Deston shrugged off his black mood and smiled. “The trouble is, petsy, it’s too big. Too damned big altogether. And look at our planet Barbizon. Considering the size of the deposits and what and where the planet is, nobody except Galactic Metals could handle the project the way it should be handled.”
“Well, would that be bad? To sell it or lease it to them?”
“Not bad, honey; impossible. All those big outfits are murder in the first degree. Before I could get anywhere with them—if they find out I found it, even—GalMet would own not only Barbizon, but my shirt and pants, too.”
Barbara laughed gleefully. “How well I know that routine! Do you think they don’t do it in oil, too? But WarnOil’s legal eagles know all about skulduggery and monkey-business and fine print—none better. So here’s what let’s do. File by proxy... and maybe you and I had better incorporate ourselves. Just us two; Deston and Deston, say. Develop it by another proxy, making darn sure that they don’t find any uranium at all and nothing else that’s worth more than three or four dollars a ton... ”
“Huh? Why not?”
“Because GalMet’s spy system, darling, is very good indeed.”
“All right, but we’ve still got to make the approach... dammit, I’d give it to GalMet for nothing if it’d give us a half-hour face-to-face with Upton Maynard, to show him what you and I together can do.”
“Not free. Ever. Just a bargain that he can’t possibly resist. You figure out what that would be and I’ll arrange the face-to-face with His High Mightiness Maynard.”
“Oh? Could be, at that, since you’re a Big Time Operator yourself. You could go through the massed underlings like a snow-plow, hurling ’em kicking, far and wide.”
“Oh, no, I won’t go through channels at all with a thing as big as this is. Shock treatment—I’ll hit ’em high and hard.”
“Fine, gal—fine! So I’ll write to Herc; tell him he can start getting organized. He’ll be tickled to death—he doesn’t like flying a desk any better than I do.”
“Write? Call him up, right now.”
“I’ll do that, at that. I’m not used yet to not caring whether a call is across the street or across half of space.”
“And I want to talk to Bun, anyway.”
The call was put through and Barbara talked to Bernice for some fifteen minutes. Then Deston took over, finding that Jones was anything but in love with his desk job. When Deston concluded, “... family quarters aboard. Full authority and full responsibility of station. Full captain’s pay and rank plus a nice bonus in stock,” Captain Theodore Jones was fairly drooling.
CHAPTER IV
ORGANIZATION OF THE LITTLE GEM
In comparison with silicon or aluminum, which together make up almost thirty six percent of the Earth’s crust, copper is a very scarce metal indeed, amounting to only a very small fraction of one percent. Yet it is one of the oldest-worked and most widely useful of all metals, having been in continuous demand for well over six thousand Tellurian years.
Yet of all the skills of man, that of mining cuprous ores had perhaps advanced the least. There had been some progress, of course. Miners of old could not go down very deep or go in very far; there was too much water and not enough air. The steam engine helped; it removed water and supplied air. Electricity helped still more. Tools also had improved; instead of wooden sticks and animal-fat candles there was a complex gadgetry of air drills and electric saws and explosives, and there was plenty of light.
Basically, however, since automation could not be economically applied to tiny, twisting, erratic veins of ore, the situation remained unchanged. Men still crawled and wriggled to where the copper was. Brawny men, by sheer power of muscle, still jackassed the heavy stuff out to where the automatics could get hold of it.
And men still died, in various horrible fashions and in callously recorded numbers, in the mines that were trying to satisfy the insatiable demand for the red metal that is one of the prime bases upon which the technology of all civilization rests.
And the United Copper Miners, under the leadership of its president, Burley Hoadman, refused to tolerate any advancement whatever in automation. Also, UCM was approaching, and rapidly, its goal—the complete unionization of every copper mine of the Western Hemisphere of Earth.
A few months before the events recorded in the preceding chapter, then, in the Little Gem, a comparatively small copper mine in Colorado, a mile and a half down and some six miles in, Top Miner Grant Purvis half-lay-half-crouched behind a two-hundred-fifty-pound Sullivan Slugger air-drill operating under one hundred seventy five pounds per square inch of compressed air. He was a big man, and immensely strong. He was six feet two inches tall; most of his two hundred thirty five pounds was hard meat, gristle, and bone. His leather-padded right knee was jammed against the wall of his tiny work-space; the hobnail-studded sole of his left boot was jammed even more solidly into a foot-hole cut into the hard rock of the floor. With his right shoulder and both huge hands he was holding the Sullivan to its work—the work of driving an inch-and-a-quarter steel into the face. And the monstrous, bellowing, thundering, shrieking Slugger, even though mounted upon a short and very heavy bar, sent visible tremors through the big man’s whole body, clear down to his solidly-anchored feet.
In his shockingly cramped quarters Purvis changed steel; shifted the position of his Sullivan’s mounting bar; cut new foot-holes; kept on at his man-killing task until the set of powder-holes was in. Then he dismounted the heavy drill and, wriggling backwards, lugged it and its appurtenances out into the main stope to make room for the powderman.
As he straightened up, half paralyzed by the position and the strain of his recent labors, another big man lunged roughly against him.
“Wot tha hell—sock me, willya?” the man roared, and swung his steel-backed timberman’s glove against Purvis’ mouth and jaw.
Purvis went down.
“Watcha tryin’ ta pull off, Frank?” the shift-boss yelled, rushing up and jerking his thumb toward the rise. “You know better’n that—fightin’ underground. You’re fired—go on top an’ get yer time.”
“Wha’d’ya mean, fired?” Frank growled. “He started it, the crumb. He slugged me first.”
“You’re a goddam liar,” the powderman spoke up, setting his soft-leather bag of low explosive carefully down against the foot of the hanging wall. “I seen it. Purve didn’t do nothin’. Not a goddam thing. Besides, he wasn’t in no shape to. He didn’t lift a finger. You socked him fer nothin’.”
“Oh, yeah?” Frank sneered. “Stone blind all of a sudden, I guess? I leave it to tha rest of ’em—” waving a massive arm at the two muckers and the electrician, now standing idly by, “—if he didn’t sock me first. They all seen it.”
All three nodded, and the electrician said, positively, “Sure Purve socked him first. We all seen ’im do it.”
Purvis struggled to his feet. He shook off a glove, wiped his bleeding mouth, and stared for a moment at the blood-smeared back of his hand. Then, and still without a word, he bent over and picked up a three-foot length of inch-and-a-quarter steel.
“Hold it, Purve—hold it!” The shift-boss put both hands against the big man’s chest and pushed, and the atrocious weapon dropped with a clang to the hard-rock floor. “Thass better. They’s somethin’ damn screwy here. It just don’t jibe.”
He crossed over to his telephone and dialed. “Say boss, what do I do when I fire a nape fer startin’ a fight underground an’ he won’t go out on top? An’