Then began one of the hardest weeks of grinding labor that Sandy had ever put in. All day long he climbed over rocks and fought briary thickets while moving his rod to spots where it could be seen from the various transit positions. His experience on Boy Scout geology field trips kept him from getting lost and enabled him to chip a number of rock formations for analysis. But it was only after he returned to camp at night and propped his tired eyes open with his fingers while watching Don, Ralph and Stack plot lines on a topographical map of the region, that he could form any idea of what was being done.
Hall joined them on the third evening and watched without comment as the work went on. He looked gray and tired.
“You seem bushed, John,” said Donovan after they had added the day’s data to the map. “Any trouble?”
“Plenty, Don. At the last minute the bank refused a loan. It said that two wells didn’t make a profitable field, out here in the middle of nowhere. I had to trade a two-thirds interest in the other lease to Midray before I got my money.”
“That’s the way the oil squirts,” Ralph said philosophically. “So we’re in partnership with a big company.”
“I’m solvent, anyway.” Hall shrugged. “But we won’t make our fortunes unless that first lease turns out to have the largest field in San Juan County. Of course, if this one pays off, too…” His voice trailed away.
“I don’t know about that, John.” Donovan bit his thin lips. “We’re finding some underground anomalies, but, confound it, I don’t feel right about the situation. For one thing, the plants that usually grow in the neighborhood of a deposit just aren’t in evidence. We’ve found an anticline, all right, but I have a hunch there’s mighty little oil in it.”
“Excuse me,” Sandy interrupted from his seat at the end of the map table, “but if you find a dome, or anticline, doesn’t it just have to hold oil?”
“Not at all,” the geologist answered with a wave of his pipe. “The oil might have escaped before the bulge was formed by movements of the earth’s crust. Or perhaps the top of the anticline had a crack, or fault, through which the oil seeped to the surface ages ago.”
“You are going to run a seismic survey, aren’t you?” Hall asked.
“Yes, we’ll start tomorrow if the weather holds out. The radio says thunderstorms are brewing, though.”
“Do the best you can.” Hall rose and stretched. “I’m going to turn in now. I feel lousy.”
* * * *
Sandy didn’t sleep well, although he, too, was so tired that his bones ached. He was up at sunrise—except that there was no sunrise. The sky looked like a bowl of brass and the heat was the worst he had met with since his arrival in the Southwest.
After a hurried breakfast they drove the portable drill rig, instrument truck and shooting truck to the anticline which lay, circled by tall yellow buttes, about three miles from the camp site.
Once there, Ralph used a small diamond drill to make a hole through surface dirt and rubble. The rest of the crew dug a line of shallow pits with their spades. These were evenly spaced from “ground zero” near the hole Ralph had drilled to a distance from it of about 2,000 feet. While two men tamped a dynamite charge into the “shot hole,” other crew members buried small electronic detectors called geophones in the pits, and connected them, with long insulated wires, to the seismograph in the instrument truck.
Just as the job was finished, a roaring squall sent everyone dashing for cover.
“We’re going to set off a man-made earthquake in a moment, Sandy,” Donovan said when the dripping boy climbed into the instrument truck. “Watch carefully. When I give the word, Ralph will explode the dynamite. The shock will send vibrations down to the rock layers beneath us. Those vibrations will bounce back to the line of geophones and be relayed to the seismograph here. Since shock waves travel through the ground at different speeds and on different paths, depending on the strata that they strike, they will trace different kinds of lines on this strip of sensitized paper. I can interpret those lines and get a pretty good picture of what the situation is down below.”
“You mean you can make an earthquake with dynamite?” Sandy cried.
“A mighty little one. But it will be big enough for our purposes. This seismograph measures changes of one millionth of an inch in the position of the earth’s surface.” He started the wide tape rolling, and picked up a field telephone that connected the three trucks.
“All ready, Ralph?” he asked. “Fine! I’ll give you a ten-second countdown. Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Shoot!”
There was a subdued roar deep underground. A geyser of earth and splintered rock spouted from the shot hole. The seismograph pens, which had been tracing steady parallel lines on the paper, began tracing jagged lines instead.
“All right, Ralph,” Donovan spoke into the phone. “If the rain lets up, have the boys string another line of geophones and we’ll cross-check.”
They got in one more shot before the increasing thunderstorm made further work impossible. Then Ralph and Hall sprinted over from the shooting truck and spent the next hour listening while Donovan explained the squiggles on the graph.
“So you’re not too happy about the situation, Don?” the producer asked at last.
“I hate to say so, John,” the geologist answered, “but things don’t look too good. We’ve found a dome, all right, but I’m afraid it has a crack in its top. Look at this.” He put away his magnifying glass, lighted up, and pointed his pipe stem at a sharp break in the inked lines. “I can’t take the responsibility for telling you to spend a hundred thousand dollars or so drilling five thousand feet into a cockeyed formation like that.”
“Once a poor boy, always a poor boy, I guess.” Hall shrugged.
“Oh, I haven’t given up yet,” said Donovan grimly. “The aerial survey shows another possible anomaly about, three miles west of here. I’ll do some work on that before we call it quits.”
“Take your time,” said his employer.
“Hey!” Ralph, who had been standing at the trailer window, staring glumly into the sheets of rain that swept toward them across the San Juan gorge, spoke up sharply. “Take a look at that river, will you?”
They joined him at the window and found that the stream had doubled in size since the rain had started. Now it was a raging yellow torrent that filled the gorge from border to border.
“It beats me,” said Hall, “how it can rain cats and dogs in this country one day and flood everything, but be dry as dust the next. When the government finishes building its series of dams around here and all this water is impounded for irrigation, you’ll see the desert blossom like the rose, I’ll bet.”
“The rain all runs off and does no good now, that’s a sure thing,” Donovan agreed.
“Look,” Ralph interrupted. “There’s a boat or barge or something coming down the river.”
“You’re crazy,” said Donovan. “Nothing could live in that—Say!” He rubbed mist off the window and peered out into the downpour. “Something is coming down. You’re right!” They stood shoulder to shoulder and stared in horror. Around a bend in the stream a heavily laden homemade barge had plunged into view. A vivid flash of lightning showed one man standing upright in the stern. Blond hair flying, he was struggling to steer the bucking craft with a long sweep.
“That’s