“Not set right…”
“Handle’s too high…”
“He has to stoop to it…”
“He’s going to hit a hot one…”
“Never mind, he’ll get on all right,” countered Tit sharply, and Levin felt a burst of fellow feeling with the lithe Pitbot, a feeling which somewhat unsettled him, considering the machine was but a Class II.
With each step forward, the tunnel grew smaller and dimmer, and Levin followed Tit, trying to do the best he could. They moved a hundred paces. Tit kept moving on, without stopping, not showing the slightest weariness, but Levin was already beginning to be afraid he would not be able to keep it up: he was so tired.
He felt as he swung his axe that he was at the very end of his strength, and was making up his mind to ask Tit to stop. But at that very moment Tit stopped of his own accord, and bending at the midsection, rubbed his axe, and began whetting it on the whetstone embedded in his forearm. Levin straightened himself, and drawing a deep breath looked round. Behind him came another Pitbot, who stopped at once without waiting to get to Levin, and began whetting his own axe. Tit sharpened his tool and Levin’s, and they went on. The next time it was just the same. Tit moved on with sweep after sweep of his axe, not stopping nor showing signs of weariness. Levin followed him, trying not to get left behind, and he found it harder and harder: the moment came when he felt he had no strength left, but at that very moment Tit stopped and whetted the axes.
He marveled at the sensitivity of this Class II, at the evolutionary design of it; Tit’s circuits were designed to adjust to the needs of the other worker robots in his line, to maintain each other as they worked together in the Scrubbier-lit gloom. Since today Levin worked among them, Tit now treated him automatically as a member of the cadre, making allowances for his slow pace and (compared to the robots) limited strength.
So they completed the first tunnel. And this first branch seemed particularly hard work to Levin; when the tunnel ended abruptly, the mechanical crew reversed its course, retracing their steps to the declension point, and headed down a second tunnel to continue their work. What delighted Levin particularly was that he now knew he would be able to hold out.
He thought of nothing, wished for nothing, but not to be left behind by the robots, and to do his work as well as possible. He heard nothing but the clang of metal on rock and the constant dull buzz emitted by Old Georgy. He saw before him Tit’s upright figure swinging away, the thick chunks of alloy falling free with each swing.
How odd, thought Levin, to think that in centuries past this land was intact, unscarred by tunnels and mines, covered instead by fields of gently swaying wheat. Before groznium was discovered, in the ancient days of the Tsar, before there were robots or even the idea of robots, all this was cropland, and where now was heard the clang of the axe and the whir of the Extractor was heard the whisper of the scythe, the tromp of peasant boots on grass, the endless mowing of rows. And all that work, that grueling and backbreaking labor, performed not by tireless machines, but by human beings. This work that he did today as a sort of lark, to rid his irritable soul of excess energy, had in those days been the daily toil of the Russian people in their thousands and millions.
Levin found it hard to imagine… and yet he could not help but consider what price his people had paid for the glorious transformation of the Age of Groznium. The robots have assumed the burden of our labors, but have taken from us, too, the benefits of that labor: the clarifying moral force of discipline, the redemptive pain of long exertion.
Such were the thoughts working through Konstantin Dmitrich’s mind, as the man himself worked through the tunnels of his mine. Long tunnels and short tunnels, with easy walls and with poor walls. As the hours ticked by in the inky darkness, Levin lost all sense of time and could not have told whether it was late or early now. A change began to come over his work, which gave him immense satisfaction. In the midst of his toil there were moments during which he forgot what he was doing, and it all came easy to him, and at those same moments his wall was almost as smooth and well-plucked as the robots’.
Even as they descended further and further below the surface of the earth, and the heat grew and grew until it felt he was standing in a very oven, the mining did not seem such hard work to him. The perspiration with which he was drenched cooled him, while the fulvous lucency of the Glowing Scrubbier seemed to give a vigor and dogged energy to his labor; more and more often now came those moments of unconsciousness, when it was possible not to think of what one was doing. The pickaxe dug of itself. These were happy moments. Still more delightful were the moments when they reached a cool underground stream, and old Tit rinsed his blade in the murky water, ladled out a little in a tin dipper, and offered Levin a drink.
“Humans experience thirst, correct?” he said. “For water?”
And truly Levin had never drunk any liquor so good as this cold, black water with purplish, glowing pinpricks of groznium floating in it, and a taste of rust from the tin dipper. And immediately after this came the delicious, slow saunter, with his hand on the axe, during which he could wipe away the streaming sweat, breathe deeply from his oxygen canister, and look about at the long string of automated miners tromping along in their dark underground universe.
The longer Levin mined and the deeper below the surface his labor took him, the oftener he felt the moments of unconsciousness in which it seemed not his hands that swung the axe, but the axe swinging of itself, a body full of life and consciousness of its own; and as though by magic, without thinking of it, the work turned out regular and well-finished of itself. These were the most blissful moments. He suspected that some portion of this blissful sensation was the result of oxygen deprivation, and pulled deeply on his canister.
Emerging from the tunnel at last, Levin blinked back at the startling brightness of daylight. He looked at the crater floor and hardly recognized the place, everything was so changed. While he was immersed in the mine, the surface-machines had transformed the crater floor into a bustling assembly line, where buckets full of mined ore were first weighed by efficient little Class I scales, then bundled by the busy boxing end-effectors of II/Packagers/97s, then run up on hundred-yard-long conveyer belts from the tunnel entrance to the dumbwaiters. The crater floor was like a busy and happy factory floor, with surface machines and Pitbots buzzing and beeping gaily to one another and navigating their way around Surceased Extractors and busy Packagers, while the conveyer track carried the freshly plucked groznium off to the smeltworks.
The work done was exceptionally much for forty-two machines. But Levin felt a longing to get as much mining done that day as possible, and he was vexed with the sun sinking so quickly in the sky. He felt no weariness; all he wanted was to pick a fresh tunnel, grab his axe once more, and get as much done as possible.
But the day’s work was to come to a sudden end, for from deep within the pit came a series of concussive booms. Likely a maltuned Pitbot had struck a “hot one,” a tiny pocket of heavily concentrated groznium mixed with nitrates, and the impact had caused an explosion. In the next instant robots came pouring out, red lights flashing on their head units, klaxons blaring, scuttling out of danger as quickly as possible in compliance with the Iron Law of self-preservation.
Levin joined the hastening crowd, sprinting full bore for the crater-side; he clambered fist over foot up the side of the crater wall, caught amidst a crush of robots ascending beside him on sturdy metal feet. Halfway up the face of the crater Levin risked a glance behind him and saw a great cloud of dust billowing out from within the tunnels; he saw the opposite wall of the crater fracture and avalanche, as the earth convulsed with the power of the mine explosion; he saw Old Georgy, come automatically out of Surcease but too slow on his fat treads to escape the massive tumble of rock, buried in boulders and rubble.