Charon's Landing Read Online Free PDF Page A

the air conditioning. He fondly recalled the chilled air he’d felt in Alaska only four days ago.
    “I know what you’re all thinking, ‘Great, a guest lecturer even more boring than Professor Snyder.’ ”
    A co-ed’s voice called out seductively, “That’s not what I was thinking, handsome.”
    A chorus of female whoops and cheers followed almost immediately. Mercer smiled sheepishly and adjusted his tie to cover his embarrassment.
    As the cheering was dying down, Mercer leaned into the microphone and looked toward where the first voice had come. “You make me wish schools had never done away with spanking unruly students.”
    Another few moments of cheering and laughter delayed Mercer’s lecture.
    “How many of you are here because the university requires a year of science before they give you a poli-sci degree? And be honest.” A sea of hands were raised all across the hall. “And how many of you are genuinely interested in learning geology?” A few hands shyly went up before being lowered quickly.
    “To those few who planned on learning today, I apologize, because I’m not a teacher. In fact, I don’t understand half of the things Professor Snyder will teach you this year. As she said in my introduction, I did get my Ph.D. at the same time as she did, but I had already graduated from the Colorado School of Mines. Her goal was to teach geology, while I wanted to apply it.”
    He had a relaxed, unrehearsed speaking style that caught his audience’s interest as he spun tales of mining disasters and of wondrous treasures hacked from the earth. This was not the stuff of science as they’d expected but adventure stories told with a natural eye for the more fabulous elements of the tales. He talked about the fabled early days of the Kimberley diamond rush in South Africa where desperate paupers became overnight millionaires and of the Molly Maguires’ strike in the Pennsylvania coal fields that led to the establishment of the forty-hour workweek. He described what it was like to actually work miles below the earth in dust-choked shafts and dark tunnels where the constant strain of knowing gravity was pressing billions of tons of rocks down around you had driven many men insane.
    Mercer spoke about the history of mining and quarrying, from the prehistoric days of scavenging shards of flint to make spear points to the earliest actual open pit mines where water-soaked wood wedges were used to cleave slabs of stone that became the temples and monuments along the Nile River. He talked about the ancient mines where children were forced to hand dig for ore, and their lives might last as much as a month but more often ended only days after entering a shaft. He talked about technological advances, about giant earth-moving equipment, huge machines that weighed as much as twenty thousand tons yet were still able to move under their own power. He talked about explosives, how four hundred pounds of dynamite registers seven on the Richter scale when set off on the surface and about Primacord fuses that burn at twenty-five thousand feet per second. He kept the students enthralled for an hour with stories and anecdotes from a world few of them ever knew existed.
    When he finished, there was a smattering of applause centered at the back of the room, started by a single figure in the very last row. As the others stopped clapping, the lone figure, a woman, continued. Her applause was slow, almost taunting. A clap, a pause, and then another clap. And another pause.
    The woman stood, strands of her hair escaping from under a red bandanna. Despite the oppressive heat in the hall, she wore a shapeless bush jacket over a dark T-shirt. Mercer couldn’t really make out any details of her face as she continued her desultory applause, but there was something compelling about her posture, an undercurrent of poise and confidence that her shabby clothes couldn’t hide.
    “These stories are all very interesting, Dr. Mercer, quite