of violence always made Hinks grin. ‘Sure you’re all right, sir?’
‘Perfectly all right,’ Dr Stevens lied. ‘Just see no one goes down the mine. That’ll be all.’
‘Right you are, sir.’ Hinks turned and went. Dr Stevens hated to imagine what Hinks might do to stop people going down the mine.
Alone, Dr Stevens staggered over to the door and locked it. Then he crossed back to his desk, unlocked a little cupboard built into the side of the desk. His hands were now shaking, and his head felt like splitting open. He reached into the cupboard and brought out a very special pair of earphones. Fumbling, he put them on, plugged the lead into a special socket in his desk intercom, and slumped back into his chair. The voice of his friend Boss at once started to talk to him through the earphones, reassuring Dr Stevens that what he was doing was right. Almost immediately the headache went away.
Jo was pleased with the way Nancy, or Mum, had welcomed her, but she was still angry with Professor Clifford Jones. Over lunch she met a number of the Wholeweal Community, mainly young people who had come to Llanfairfach because they were fed up with the pressures and materialism and pollution of the big cities. Conversation during the meal was light hearted, and they seemed pleased to have this newcomer, Jo, in their midst. But as soon as the meal was over they all went back to their various occupations. The Nut Hatch was a hive of activity, where these young people spent their time evolving alternative methods of production and living. Jo helped Nancy wash up the dishes. Then she had nothing to do. Everyone was far too busy to involve her, or even talk to her. Burning with curiosity about the man who died and went green, she decided to go and look at the mine.
The closed mine looked sadly derelict. Grass and weeds grew over the little narrow gauge railway lines once used for pushing wheeled tubs of coal. Immediately over the shaft was a high metal construction with wheels at the top. This was part of the lift mechanism. When a coal mine is in full life, the wheels at the top of these metal constructions are turning all the time, either taking miners down to work, or bringing up the coal they have hewn from the bowels of the earth—but here everything was ghostly still.
As Jo wandered about among mounds of coal dust, the unused wheeled tubs, and the outhouses and sheds around the main shaft, a man came out of the pit office and shouted at her.
‘Hey!’ he called. ‘What are you doing?’
Jo went over to him. Like many Welshmen he was short and dark eyed.
‘I’m from UNIT,’ she said. ‘I want to look at the mine.’
‘Well now you’ve seen it,’ said the man. ‘So go away. You can’t walk round here without authority.’
‘Where do I get it?’
‘National Coal Board,’ said the man, ‘in Cardiff.’
‘You’re just trying to be awkward,’ said Jo.
As he spoke, another short dark-eyed man popped his head out from the office and called something urgently in Welsh. The man talking to Jo turned and rushed into the office. Jo followed and stood at the door. The office was small and untidy, its wooden floor black with in-grained coal dust. A door led off to the lift machinery. The man who talked to Jo had grabbed an old-fashioned telephone. He listened, then spoke in rapid Welsh.
‘What’s happening?’ Jo asked quietly.
The second man said, ‘One of our mates, Dai Evans, has gone down the pit. Now he’s in trouble.’ He was too worried to ask who Jo was or to tell her to go away.
With one man on the phone, and Jo and the other man watching him, none of them saw or heard Hinks as he quietly slipped into the lift machinery by way of its outer door. Hinks was no engineer, but the lift machinery was simple enough for him to understand. In a couple of seconds he was able to sabotage the machinery and make his getaway.
The man put down the phone. ‘We’ve got to get him out—quickly!’ He noticed Jo standing by the door. ‘I told you, girl, go away!’
‘If someone’s hurt,’ she said, ‘I could be useful. I’m trained in first aid.’
‘Women don’t go down the pit,’ said the second man.
‘Those poor little pit ponies you used to have years ago down in the mines,’ said Jo, ‘did they all have to be males?’
‘There’s a daft question for you,’ said the second man.
‘If female ponies can go down a mine,’ said Jo, ‘so can female humans. Especially if they can be useful. I’m Jo Grant. Who are you two?’
‘Dave Griffiths,’ said the first man.
‘Bert Williams,’ said the second.
‘Which of you is coming with me?’ asked Jo.
‘There’s cheek for you!’ said Bert Williams. ‘Who said you were going?’
‘Could either of you put a splint on a broken leg?’ asked Jo. ‘Or know how to give the kiss of life?’
Neither answered.
‘So you see,’ said Jo. ‘You need me. How do we get down there?’
‘I’ll take her with me,’ said Bert. ‘Perhaps she could be useful.’ He turned to Jo. ‘We must get a helmet to fit you, miss, although with a head as big as yours that might be difficult. Come along.’
Bert led Jo across to one of the locker rooms, a long low building with rows of metal lockers where the miners used to leave their working clothes. There were helmets on the shelves, and Bert found one to fit Jo. On the front of the helmet was fastened an electric lamp. Thus equipped, they went back to the pit head office.
‘Has he phoned again?’ Bert asked.
‘Nothing,’ said Dave.
‘All right,’ said Bert, ‘get ready to operate the machinery.’
Dave hurried into the room containing the lift machinery. Bert put on his helmet, and took Jo away from the office towards the lift. It was like a cage, large enough to carry twenty men at a time.
‘This isn’t like a lift you’ll find in a shop,’ said Bert. ‘We don’t go down slowly and gradually, with someone to tell you what you can buy on the different floors. Once we start moving, we drop like a ruddy stone, and you can see everything go by.’
‘I’m not frightened,’ Jo fibbed.
‘I was the first time,’ said Bert. ‘Fourteen years old I was, and scared out of my wits, but I tried not to show it.’
The cage started to move.
‘Here we go,’ said Bert. ‘Hold tight.’
Suddenly the floor of the cage dropped away from under Jo’s feet. She felt very sick.
As the big wheels above the lift shaft began to spin, they were observed by the Brigadier and the Doctor. They had just arrived in the Brigadier’s jeep.
‘I thought this mine was closed,’ said the Doctor.
‘It is, or supposed to be.’ The Brigadier stopped the jeep and ran to the pit head machine room, the Doctor close behind. They found Dave Griffiths at the controls. ‘Who’s going down the mine?’ asked the Brigadier.
‘One of my mates and some girl or other,’ said Dave. ‘What’s it to you?’
‘A girl?’ said the Doctor. ‘Please stop the lift immediately.’
‘There’s a mate of mine hurt down there,’ said Dave. ‘In some kind of trouble.’
‘All the more reason to stop winding!’ shouted the Doctor. The look on his face was imploring, the tone of voice imperative.
‘Right you are,’ said Dave. He pulled on the brake. Nothing happened. He pulled harder. The wheels of the lift mechanism kept spinning. ‘I
can’t
stop it,’ he screamed, ‘it’s out of control. Clutch and brake both gone.’
The Doctor noticed an old iron bar lying on the blackened floor. He picked it up and wedged it against the main drum of the machinery. ‘Now reverse the motor,’ he called.
‘It won’t work,’ said Dave. ‘We’ll snap the cable.’
‘Don’t argue, man,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s their only chance.’ As he spoke he braced himself and pulled harder on the wedged iron bar.
Dave put the electrical motor into reverse. There was a shower of sparks and smoke bellowed out from the machinery. Then it stopped. The Doctor released his grip on the iron rod. ‘That’s done it,’ he said.
‘That,’ said Dave, ‘has seized up the whole works.’
The Brigadier looked at a meter on the wall that showed the depth of either of the twin lifts. ‘According to this, you halted their descent just twenty feet before they hit the bottom. Congratulations.’
‘It’s all right you congratulating us,’ said Dave, ‘but I told you, the machine’s seized solid now. Wherever they are in that lift shaft, they’ve got to hang there until we solve this problem.’
Jo and Bert picked themselves up from the floor of the cage. The force of the sudden stopping had thrown them both down.
‘You all right?’ Bert asked.
‘No bones broken,’ replied Jo. ‘Why have we stopped here?’
‘Maybe I should write a letter to the National Coal Board and ask them,’ said Bert. ‘Seriously, I think it was a brake failure. Can’t happen in theory.’
‘I’ve heard those theories before,’ said Jo. ‘How do we get out of here?’
‘First let’s find out how high we are,’ said Bert. He took a screwdriver from his pocket, and dropped it over the side of the cage into the total darkness below, and listened as it hit the ground beneath. ‘I reckon we’re about twenty feet from the bottom.’
‘A good thing we stopped,’ remarked Jo.
‘Yes. Another two or three seconds and we’d have had our thigh bones up under our arm pits.’ He looked around the cage. ‘I think we may be in luck,’ he said, finding a rope in a coil attached to the wall of the cage. ‘Ever shinned down a rope before, miss?’
‘More than once,’ said Jo. ‘How do we know it’s long enough?’
Bert was paying out the rope, measuring it with the span of his arms. ‘There’s a good twenty feet here.’
‘You only guessed we’re twenty feet from the bottom,’ Jo reminded him.
‘Good point,’ said Bert. ‘It’s a logical young woman you are. So I’ll go first. If I run out of rope and drop ten feet, you may get a chance to fix a couple of those splints you were talking about to two broken legs.’ He attached the rope to the frame of the cage, paid it out over the side, then climbed after it. ‘Don’t forget we’re down here to help a man in trouble, so maybe we should take a risk or two.’
The Doctor completed his inspection of the lift machinery. He wiped his hands on a brightly coloured handkerchief drawn from one of his capacious jacket pockets, and spoke to Dave and the Brigadier.
‘Absolutely correct diagnosis of the situation,’ he said. ‘It’s seized solid. Wherever that lift is hanging in the shaft, it’s going to be there for quite some time.’
‘I noticed coming here,’ said the Brigadier, ‘there are two shafts. Couldn’t we use the other lift?’
Dave shook his head at the simplicity of this English non-miner. ‘It’s a counterweight lift system, man. As one goes down the other comes up. So if one is jammed, the other is jammed, too.’
‘That makes sense,’ said the Doctor, ‘although it doesn’t help very much.’ He scratched the side of his nose and considered the problem. ‘What if we made that other lift independent?’
‘By Jove,’ said the Brigadier. ‘You mean so that it could work on its own?’
‘That,’ said the Doctor, ‘is what “independent” means.’ He turned back to Dave. ‘Couldn’t we rig a donkey engine and pulley system?’
‘I suppose we could,’ said Dave. ‘But remember it’s the same cable running to both lifts. ‘We’d have to cut through that cable to free the other lift before we could do anything.’
‘All right,’ said the Doctor. ‘Where’s your cutting gear?’
‘There isn’t any,’ said Dave. ‘The mine’s been out of action for a year. When it closed, the National Coal Board stripped it of everything.’
‘Then for goodness’ sake,’ said the Doctor, showing a touch of anger, ‘let’s tell the National Coal Board we need back the cutting gear, and we need it fast!’
‘Have you ever tried to get the Board to do
anything
fast?’ asked Dave. ‘But I’ve been thinking. I know where there should be the equipment we need.’
‘Where?’
‘Panorama Chemicals,’ said Dave, ‘if they’re willing to help us.’
The Brigadier moved to go. ‘I’ll get over there and ask them straight away!’
‘Hold your horses, man,’ said Dave. ‘We’re not all savages in Wales, you know. We’ve got telephones, just like you English. Come along with me.’
Dave led the Doctor and the Brigadier back into the pit head office. He looked up the number he wanted in a grubby school exercise book, then picked up the phone and dialled.
Dr Arnold Bell placed his carefully prepared report on the big desk in Dr Stevens’s office. He had expected Dr Stevens to be there, but found the office deserted. As Chief Scientific Officer of Panorama Chemicals he felt free to wander into the Director’s office, especially when he had such an important report as this to deliver. The report stated in analytical detail that Bateson’s polymerisation method was definitely working. It meant that for every ton of crude oil imported from the Middle East, or mined in the North Sea, Panorama Chemicals would be able to produce 25% more petrol or diesel fuel. The additional profit of the company might run into millions and millions of pounds. However, Dr Bell was not concerned with profits—that was Dr Stevens’s affair. What fascinated Dr Bell was the scientific achievement. The method resulted in tons of waste fluid, and this would have to be deposited somewhere. But Dr Bell did not regard that as his problem. For the time being the waste was being pumped into the old coal mine. No doubt in time the company would devise some other means of disposal.