Move the Mountains

by Emily Conolan

  Suddenly, you’re seized with panic. With a flash of clarity, you remember: Those heaters! They poison the air!

  You flail and fall off the couch. Then you look up at the pretty blue flames. You have no idea what you’re doing there.

  The room is lovely and warm. You sigh. Sleep will be so welcome. You rest your head on the floor and close your eyes.

  To return to the last choice you made and try again, go to the end of scene 21.

  You almost blurt out, I’d like to come on the tunnel inspection, but then you decide you’ll have more chance of success if you can make Mr Ford think it was his idea to take you. So instead you say: ‘I’m glad I don’t have to go! Is it all right if I take tomorrow’s morning-tea rations back for the Nowak children?’

  As you expected, making it sound like you’re pleased to be able to shirk work and want to reapportion the food supplies puts Mr Ford on instant alert.

  ‘Now that I think of it, we will need you to come,’ he says. ‘Arrive early to pack the morning-tea supplies in a hamper.’

  You pretend to be reluctant, but inside you’re dancing. You’re going to see the project up close!

  In the morning, you dress warmly and arrive early. You ride in the company jeep to the site where the new tunnel is being excavated. Mario is a tunneller – he’s out at sites like this every day, so you haven’t seen him for months, let alone thought about making up with him after your big argument. You can hear the tunnel before you see it: the clank of winches, the thrumming of drills, echoing from deep within the rock.

  Mr Ford strides up to the tunnelling team leader, a tall man with a ginger beard who’s left a small building near the tunnel entrance to meet you at your jeeps. ‘Why haven’t you stopped work, De Vries?’ he demands. ‘You knew there was an inspection scheduled for ten a.m.!’

  Mr De Vries glances at his watch. ‘But it’s nine forty-five, sir,’ he says in an accent you guess is Dutch.

  ‘My watch says ten,’ insists Mr Ford, without even looking at it. ‘Order them to stop work now.’ He turns away.

  You glance at your own small watch. It is nine forty-five, for heaven’s sake. Mr Ford would insist the earth were flat if it suited him. He thinks he’s too important to wait for fifteen minutes, even when he’s in the wrong. Without saying a word, you flash your watch at the tunnelling team leader. It seems to give him the gumption to stand up to Mr Ford.

  ‘We’re on track to break a new speed record for tunnelling, and I’m not going to stop the boys fifteen minutes early,’ De Vries insists. ‘We’ll stop work, as requested, when everybody’s watches say ten.’

  Begrudgingly, Mr Ford looks at his own watch and realises he’d look petty to persist. ‘Very well,’ he says. ‘We’ll have our morning tea early.’ He gestures to you to fetch the hamper.

  Just as you turn back to the nearby jeep containing the hamper, you hear a rumbling boom issue from the mouth of the tunnel, followed by cracks and crunches. You spin to see a cloud of dust exhaling from the tunnel and De Vries running through it towards the entrance, throwing on his hard hat, and shouting back over his shoulder: ‘Send help! Send help!’

  Mr Ford swears and shakes his head, and his engineers just stand there, thunderstruck. Over at the small building near the tunnel’s entrance, you see a man in overalls shouting into a two-way radio.

  ‘What’s happened?’ you ask Mr Ford.

  ‘A damned accident, I think,’ he replies, looking more frustrated than worried. ‘The workers drill long holes and pack them with dynamite to blast apart the rock. They’re meant to drill new holes after each blast, but it saves time to drill back into what’s left of the old holes, and sometimes there are traces of explosive still in there. The friction from the drill sets it off, and boom.’

  You run to the man on the radio to see if you can do anything to help, but he waves at you to wait a minute. You see the clipboard of the day’s roster on the desk, and your heart gives a lurch as you realise Mario might be in the tunnel. Sweat springs to your palms and your breathing quickens as you scan the list of names: Alexeev, Claesen, Castellanos, Davies, De Luca – oh no – De Luca, Mario. He’s in there.

  You see a torch on the desk and grab it. There’s also a white hard hat next to the clipboard, and you jam it onto your head. Mario’s life is in danger – he might even be dead – and I never apologised to him, you think frantically as you run towards the tunnel.

  Once inside, you can hear echoing moans. You start to shake, and the torchlight wobbles. Keep calm, you tell yourself. As the tunnel gets deeper and the darkness grows around you, you see two hunched figures emerging. It’s the team leader, De Vries, and a wounded man you’ve never seen before, who is clutching at his stomach and spitting blood.

  ‘Don’t go in there!’ De Vries cries. ‘It’s not stable!’

  ‘My cousin’s in there,’ you say resolutely.

  You start to run. Then your torchlight falls on a pile of rubble and twisted metal up ahead. Two men are bending over some figures on the ground. You can hear their voices clearly now:

  ‘Come on, Sam … keep your hand on it and press hard …’

  ‘It’s all right, there’s help coming …’

  ‘Where’s Petrov?’

  As you run towards them, you hear a deep, ominous creak, and the walls seem to shudder. You swing your torch up and see a slab of rock overhead with a jagged crack across one corner. It’s not stable, De Vries said. You can’t go any deeper into the tunnel now, not even for Mario – it’s too dangerous. But you can help these men just ahead of you on your way out. You steel your nerves and dash towards them.

  You reach the nearest fallen man and grab his ankles, saying to the closest worker bending over him: ‘Grab his arms and let’s get out of here.’

  The worker’s head snaps up at your voice, and although his face is blackened with grime, you suddenly see – it’s Mario! Your heart leaps, but you both know you don’t have time for a reunion; he just grins at you and scoops the injured man up by his armpits. You take one side, he takes the other, and you both stagger.

  ‘How about this for a coincid—’ Mario begins, but the air is torn by a huge crack! It’s like a giant crunching bones for dinner. You have no time to run, or even react. The slab of rock overhead gives way under its own weight, cleaves from the rock above it, and drops, like a black foot stamping down on an insect. Death comes very quickly.

  To return to the last choice you made and try again, go to the end of scene 22.

  You arrive at the office late, once you’re sure everyone will have definitely left for the tunnel inspection. If anyone finds you here, though, you have an excuse: you’ve brought your English books along and will say you’ve come to study in peace.

  The office is chilly – all the heaters that usually keep the room warm are off. Last night there was a raging storm, and Olenka’s house was an icebox this morning. Olenka is happy, though, because Edik is in town for the next few days. In fact, he joined Mr Ford on the tunnel inspection today, because it’s one of the sites he surveyed. He got home just before the storm hit last night with a hair-raising tale about nearly being hit by a falling tree.

  You’re not sure if it’s the cold or the thrill of being a secretive student that gives your arms goosebumps as you open the filing cabinet next to Mr Ford’s desk.

  You examine a map you find that shows where the pipelines and power stations will be placed. The height the water has to fall governs how much energy is produced. You slowly follow the equations. It seems like they use an equation that involves gravity, but the water isn’t simply falling vertically – they have to consider how much friction there is in the pipe, which slows it down. It’s like a trail of clues.

  Once you understand what’s happening, you try doing the calculations for one of the pipes yourself, and when you check their answer and see it matches your own, you get a tremendous rush of satisfaction.

  These engineers are sculptors, you think. They can take a mess
y hunk of nature and craft it into something smooth and synchronised, which will last for centuries.

  You start looking at the plans for two tunnels that are meant to meet up in the middle of a mountain. Each tunnel descends at a slightly different angle to meet at exactly the same spot below the earth. It looks neat on paper – the mountain like a cake sliced in half – but you know it must be difficult for the tunnellers to achieve in practice. This is one of the tunnels Mr Ford and his team are inspecting today.

  Suddenly, you remember throwing out a blueprint like this that Mr Ford left scrunched up under his desk around two weeks ago. You wonder if it’s still in the big bin of waste to be incinerated. Waste is only burnt fortnightly, so it may still be there. If you found it then you could compare the two and see if you could find the mistake that made him throw the other one away.

  There it is! You retrieve the crumpled blueprint and spread it out on the table in the kitchenette. You make yourself a cup of tea (milk, one sugar) and drink it while you compare the two plans.

  The blueprints look identical, except that the crumpled one has a big brown stain on it. You feel a bit deflated. It seems that the first blueprint was just thrown away because someone spilled their tea on it. Still, you decide to check if there are any other mistakes. You start by using trigonometry to check if all the angles add up. You soon notice that there is a tiny difference. The first, crumpled blueprint says that tunnel B needs to be drilled at an angle of twenty-six degrees, but on the second, it’s written as twenty-nine degrees. Which one is right?

  As you do the sums, a suspicion starts to grow inside you. Twenty-nine degrees can’t be right. If they drill that steeply, then the tunnel will go too deep and will miss connecting with tunnel A by hundreds of metres!

  You stop and take a deep breath. Is it actually possible that someone has made an error when they’ve copied out this blueprint, and that I’ve just rescued the correct one from the bin?

  You force yourself to think through this very carefully. If it turns out you’re wrong, you’ll have made yourself look stupid, and revealed to everyone that you were sneaking around the office today, and after that blow-up over Lidia, that will probably mean you’ll be out of a job.

  You do what an engineer would do. You triple-check everything. You consult the maps, and the surveyor’s report, put together by a team of workers including Edik. By the time you’ve completed this meticulous work, you’re certain that Mr Ford threw away the wrong blueprint. The one the tunnellers have been basing their work on is incorrect. A huge bubble of excitement swells your chest with pride. Now I’ll show them what I can do! They’ll have to respect me now.

  YOU MANAGE TO find a lift with some workers and reach the mouth of the tunnel in record time. Looking down its yawning black throat, your heart hammers with excitement. When you hear a voice calling out for you to stop, you turn to see a wiry, grubby man in overalls, who must be one of the tunnellers.

  ‘Oi! No women in the tunnels!’ he cries.

  ‘What?’ You’re flabbergasted. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because it’s terrible bad luck, that’s why,’ he asserts. ‘No woman’s ever been allowed down here, and they never will be. It’d cause a tunnel collapse, or some sort of disaster!’

  You stare at him. Why would people believe such nonsense? Next he’ll accuse me of witchcraft!

  ‘But I have to take something to Mr Ford,’ you tell him. ‘It’s very important!’

  ‘You’ll have to wait till he gets out,’ the tunneller says stoutly.

  ‘I can take it in to him,’ a familiar voice offers behind you.

  ‘Mario!’ you cry. You haven’t seen him since your argument when you first arrived.

  ‘I’ll look after it,’ Mario says to his co-worker. ‘Go and have your tea.’

  The man shuffles off. You realise how glad you are to see Mario, and that your argument isn’t important anymore – you just want your cousin to be your best friend again.

  You give him a hug. ‘Sorry,’ you mumble.

  ‘It was all my fault,’ he replies. ‘Friends?’

  ‘Forever,’ you affirm.

  ‘I heard you were working for the big boss these days – but I can see you hadn’t heard about the women in tunnels superstition.’ Mario chuckles. ‘Load of rubbish. Let’s go.’

  He leads you in to find Mr Ford and the others. This tunnel is nothing like Cat’s Mouth: it’s as wide and tall as a house, and reinforced on all sides with steel beams. Pipes go down the sides of the wall to carry fresh air deep underground, and train tracks run along the floor of the tunnel to bring workers and equipment in, and rubble out.

  ‘It’s hell down here when everything is running,’ Mario tells you. ‘There’s noise like you wouldn’t believe: rumbling, crashing, pounding. It’s a relief to see daylight at the end of a shift.’

  ‘I can believe it,’ you say. Although the tunnel is an impressive feat of engineering, you do feel uneasy as you go further in. You never much liked being underground.

  A few men are still working just inside the entrance, loading sections of enormous metal pipes onto canvas slings. Mario explains that the pipes will carry pressurised water, so they’re extremely thick and heavy. Each piece is the size of a small car.

  ‘We’ve all been asked to take a tea-break so the boss can come in, but we don’t like to stop work for inspections; it slows us down,’ Mario says. He explains that the tunnellers get extra pay if they break records for speed, so everyone is always striving their hardest. ‘The problem is, you get so tired – and then you’re more likely to have an accident. Last week I saw a man killed by a burst air pipe. It was lashing around like a whip.’ He shudders, and so do you.

  You walk down the sloping tunnel in silence after that, Mario’s torchlight bobbing in front of you. The air is very still, and smells of rock dust. You feel Mario take your hand.

  You explain to him how you think you’ve discovered a mistake in the blueprint. You’re excited, but he’s gutted. ‘Weeks of work wasted because that fool threw out the wrong plan? And the little Italian tea-lady is the one who worked it out! That is not going to go down well. But you’re a genius, of course – I always knew that, and now they will too.’

  For the first time, you realise that you’ll need to be discreet in how you point out this mistake. If you make Mr Ford look like an idiot in front of everyone, he’ll get defensive.

  You hear voices up ahead. That’s them! Your heart starts to clatter. Here you are, deep underground on one of the most ambitious engineering projects the world has ever seen, making your contribution. Mr Ford is just ahead, with two workers from the office, taking measurements and making notes.

  When he sees you, his brow furrows in confusion. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Sir, can I have a quiet word?’

  ‘Certainly not. We’re in the middle of an inspection!’ He looks around. ‘Who brought the tea-lady?’

  ‘Mister Ford, I know I’m the tea-lady, but I’m also very good at maths,’ you argue. ‘I was in the office today and—’ You begin to get out the documents, but Ford snatches them away from you.

  ‘Those are confidential!’ he snaps.

  ‘Please, Mr Ford,’ you beg. You’re getting desperate. ‘You have to listen to me! The tunnels won’t meet! You threw out the wrong plan!’

  ‘Get her out of here,’ he snaps and turns his back. But Mario stands his ground.

  ‘She says she found a mistake, and I believe her,’ he states. ‘None of us will go back to work on this tunnel until you’ve checked it.’

  Mr Ford exhales through his teeth. He snatches the papers and orders one of his assistants to hold them up while he inspects them by torchlight.

  ‘It’s a difference of three degrees, sir,’ you point out. ‘Just there.’

  You hear him swear under his breath. ‘Fitzsimmons, Schmid,’ he commands, ‘meeting outside. And go and get Edik Nowak – he’s further down the tunnel.’ He turns on his heel and
begins to walk away.

  I was right, you think. I knew it! You’re going to go to this meeting that Mr Ford wants to hold outside, and you’re going to join in. This is your foot in the door – you just have to keep your nerve and stay respectful.

  You become aware of a distant sound like a tolling bell, clanging and echoing. ‘Do they ring a bell for lunch here?’ you ask Mario. He shakes his head, and the sound grows louder – it’s not rhythmical, it’s more of a jangling, bashing noise, like Teodor might make on one of Olenka’s cooking pots. And now you can hear metallic squeals and dry, rocky crunches too.

  ‘The pipe!’ Mario shouts. ‘There’s a pipe coming down. Get back, get back!’

  You look back and see Mr Ford and his two coworkers leap into an alcove in the side of the tunnel. Mario hesitates for a split second, clearly wondering whether he can reach the alcove too before the runaway pipe does. But you know that Edik is deeper into the tunnel, and you can see some large waste skips further down the track with enough clearance for you to slide in underneath, so you sprint towards the skips, screaming Edik’s name. Mario sprints after you.

  The noise sounds like some demon is wielding the metal pipe in a fury. You hope that the pipe will just glance off the skips and go over the top, or to one side. The safest place to be is under them. You run as hard as you can, limbs burning, urging your body faster and faster. You dive as you reach the closest skip and scramble under, scraping and bumping yourself on the ground. Mario fits in beside you and wraps his arms around you.

  But where is Edik? You scream his name and look out down the tracks to see a figure running towards you. It’s him! He’s going to make it!

  Everything happens in an instant. You feel a wall of air push against you. Mario squeezes you from behind, hard. Edik dives towards your skip and hits the ground. You shoot out an arm to help pull him under. He grabs it with both of his. The last thing you see before the pipe hits and you shut your eyes tight is his terrified eyes, glowing white in the gloom; he hasn’t made it under the skip.