Lemuria by Burt Clinchandhill (most popular novels of all time .txt) 📗

only about a dozen remained, half of them working the drill, and the other half either cooking, guarding, or staffing. Morozov, leaning against an empty drum, found no happiness in anything but the weather today. He sighed at the fact he’d spent his last Kola-winter without real heating.

“Mitya,” a drill-worker dressed in a bright yellow oilskin suit shouted out. “Why don’t you come here and get your hands dirty for the first and last time?” His coworkers laughed.

Morozov raised his hands in front of his face. “These?” he yelled back over the sound of metal from the drill clanking as it was pulled up. “These divine instruments? No way, man, that’s your job. That’s why you get paid the big bucks.” He gave a tiny smile as he took out a pack of cigarettes and an old, dented zippo. Before lighting the cigarette—for a long moment—he gazed at the lighter he bought with his first salary.

In 1965, Leonid Brezhnev, President of the Soviet Union, gave the order to start the deepest drill on Earth. Officially, the goal of the aimed forty-nine-thousand-foot-deep drill was to penetrate as far as possible through the Baltic Shield continental crust and perform extensive geophysical examinations. Unofficially, the reason for the drill was the fact that President Lyndon B. Johnson announced that the Lone Star Producing Company—from Washita County, Oklahoma—would start digging a thirty-thousand-foot-deep exploratory hole. Next to the arms race and the space race, the cold war rivalry now expanded to a race for the deepest drill into the Earth.

Morozov, born and raised in Murmansk, was halfway into his fifties. As a young man with scarce jobs in his hometown, he took a job guarding the new drill site some hundred miles from his home. He’d spent over half his life at the remote North Pole location, only two miles south of the Norwegian border. With only men to spend his days and nights with, he never got around to starting a family, something he regretted every now and then.

Now, almost thirty years later, his work was done. The deepest hole in the world, over forty thousand feet deep, had become a fact. They’d defeated the United States, who gave up decades ago. After forty thousand feet, the government decided they also had to give up. The greater porosity, unexpected reduction in density, and the unexpectedly high temperatures of over 365 degrees Fahrenheit at that depth made drilling any deeper impossible.

Today, they would officially terminate the drill, and at the end of the day, when they would close down the hole, Morozov would be out of work. Feeling somewhat melancholic as he smoked his Belomorkanal cardboard-tubed cigarette, he watched the drill workers retract the enormous length of drilling pipe he’d observed disappearing into the earth over the years. Many years ago, they’d offered him a job as a drilling worker. Even though it paid almost ten thousand rubles extra per month, he chose his security job over the dirty work in the mud every day. He’d never needed the money, since there were no ways to spend it at the dig. With no savings to speak of, he now regretted that. The government had arranged a small apartment for him in Murmansk, and with the small pension they provided, he could probably eat meat every day, though he wondered if it would be enough to provide his daily dose of Wodka.

Come to think of it, I never had to pay for rent or regular meals in all of my adult life. The state had always provided him with room and board.

Morozov looked at his watch as the sun went down over the tundra and another length of pipe was freed from the deep. This way, he figured, it would take another three to four hours before the last pipe would be retracted. Finally, the drill would see daylight again, and the closing of the hole would start. Everything should be finished before midnight, and he figured he could get a good night’s sleep before leaving the site in the morning.

His crewmate took off his working gloves and called out, waving at Morozov. “Are you coming for dinner?”

Morozov waved back at the man. “Thanks, but I have some dried fish left from lunch.” He took out a paper bag from his jacket and waved it in the air. “I’ll pick up something later.”

As the handful of workers left the building for the cantina, he realized this would probably be his last time alone in the drill building. Slowly, he walked up to the place where the remaining drill pipe disappeared into the earth beneath the thirty-foot steel construction and cranes. The hydraulics hissed, and steam vented from the valves on the side of the rig. A slight tremble vibrated from it, through the floor, and into Morozov’s body. He’d felt this tremble many times before when drilling, but this time the drill stood still.

He took a step forward to look inside the hole surrounding the drill pipe. The tremors seemed to generate from somewhere down there. He took a flashlight from his belt and shone it down the pit. The drill hole itself wasn’t much bigger than nine inches, and his flashlight only penetrated the first few feet. The trembling beneath his feet seemed to increase, and the drill pipe itself began to shake.

It’s like something is pushing it from below, he thought.

He stretched his arm to touch the pipe, but before his hand could reach it, the tube started shaking wildly and slammed against his hand for a second. It felt warm. Under the violent shaking, the steel pipe now started to bend, accompanied by the sound of buckling steel. Morozov quickly stepped backward, keeping his eye on the construction as the sound and the trembling increased. The high-pressure valves attached to the rig gave in under the growing pressure, and high-pressure hoses—under loud hissing sounds—broke off and swung wildly through the room while venting steam. Through his steam-obstructed view, he noticed the drill pipe