They put every available Scot onto an assembly line converting bullets and they had cases and cases of them now.

A hundred assault rifles and five hundred magazines had been cleaned to perfection. They fired without a stutter or dud.

No good against a tank or a thick, lead-glass compound dome, but those assault rifles would be deadly to individual Psychos. With breathe-gas in their blood streams they would literally explode.

He spotted the river that ran out of the gorge. He eased down, following it, the plane's lights flashing on the uneven ice and snow.

They'd been so happy about the assault rifles that they had gone to work on the bazookas. They had found some nuclear artillery shells and had converted their noses over to the bazooka noses, and now they had armor-piercing, nuclear bazookas. There were still a number of those left to make.

Yes, it had been too smooth, too good to be true.

There were no lights on the mine pad ahead.

There was no one visible there at all.

He set the plane down on the pad. The passengers boiled out of it. Their lights darted this way and that.

One of them who had run to the chasm edge called back, his voice thin in the cold darkness: "Jonnie! The cliff face has gone!”

A light shone down from the present edge and confirmed it. The fissure, thirty feet back from the old edge, had simply opened in the earthquake and fallen into the gorge.

The cliff face was no longer overhanging but sloped up toward them.

In the light, the wide edge of the broken-off quartz lode was visible. It was pure white. No gold in the remaining vein. The pocket of gold was gone!

But Jonnie was thinking right now of the crew. They had not reached the fissure, for the avalanche had exposed no tunnel.

They were somehow trapped under them, if they were still alive.

Jonnie raced back to the shaft edge. It yawned blackly, a large circle of emptiness, silent. The shaft was about a hundred feet deep.

He looked around, flashing his light. “The hoist! Where is the hoist?”

The entire apparatus used to take out ore and lower and raise men was missing.

Lights played down the mountain. It was not on the slope.

Jonnie approached the hole more closely. Then he saw the slide marks of the cross timbers that had supported the hoist cage over the hole.

The hoist was down there in the shaft.

“Be very quiet, everyone,” said Jonnie. Then he bent over and cupped his hands and shouted down, “Down there! Is any one alive?” They listened.

“I thought I heard something,” said the parson, who had come along.

Jonnie tried again. They listened. They could not be sure. Jonnie turned on his belt radio and spoke into it. No answer. He saw Angus in the rescue team. “Angus! Drop an intercom on a cable down into that hole.”

While Angus and two others were doing that, Jonnie pulled a picto-recorder out of the rescue gear. He found more cable and extended its leads.

Angus had rigged and lowered the intercom. Jonnie signaled to the parson. The place was broadly lit now with lamps the relief crew had put on poles. The parson's hand was shaking as he held the intercom mike.

“Hello the mine!” said the parson.

The intercom mike down there should pick up voices if there was any reply. There wasn't.

“Keep trying,” said Jonnie. He paid out the line of the picto-recorder and lowered it into the hole. Robert the Fox stepped forward from the relief group and took charge of the portable screen.

At first there was just the shaft wall sliding by as the picto-recorder went down. Then a piece of timber, then a tangle of cable. Then the hoist!

Jonnie rotated the cable and shifted the remote control to wide-angle.

The hoist was empty.

A sigh of relief joined the night wind as the tense group saw that no one had been killed in the hoist.

Jonnie worked the remote to look over the hoist. It was hard to tell, but it did not appear there was anybody crushed under the fallen hoist.

The picto-recorder swung idly on its cable ninety feet below them. Eyes strained at the viewscreen, begging it for data.

“No drift hole!” said Jonnie. “The drift hole isn't visible! When the hoist fell it caved in the entrance to the drift down there!”

Pressing a flying platform into service, they flew a three-man crew down to the bottom of the drift. Robert the Fox wouldn't let Jonnie go down on it.

One of the men dropped down from the platform and fixed lifting hooks into the cage cable and they pulled it back up to the top of the hole.

They rigged a crane, pulleys, and a winch, and thirty-three minutes later– clocked by the historian who also had sneaked aboard the relief plane– they had the hoist out of the shaft and sitting off to the side.

Jonnie put the picto-recorder back down and it confirmed his guess. The shaft end of the level drift down there was blocked, knocked shut when the hoist fell.

They rigged buckets to crane cable and very shortly they had four men down at the bottom. Jonnie ignored Robert and went this time.

They tore at the rocks with their hands, filling up buckets that shot aloft to be replaced by empty ones. More tools and welcome sledges came down.

Two hours went by. They changed three of the men twice. Jonnie stayed down there.

They worked in a blur of speed. The rattle of rocks and thud of sledges freeing them resounded in the dusty hole bottom. The rockfall was thicker than they had hoped.

Two feet into the drift. Three feet. Four feet. Five feet. Maybe the whole drift had collapsed!

They changed crews. Jonnie stayed down there.

Three hours and sixteen minutes after their arrival at the bottom, Jonnie heard a distant whisper of sound. He held up his hand for silence. "In the mine!” he shouted.

Very faintly it came back: “...air hole...” “Repeat!” shouted Jonnie. It came back, “...make...”

Jonnie grabbed a long mine drill. He looked for the thinnest place he could imagine in the white rock wall before him, socked the rock drill point into it, and signaled the man on the drill motor. “Let her spin!”

They bucked the drill into it with the pressure handles. The others would hear it in there and get out of the way.

With a high scream the drill went through.

They dragged it out.

“Air hose!” yelled Jonnie. And they fed the hose through the drill hole and turned the air compressor on. Air from the drift squealed back past the sides of the hose and into the rescue crew's faces.

Twenty-one minutes later they had the top of the rockfall cleared and could drag men out.

They had to drop the gap farther to get the last one. It was Dunneldeen and he had a broken ankle and broken ribs.

Seventeen men, only one with a serious injury.

They passed them to the top silently in the hoist buckets.

A dust– and sweat-covered Jonnie was the last one up. The parson threw a blanket around him. The salvaged crew were bundled up, sitting in the snow, most of them drinking something hot that one of the old women had sent in a huge jug. The parson had finished setting the ankle of Dunneldeen and, helped by Robert the Fox, was taping up the ribs.

Finally Thor said, “We lost the lode.” Nobody said anything.