Tunnels 02, Deeper

it used to great effect, scuttling away at a rate of knots as several of the children followed in hot pursuit. I could hear the others giggling away in their suits; they thought it was hilarious.

    Later that day I saw a couple of the more senior members of the encampment preparing to leave. They were touching the heads of their dust suits together, quite possibly conversing with each other, though I have never heard their language. For all I know, it might be English.

    I followed them and they didn't seem to mind -- they never do. We climbed out of the encampment, somebody rolling the boulder back behind us to block the entrance after we exited. The fact that their encampments are excavated into the floor of the Great Plain and the side passages leading off it, or sometimes even cut into its roof, renders them almost invisible to the casual observer. I tagged along behind the two Coprolites for several hours until we left the Great Plain, taking a passage that dipped steeply down. As it leveled out, I found we were in some type of port area.

    It was substantial, with large-gauge railway tracks running alongside a basin of water. (I believe that the Coprolites were responsible for the construction of the track for the Miners' Train and for digging the canal system, both tremendous undertakings.) At the quayside, three canal boats were docked, and I was delighted when the Coprolites boarded the nearest one. It was fully laden with recently mined coal. The vessel was powered by a steam engine -- I watched as they shoveled coal into a furnace and lit it with a tinderbox.

    When sufficient pressure had built up, we set off, traveling out of the basin and along mile after mile of enclosed waterways. We stopped several times to operate the locks as we came to them -- here I was able to step off the boat and onto the bank and watch as they hand-cranked the lock gates.

    As we went, I thought much on how these people and the Colonists rely on each other, a sort of slipshod symbiosis, but I would say that the fruit and light orbs are little recompense for the vast tonnage of coal and iron ore that the Colony receives in return. These people are master miners, laboring with their heavy, steam-driven digging equipment (see Appendix 2 for my drawings).

    We went past some of the areas of intense heat I've described before, where lava must flow close behind the rocks. I dread to think what temperature it was outside my dust suit. We eventually emerged back onto the Great Plain, making good speed now that the furnace was roaring, and I was beginning to feel rather exhausted (these suits are intolerably heavy after prolonged use) when we saw a group of what I can only assume were Colonists on the canal side.

    They categorically weren't Styx, and I believe we may have startled them. There were three, a motley crew from what I could tell, looking a bit lost and nervous. Couldn't see very much, since the combination of my glasses and the light orbs around the eyepieces of the suit produces such a glare, it impairs my vision somewhat.

    They didn't look like full-grown Colonists, so I haven't the foggiest what they were doing so far away from the train. They gawped at us, though the two Coprolites accompanying me typically took no notice whatsoever. I tried to wave at the trio, but they didn't acknowledge me. Perhaps they, too, had been Banished from the Colony, just as I would have been if I hadn't actually wanted to go into the Interior.

    Dr. Burrows reread the last paragraph, then his eyes glazed over as he began to dream again. He imagined his battered journal, open at this very page, in a glass case in the British Library or perhaps even the Smithsonian.
    "History," he said to himself. "You are making history ."

    * * * * *

    Finally he'd put on his suit and, moving the trash-can-lid door aside, climbed down the steps carved into the wall. At the bottom, as he stood on the well-raked dirt floor, he peered around, his breathing loud in his ears.
    His hunch that change was in the air had been right.
    The settlement was uncharacteristically dark.
    And completely deserted.
    In the center of the communal area, a single, flickering light burned. Dr. Burrows began walking toward it, keeping the wall to his side and glancing up at the roof spaces above him. The twin beams from his suit revealed that all the hatches to the other living spaces were open. The Coprolites never left them like that.
    The encampment had been evacuated while