Free The Healer by Michael Blumlein Page B

four drifts fanning out in four directions, and he took a few steps into each one, looking for something that might jar his memory. To this point he'd been too embarrassed to call out, for it would have been an admission that he was lost; but now, his anxiety rising, embarrassment took a back seat to the desire to be found. In a modest voice he said Slivey's name, waited, repeated it a little louder, then cupped his hands and shouted. The sound died almost as soon as it left his mouth. It was as if the mine had opened up its own mouth and swallowed it.
    In one of the passages the air seemed just a bit fresher than the others, which gave him hope that it might lead him to other men. But after a hundred yards there was a fork, and he had to choose again, and this time both drifts seemed the same. Or almost the same—on close inspection one was slightly narrower and lower-backed than the other, and, reasoningthat a smaller drift was less likely to be a major branch, he took the wider one. But soon this one narrowed, too, and when he had to stoop his head to keep from banging it, he knew that he'd gone wrong. At this point it occurred to him that maybe he should stop moving altogether and wait for them to come to him, that wandering around willy-nilly might make it harder to be found. For surely they were looking for him—any second he expected to hear voices and see a light.
    But moving kept him warm, and not moving felt too much like giving up. And in the back of his mind he worried that he'd strayed far away from everybody, into some burnt-out, unused abandoned section of the mine.
    So for a second time he turned around and headed back the way he'd come, or at least the way he thought he'd come, following the drift as it took a leftward turn. Half a minute later, he heard a noise ahead, and, heart racing, he rushed forward. But when he rounded the bend, his hopes were dashed. At the center of a cloud of billowing yellow dust lay a pile of newly fallen rock. The sound had come not from any rescuer, but from the mine itself. It was a cruel disappointment. But not as cruel as what came next.
    As he stared and cursed his luck, the dust began to flicker, the sort of flicker that a moth made with a candle as it danced back and forth around the flame. But he saw no moth in the light of his headlamp, and in fact could think of no good reason why one would live three thousand feet beneath the ground. For a second the flickering stopped, and he put it out of his mind, for there were other, more pressing things to be concerned with. Then suddenly, his light went out.
    To his shame he panicked. And by some miracle tamed the panic. In the darkness he felt for his lamp and then its cord, making sure that they were still connected. He checked the battery connection too, then unclipped the battery from his belt and, reasoning that a heart, which was a sort of battery too, could sometimes, when stalled, be jump-started with a thump to the chest, banged it on the wall. It made a dullthudding sound not so very different from what a chest would make but, sadly, did not spring to life. He went through the motions of doing everything again, to no avail. The battery and lamp were dead.
    With his hand against the rib as a guide he inched forward, until he banged his head on a nasty overhang of rock and nearly knocked himself out. After that, he decided to stay put: if he couldn't find his way in the light, what possible chance was there to find it in the pitch black? He had his brass, which at least was something. When the men brassed out and his was found unaccounted for, they would send a party out in search of him. And Slivey, of course, would already be looking. Unless something had happened to him, too. Which is how his mind had started to work, imagining things that in other circumstances he would never have thought of. He couldn't understand how they'd ever gotten separated to begin with. The whole thing beggared reason.
    The cold was