by Liu Cixin
“Then,” the mine chief said, “we ought to get together demolition squads.”
The director nodded. “Time is of the essence. You get to work. I’ll file a request with the ministry.”
The bureau party secretary said, “Can’t we use military engineers? If we use miners for the demolition squad, and anything happens …”
“I’ve considered it,” said the director. “But we only have one detachment of military engineers at the moment, far too few even for one shaft. Besides, they’re not familiar with subterranean demolitions.”
*
Shaft No. 4, closest to the fire, was the first to shut down. When the tramloads of miners reached the entrance, they found a hundred-strong demolition squad waiting around a pile of drills. They inquired, but the demolition squad members didn’t know what they were expected to do; their orders were only to assemble beside the drilling equipment. Suddenly, their attention was seized by a convoy heading toward the entrance. The first truck bristled with armed police, who jumped down to secure a perimeter around a parking area for the vehicles that followed. When the eleven trucks stopped, the canvas was pulled back to reveal neat stacks of yellow wooden crates. The miners were stunned. They knew what was in these crates.
Each crate held twenty-four kilos of ammonium nitrate fuel oil, fifty tons of it altogether in the ten trucks. The final, somewhat smaller truck carried a few bundles of bamboo strips for lashing the explosives together, and a pile of black plastic bags, which the miners knew held electronic detonators.
Liu Xin and Li Minsheng hopped down from the cab of one of the trucks and saw the newly appointed captain of the demolition squad, a muscular, bearded man, coming their way with a roll of charts.
“What are you making us do, Engineer Li?” the captain asked as he unrolled the paper.
Li Minsheng pointed to a spot on the chart, his finger trembling slightly. “Three blast lines, each thirty-five meters long. Detailed positions are on the chart underneath. One-hundred-fifty-millimeter and seventy-five-millimeter boreholes, filled with twenty-eight kilos and fourteen kilos of explosives, respectively, at a density of …”
“I’m asking, what are you trying to make us do?”
Li Minsheng went silent and bowed his head under the captain’s fiery stare.
The captain turned toward the crowd. “Brothers, they want us to blow up the tunnels!” he shouted. There was a moment of commotion among the miners, but a wall of armed police came forward in a semicircle to block the crowd from reaching the trucks. But the police line distorted under the pressure of the surging black human sea, until it was at the breaking point. All of this took place in a heavy silence, with the scuffle of footsteps and clack of gun bolts the only sounds. At the last moment, the crowd ceased its tumult as the director and mine head stepped up onto the bed of one of the trucks.
“I started work in this mine when I was fifteen. Are you just going to destroy it?” shouted one old miner. The wrinkles carved into his face were visible even beneath the thick cover of coal dust.
“What are we going to live on after it’s closed?”
“Why are you blowing it up?”
“Life in the mine was difficult enough without you all messing around.”
The crowd exploded, waves of anger surging ever fiercer over the sea of coal-blackened faces flashing white teeth. The director waited silently until the crowd’s anger turned to restless movement, then, when it was just about to get out of control, he spoke.
“Take a look in that direction,” he said, pointing to a small rise near the mine entrance. His voice was not loud, but it quieted the angry storm, and everyone looked where he was pointing.
“We all call that the old coal column, but do you realize that when it was erected, it wasn’t a column, but a huge cube of coal? That was in the Qing Dynasty, more than a hundred years ago, when Governor Zhang Zhidong erected it at the founding of the mine. A century of wind and rain have weathered it into a column. Our mine has weathered so much wind and rain during that century, so many difficulties and disasters, more than anyone can remember. That’s more than a brief moment, comrades. That’s four or five generations! If there’s nothing else we’ve learned or remembered over the past century, then we must remember this—”
The director raised his hands toward the sea of faces.
“The sky won’t fall!”
The crowd stood frozen. It seemed as if even their breathing had ceased.
“Out of all of China’s industrial workers, all of its proletariat, none has a longer history than us. None has a history with more hardship and tumult than ours. Has the sky fallen for miners? No! That all of us can stand here and look at that old coal column is proof of that. Our sky won’t fall. It never did, and it never will!
“Hardship? There’s nothing new about that, comrades. When have we miners ever had it easy? From the time of our ancestors, when have miners ever had an easy day in their lives? Rack your brains: Of all the industries and all the professions in China and the rest of the world, are any of them harder than ours? None. None at all. What’s new about hardship? If it were easy, now that would be surprising. We’re holding up both the sky and the earth! If we feared hardship, we’d have died out long ago.
“But talented people have been thinking of solutions for us as society and science have advanced. Now we have a solution, one that has the hope of totally transforming our lives, bringing us out of the dark mines and into the sun to mine coal beneath blue skies! Miners will have the world’s most enviable job. This hope has now arrived. Don’t take my word for it, but look at the pillars of fire shooting skyward in the south valley. But these efforts have caused a catastrophe. We will explain all of this in detail later. Right now all you need to understand is that this may be the very last hardship for miners. This is the price for our wonderful tomorrow. So let’s stand together and face it. As so many generations have before—again, the sky hasn’t fallen!”
The crowd dispersed in silence. Liu Xin said to the director, “I’ve known you and my father, and I can die without regret.”
“Act, and think of nothing else,” the director said, clapping Liu Xin on the shoulder, then gripped him in an embrace.
*
The day after demolition work commenced on Shaft No. 4, Liu Xin and Li Minsheng walked side by side through the main tunnel, their footsteps echoing emptily. They were passing the first blast area, and in the dim light of their headlamps, they could see the boreholes densely distributed in the high ceiling, and the colorful waterfall of detonation wires streaming toward a pile on the floor.
Li Minsheng said, “I used to hate the mine. Hate it, because it consumed my youth. But now I realize that I’ve become one with it. Hate it or love it, it’s what my youth was.”
“We shouldn’t torture ourselves,” Liu Xin said. “We’ve done something with our lives, at least. If we’re not heroes, then at least we’ve gone down fighting.”
They fell silent, realizing that they were talking about death.
Then Aygul ran up, breathing hard. “Engineer Li, look at that,” he said, pointing at the ceiling. A few thick canvas hoses, used for ventilating the mine, were now limp and slack.
Li Minsheng blanched. “Shit! When was ventilation cut off?”
“Two hours ago.”
Li Minsheng barked into his radio, and soon the chief of ventilation and two ventilation engineers showed up.
“There’s no way to restore ventilation, Engineer Li. All of the equipment from down below—blowers, motors, anti-explosion switches, and even some pipes—have been taken out!” the ventilation chief said.
“You fucking idiot! Who told you to take them out? Are you fucking suicidal?” Li Minsheng shouted, far past caring about decorum or professionalism.
“Engineer Li, watch your language. Do you know who told us? The director expressly said for us to take out as much equipment as possible before the shaft is sealed. We all were at the meeting. We’ve been working day and night fo
r two days and have taken out more than a million yuan worth of equipment. And now you’re cursing at us? What’s the point of ventilation anyway when the shaft’s going to be sealed?”
Li Minsheng let out a long sigh. The truth of the situation had still not been disclosed, leading to this kind of coordination issue.
“What’s the problem?” Liu Xin asked after the ventilation staff had left. “Shouldn’t the ventilation be stopped? Won’t that reduce the supply of oxygen to the mine?”
“Dr. Liu, you’re a theoretical giant but a practical dwarf. You’re clueless in the face of reality. Like Engineer Li said, you only know how to dream!” Aygul said. He had not spoken courteously to Liu Xin since the fire had started.
Li Minsheng explained, “This coal seam has a high incidence of gas. Once ventilation is shut off, the gas will quickly accumulate at the bottom of the shaft, and when the fire gets here, it may touch off an explosion powerful enough to blow out the seal. At the very least it will blow out new channels for oxygen. There’s no choice but to add another blast area.”
“But Engineer Li, the two areas above us are only half done, and the third hasn’t even started. The fire is nearing the southern mining zone; there might not even be enough time to complete three zones.”
“I …” Liu Xin said carefully. “I have an idea that may or may not work.”
“Ha!” Aygul laughed coldly. “This is unprecedented. When has Dr. Liu ever been uncertain? When has Dr. Liu ever had to ask someone else before making a decision?”
“What I mean is that we’ve got a blast zone already set up at this deep point. Can we detonate it first? That way, if there’s an explosion farther down the shaft, there will be one obstacle, at least.”
“If that worked we would have done it already,” Li Minsheng said. “The blast will be large enough to fill the tunnels with toxic gas and dust that won’t disperse for a long time, impeding further work in the tunnels.”
The ground fire’s advance was faster than anticipated. The construction group decided to detonate with only two blast zones in place, and ordered all personnel evacuated from the shaft as quickly as possible. It was near dark. They were standing around a chart in a production building not far off from the entrance, considering how to detonate at the shortest possible distance using a spur tunnel, when Li Minsheng suddenly said, “Listen!”
A deep rumble was coming from somewhere below ground, as if the earth were belching. A few seconds later they heard it again.
“Methane explosions. The fire has reached the mine,” Aygul said nervously.
“Wasn’t it supposed to still be farther away?”
No one answered. Liu Xin’s ground rats had been used up, and with the only sensing techniques now at their disposal it was difficult to precisely determine the fire’s position and speed.
“Evacuate at once!”
Li Minsheng snatched up his radio, but no matter how he shouted, there was no answer.
“Before I came up, Chief Zhang was worried he’d smash a radio while working,” a miner from the demolition squad told him. “So he put them with the detonation wires. There are a dozen drills working simultaneously down there. It’s pretty loud!”
Li Minsheng jumped up and dashed out of the building without even grabbing a helmet. He called a tram, then headed down the shaft at top speed. The moment the tram vanished into the shaft entrance, Liu Xin could see Li Minsheng waving at him, and there was a smile on his face. It had been a long time since he’d smiled.
The ground belched a few more times, but then silence descended.
“Did that series of explosions consume all of the methane in the mine?” Liu Xin asked an engineer standing beside him, who looked back at him in wonder.
“Consume it all? You’ve got to be kidding. It will just release more methane from the seam.”
A sky-spitting thunder rolled, as if the Earth itself were exploding under their feet. The mouth of the mine was engulfed in flames. The blast lifted Liu Xin up into the air, and the world spun madly about him. A mess of stones and crossties were thrown by the blast, and he saw a tramcar hurtle out of the flames, spit out of the entrance like an apple core. He landed heavily on the ground as rock rained down on him, and it felt as if each was coated in blood. He heard more deep rumbles, the sound of the explosives detonating in the mine. Before he lost consciousness, he saw the fire at the entrance disappear, replaced by thick clouds of smoke….
ONE YEAR LATER
He walked as if through hell. Clouds of black smoke covered the sky, rendering the sun a barely visible disk of dark red. Static electricity from dust friction meant the smoke flickered with lightning, which lit up the hills above the ground fire with a blue light, exposing the image indelibly onto Liu Xin’s mind. Smoke issued from shaft openings that dotted the hills, the bottom of each column glowing a savage dark red from the ground fire before gradually blackening farther up the columns that swirled snakelike into the heavens.
The road was bumpy, and the blacktop surface was melted enough that with every few steps it almost peeled the soles off his shoes. Refugees and their vehicles packed the roadway, all of them in masks against the stifling sulfurous air and the snowflake-like ash that fell endlessly and turned their bodies white. Fully-armed soldiers kept order on the crowded road, and a helicopter cut through the smoke overhead, calling through a loudspeaker for no one to panic…. The exodus had begun in the winter and was initially planned to be completed in one year, but a sudden intensification of the ground fire meant they had to proceed more urgently. Chaos reigned. The court had repeatedly delayed Liu Xin’s hearing, but this morning he had been left unguarded in the detention center and had made his way uncertainly outside.
The land around the road was parched and fractured into fissures filled with the same thick dust that billowed around him. A small pond steamed, its surface crammed with floating corpses of fish and frogs. It was the height of summer, but no stitch of green was visible. Grass was withered yellow and buried under dust. The trees were dead as well, and some were even smoking, their charcoal branches reaching toward the evening sky like grotesque hands. Smoke wafted from some of the windows of the empty buildings. He saw an astonishing number of rats, driven from their nests by the fire’s heat, crossing the road in waves.
As he went farther into the hills, the heat became even more palpable, rising up around his ankles, and the air more choked and dirty.
Even through his mask it was hard to breathe. The fire’s heat was not evenly distributed, and he instinctively skirted the most scorching places. It left him few paths. Where the fire was particularly fierce, the buildings had caught flame, and there were periodic crashes as structures collapsed.
He had reached the mine entrances. He walked past a vertical shaft, now more of a chimney, its enormous rig red-hot under the heat and emitting a sharp hiss that made his skin crawl. He had to detour around its surging heat. The separator building was enveloped in smoke, and the piles of coal behind it had been burning for days. They had melted into a single enormous chunk of glowing coal flickering with flames….
There was no one here. The soles of his feet were burning, the sweat had almost dried off his body, his difficulty breathing pushed him to the edge of shock, but his mind was clear. With his last ounce of strength he walked toward his destination. The mouth of the shaft, glowing red from the fire within, beckoned to him. He had made it. He smiled.
He turned in the direction of the production building. The roof might be smoking but it was not on fire, at least. He walked through the open door and entered the long changing room. Light from the shaft fire shining through the window filled the room with a hazy red glow and caused everything to shimmer, including the line of lockers. He walked along the long row, inspecting the numbers until he found the one he wanted.
He remembered it from his childhood: His father had just been appointed head of extraction, the wildest team, well-known for being hard to handle. Those rough young workers
had been dismissive of his father at first, because of the way he had timidly asked for a detached locker door to be nailed back in place before their first prework meeting. The crew had mostly ignored him, apart from a few insults, but his father had said only, “Then give me some nails and I’ll put it up myself.” Someone tossed him a few nails, and he said, “And a hammer too.” This time they really ignored him. But then they suddenly fell quiet, and watched in awe as his father pressed the nails into the wood with a bare thumb. At once the atmosphere changed, and the workers lined up and listened respectfully to his father’s prework talk….
The locker wasn’t locked, and upon opening it, Liu Xin found it still contained clothes. He smiled again, at the thought of the miners who had used his father’s locker over the past two decades. He took out the clothes and put them on, first the thick work trousers, then the equally thick jacket. The uniform smeared with layers of mud and coal dust had a sharp odor of sweat and oil that was surprisingly familiar, and a sense of peace came over him.
He put on the boots, picked up the helmet, took the lantern out of the locker, wiped the dust off of it with his sleeve, and clipped it to the helmet. There were no batteries, so he looked in the next locker, which had one. He strapped the bulky lantern battery to his waist, then realized that it was drained: work had been halted for a year, after all. But he remembered where the lamp shop was, directly opposite the changing room, where in his youth female workers would spray the batteries with smoking sulfuric acid to charge them. That was impossible now; the lamp shop was shrouded in yellow sulfuric acid smoke. He solemnly put on the lamp-equipped helmet and walked over to a dust-covered mirror. There, in the flickering red light, he saw his father.
“Dad, I’ll go down below in your place,” he said with a smile, then strode out toward the smoking mouth of the shaft.
A helicopter pilot recalled later that during a low-altitude flyby of Shaft No. 2, a final sweep of the area, he thought he saw someone near the opening, a black silhouette against the red glow of the ground fire. The figure seemed to be heading down the shaft, but in the next instant there was only red light, and nothing else.
