THE MERCY SHAFT

Synopsis

Bethany Kroll does not go underground. She writes the ventilation plans for a copper mine two thousand feet deep, from an office, in a chair, and she is very good at it. On a Sunday she goes down anyway, because eleven men are on the ninth level and she is the only person on the property who knows where the old raises connect. Four hundred feet in, the ground comes down behind her. No radio. No signal. The eleven men are alive and further in, and there is one abandoned raise on her own plans that will move air to them by pulling it away from her. She can do the numbers in her head. She does them twice.

Who this is about

Bethany Kroll writes ventilation plans for a copper mine two thousand feet deep, which is why she is the one who knows where the old raises are. She has never been on a rescue team.

What goes wrong

A ground fall closes the ninth level behind her. The radio is dead. Eleven men are alive four hundred feet further in, in air that is going bad on a schedule she can calculate.

What's at stake

There is an abandoned ventilation raise on the plans. Opening it pushes clean air to the eleven men and pulls the bad air across the only route she could climb out on.

Why it keeps going

Every hour is a new calculation with worse inputs, and Bethany keeps arriving at the same answer she does not want, using arithmetic nobody else down there can check.

Takeaway

Courage in an engineer looks like arithmetic, and it is no easier for being written down.

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Story, in the creator's words

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