by JE Gurley
“Right!” Alan knew Vince was a bright young engineer. He would be able to make the modifications in no time. “Come on. Let’s get started on it. I don’t want to tell the others until we test it.”
Vince leaned into the rising wind, headed to the parts truck for the line and switch he would need. Alan rubbed his hands together in glee. Maybe they would be able to get the Cerberus up to specs after all. If the vacuum worked, they could run a full-speed test tomorrow.
In the distance, over the roar of the wind, he heard hammering coming from the Cerberus and smiled. Vince was wasting no time. He was young, fresh out of MIT, but he loved his work, thrived on the cutting edge of technology. Alan hoped everything went well with this next test. Vince deserved his reward for the time he had spent on the project. He had turned down dozens of more lucrative job offers to work with Alan, based solely on a single article Alan had written for Mining Journal magazine about the possibility of laser-powered tunneling machines.
Now, it was time to see if the years of work had been worth it.
3
June 30, 2016, 10:00 a.m. Ngomo Mine Klerksdorp, South Africa –
Three weeks after their first successful test, Alan Hoffman and his three top engineers were setting up the Cerberus AT10 on 138 Level of Van Gotts Ngomo Mine twenty kilometers north of Klerksdorp. At a depth of nearly 3,900 meters, 138 Level was the deepest shaft in the world’s deepest mine. In reality, 138 Level was presently only a three-meter-square vertical shaft one-hundred-ten meters below 137 Level. At that depth, the temperature was 600 Celsius, 140 Fahrenheit, making working conditions impossible. Only the massive air conditioning system the mine employed allowed men to work at such depths, and still the temperature was pushing 470 C. 116 degrees Fahrenheit, he thought, that’s about the temperature of a pleasant summer day in Vegas.
Van Gotts’ engineers had developed an ingenious method for cooling the deep mine shafts, a marvel of engineering equaling the mine itself. A large vacuum vat on the surface turned water to ice by helping the water quickly reach the triple point – liquid, gas, solid – by utilizing the principal that water in a vacuum simultaneously boils and freezes. A conveyor belt carried the ice three-hundred meters down into the mine to an abandoned tunnel used as a reservoir, where three-million liters of water was stored before pumping it through a forced air vat cooler. Massive fans blew the cool, moist air deep into the shafts, and additional fans sucked the hot air out. One such conduit opened just above the new excavation site, and freezing water dripped down Alan’s back, as he peered into its depths of the pit at his feet.
“That’s some hole,” Vince noted, spitting into the opening and watching it disappear into blackness. His yellow hard hat slipped from his head, almost toppling into the hole. After a frantic juggling act to hold on to it, he jammed it back on top of his head.
“One-hundred-ten meters,” Alan quoted from the figures Verkhoen’s mine supervisor had provided. “That makes the new shaft we’ll be boring just over four kilometers deep, officially the deepest manmade tunnel in the world.” He grinned. “We’ll be making history.”
Vince whistled his appreciation. “Yeah, that means a pressure of over ninety-seven-hundred tons per square meter.” He glanced up. “There’s a trillion tons of rock hanging over our heads.”
“Claustrophobic, Vince?” Trace asked, grinning ear to ear at his friend’s discomfort.
“Not if the rock stays put,” Vince replied with a forced laugh.
Getting the seven-meter-long Cerberus down into the mine had not been an easy task. Alan and his crew had worked feverishly for three days stripping the Cerberus down to its chassis and major components and transporting it to the deepest level using the two cages of the main elevator shaft. He had designed the machine with just such a reassembly in mind. Each section was just over two-meters long and weighed almost three tons. It had taken four elevator trips to bring all the components into position. Now, they faced the daunting task of reassembling it.
“Let’s get started,” Alan said.
With a hand signal to the crew chief, the crane operator gently lifted the first section of the eight-ton Cerberus and lowered it into the Stygian depths where, like its Greek namesake, it would rule the underground. Lights flashed on below them, revealing the true depth and size of the freshly excavated pit. Alan held his breath as the crane operator painstakingly eased the nose section lower a centimeter at a time until the machine rested safely on the bottom. Workers in the hole scurried to unhook the cables and send them back up for the next section.
“How do we get down?” Vince asked, eyeing the crane uneasily.
His answer came as the crew manhandled a large metal bucket measuring two-meters high by one-and-a-half meters in diameter into place at the edge of the pit. When the cables came up, they attached them to the bucket.
“That,” Alan said.
“Great,” Vince moaned surveying the swaying bucket, “a water bucket down a dry well.”
“It’s called a kibble,” Alan corrected him.
“It’s a big frickin’ bucket,” Vince insisted.
“You can wait until they install the ladder if you want.”
Vince rolled his eyes at the thought of descending so many rungs. “No thanks, I’ll travel by bucket, but I’ll feel like a KFC drumstick. Would you like fries with that or mashed potatoes and gravy?”
The kibble’s incessant rocking as it descended made Alan’s stomach queasy. He fought down the nausea by concentrating on the Cerberus checklist. By the time they reached the massive machine, he had reassembled it in his mind. Two burly technicians manhandled the drilling section out of the way to make room for the rest of it, sliding it into a ten-meter-deep pocket previously dug in the side of the shaft to accommodate the Cerberus. As the kibble disappeared back up the hole, Trace and Vince quickly removed the bubble wrap protecting the flanges.
When the second section reached them, they moved it into place and slid five-centimeter bolts into the flanges. While Bill and Vince tightened the bolts with pneumatic torque wrenches, he and Trace removed a panel from the laser generator section and carefully checked the fiber optic cables and electrical connections. The job of assembly went quickly and efficiently, much to Alan’s surprise and delight. Six hours later, the Cerberus was ready.
“Verkhoen’s men can attach the gas exhaust lines and run the fiber optic cable to the surface,” Alan said, laying down his wrench and rubbing his aching shoulder. “I’ll buy the beer topside.”
* * * *
Alan smiled into his headset camera for Trace, who had remained topside in the Shack monitoring the machine. In spite of the mine’s cooling system, he was soaking wet with perspiration in the ninety-seven percent humidity. The heat from the racks of work lights on stands positioned around the perimeter of the hole didn’t help matters.
“You shouldn’t have drunk so much beer,” Trace said. “You’re sweating it all out.”
“I only had two beers,” Alan protested. “It’s easy for you to preach from your air-conditioned perch in the Shack.”
He had spent the last four hours double-checking the circuit boards and inspecting the rotating laser array to make sure every connection, every bolt was secure. He made one last check of the heavily insulated, six-inch-diameter poly-composite pipe that would carry the vaporized rock from the Cerberus to a discharge pipe on the surface. Because of the great distance involved, four heaters installed at intervals along its length reheated the gas to prevent it from cooling and clogging the discharge lines. Then, he connected the four-kilometer-long insulated fiber optic cable used to remotely operate the Cerberus and receive data from the onboard computer. Ideally, he could program the Cerberus’ computer and dispense with the tether, but until they had a successful tunneling behind them, he was taking no chances. After a lengthy diagnostic check, he was finally satisfied everything was in good working order.
He turned to Vince, who was tightening a loose bolt on one of the trea
ds. “Time to go.” He spoke into his mic again. “Okay, Trace. Give us a couple of minutes to get clear; then start it up. Bring the power up slowly in increments of ten.”
As he and Vince rode the kibble up out of the hole, the Cerberus’ turbine slowly revved up until its shrill whine became deafening in the enclosed space. The temperature rose quickly as the Cerberus’ three rotating lasers began to burn into the rock, turning part of it into a superheated gas quickly sucked back to the surface through the kilometers of exhaust pipe. The remainder of the rock became heavy, viscous, molten slurry, which Cerberus’ rotating spinnerets, located in the middle of the vehicle, sprayed into a super-hard tunnel casing, quickly cooled by jets of liquid nitrogen, eliminating the need for gunite.
“We’re at twenty percent,” Trace announced over the headset. “Increasing to thirty.”
So far so good, Alan thought.
“Forty percent, Alan.” Trace’s voice brimmed with tension as he called out the numbers.
Alan stepped out of the kibble. The roar intensified until the ground was shaking from the power of the rotating lasers disintegrating rock. “Let’s go for it. One hundred percent,” he yelled into his mic.
“One hundred percent capacity,” Trace repeated.
Below, the rear end of the Cerberus slowly disappeared as it burned its way deeper into the solid rock. The temperature around them rose quickly as hot air billowed up from the pit. The discharge pipe sang a tenor note as hot gas jetted to the surface. Alan wiped his forehead and loosened his collar. Between the heat and humidity, it was like standing in a sauna.
“Okay. Everybody topside to the Shack. We’ve done all we can do here.”
Because of the great depth of the mine, a single elevator shaft would have been ineffective. Two additional elevator shafts branched from the main shaft, descending to the lowest levels. Winding through the twisting, dipping tunnels of 137 Level, it took them nearly half an hour to reach the #2 elevator. The discharge pipe followed their route, singing its song of vaporized rock on its path up the shaft to the surface. They disembarked the #2 elevator and switched to the main elevator on 80 Level. Alan noticed Vince’s lips moving during the ride to the surface.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
Vince, embarrassed, confessed, “I’m saying prayers to Vishnu, Allah, Buddha, Odin, and God. I believe in covering all the bases, just in case somebody’s right.”
Alan whispered a quick, silent prayer of his own for success. He wished his father were there to witness the event, but he had returned to Nevada to manage the company. He would have to be satisfied with monitoring the progress from the comfort of his office via a Skype broadcast.
* * * *
For the next twenty hours, Alan refused to leave the control trailer. He followed the steady progress on his laptop as the Cerberus bored through the dense igneous rock at over twelve-meters-per hour. He held his breath once when they stopped operations to allow two mining engineers wearing heat-resistant suits to test the tunnel casing the Cerberus deposited behind it like an earthworm. The tensile strength proved fifteen percent higher than they had expected, nearly twice that of gunite, the sprayed concrete normally used to reinforce tunnels. The quick-cooling nitrogen jets solidified the molten rock into a strong, crystalline lattice. There would be little chance of a cave-in, even in strata as brittle as the metamorphic sedimentary sand and gravel deposits through which they were digging.
The Cerberus bored a circular tunnel three meters in diameter, easily large enough for men to work comfortably in. Special protuberances beneath the Cerberus scored twin parallel grooves in the molten floor for the later addition of steel tracks for ore carts. It also left a meter-wide, twenty-centimeter-deep trough for water run-off. Alan foresaw a completely automated process. After reaching the vein, automated mining equipment could extract the ore, load it onto carts, and deliver it to the ore hopper, eliminating the need for miners and costly cooling equipment. With a few modifications, the Cerberus could melt the ore and pump the resulting slurry to the surface for collection. Such automated mines could follow the rich ore veins deeper underground or operate under the hostile conditions of the moon, Mars, or the asteroids.
From their starting point, the gold vein Verkhoen sought was twelve-hundred meters away, nearly one hundred hours boring time. After a full day following the Cerberus’ progress, the tension began to wear at Alan’s already exhausted body. His back ached from leaning forward in his seat, and his eyes burned from constantly staring at the monitor screens. His hands and fingers felt like slabs of raw meat after hours of grasping tools assembling the Cerberus.
He rose from the chair he had been sitting in for hours and stretched his long, cramped legs by pacing the narrow confines of the trailer. Glancing out the Shack’s solitary window, he blinked back tears as the glaring lights atop the brickwork elevator tower struck his eyes. The bright floodlights lessened the gloom outside the Shack, but just the knowledge that it was night, a time normally reserved for sleeping, intensified his fatigue. The elevator tower, the entrance to the subterranean city below their feet, loomed like a stone sentinel over the collection of metal-sided and older wooden-plank buildings comprising the vast mine complex. In spite of the hour, men and vehicles streamed across the landscape like worker ants preparing the nest for winter. The twenty-four-hour activity of the mine provided a stark contrast to the endless inactivity within the timeless stasis-bubble confines of Shack.
He glanced around the control room, noting the condition of his companions. Vince sat bleary-eyed nodding at his desk, his body slowly slumping forward, and then waking with a jerk and shaking his head. His hand brushed a cup of cold coffee sitting by his laptop. Alan slid the cup a little farther away to prevent it spilling. Trace was alert. He had tapped into his store of youthful, nervous energy, bouncing the eraser end of a well-chewed Number 2 pencil on the desk to the rhythm of a thumping bass drum, a growling bass guitar, and screaming riffs of a shredding heavy metal guitar leaking from his earphones, while chewing gum and popping bubbles to stay focused.
William Bakerman, the oldest of the three engineers at forty-eight, lay face down at his console snoring, his long salt-and-pepper beard spread out on each side of his face. A small replica of the Cerberus dangled from his left earlobe fashioned, or so one of his recollections from his colorful past went, from a gold nugget he had discovered while panning in the Klondike. In spite of the air conditioner, his shaved head sprouted beads of perspiration.
“We’ll work in shifts,” Alan announced to the nearly comatose crew. “It’s almost midnight. Each of you take a few hours off and get some rest.”
“I’m okay, Alan,” Vince protested. “I’ll stay.” Then he stifled a yawn with his hand.
“You look okay.” Alan’s sarcastic dig drew a forced, big-toothed smile from Vince. “Go get some real sleep. Be back here in six hours. You, too Trace. Trace, wake Bill.” Trace kicked Bill’s chair. He jerked awake and looked up, chagrined at being caught sleeping. “Bill, you go with the others. It might get hectic when we break through. Everyone needs to be their frosty best.”
Alan watched them file out the door, leaving him alone in the trailer. He poured a cup of black coffee, leaned back, and watched the slowly moving graph representing the Cerberus’ progress. “So far, so good,” he said.
His baby was performing as well as he had hoped. He was a proud father. He hoped his father would be as pleased. He glanced up at the video camera near the ceiling in a corner of the room and smiled for Verkhoen. The Van Gotts’ CEO had it installed the video feed to monitor their progress. Verkhoen should be delighted. He was getting his new tunnel free. His promise to purchase three of the machines would save Hoffman Industries, but Verkhoen’s investment so far was nil, other than a small leasing fee.
Alan glanced out the window of the Shack and watched a crew of Verkhoen’s men clad in heavy, heat-resistant suits maneuver the flexible metal discharge pipe to a new position. Their silv
er suits glowed in the floodlights. The superheated gas generated by the Cerberus’ mining, filled with potentially dangerous particles of uranium and heavy metals, became a fine dust of minerals as it cooled near the end of the pipe. Large tanks had been set up near the trailer to collect the dust. The dust was still over 2000 C when it exited the pipe. In spite of the suits’ built-in air conditioners, he imagined the men were rather uncomfortable.
A tough way to make a living, he reflected.
By the time Vince returned five hours later, Alan had resorted to splashing his face with cold water from the small refrigerator and pressing a cloth filled with crushed ice to the back of his neck to stay awake. After five cups of coffee from his oversized Viva Las Vegas mug, he needed to pee so badly his bladder was about to explode. The one comfort the Shack didn’t provide was a bathroom. He didn’t want to walk the hundred meters to the crew’s locker room, especially during the middle of a shift change.
Vince took one look at him and remarked, “You look like shit, boss. Go get some sleep.”
Alan smiled and stifled a yawn. He raised his arm, sniffed his shirt, and grimaced. “I guess I could use a shower.”
Vince pinched his nose. “That’s what that God-awful smell is. I thought we had hit a sour gas pocket.”
“All right, all right. I’ll leave. Keep an eye on the GPS unit. It seems to be holding up, but watch the temperature. If it wavers, shut it down.”
He stood and leaned over the desk to check a reading. Vince gave him a playful shove toward the door. “Go! Trace is on his way here. He and I can handle things for a while. Get some sleep. Take a shower. Eat some real food instead of this take-out crap.” He picked up a Styrofoam container, sniffed the contents, and made a face. “I hate to think what kind of meat this moo goo gai pan is made from. It doesn’t smell like chicken to me.”
As exhausted as he was, Alan was reluctant to leave. The Cerberus was his baby, his brainchild. From concept to creation, the project has dominated his life for four long years. It had cost him most of his friends and his marriage. No, not my marriage, he corrected himself. I did that on my own.
