To Hold Up the Sky Read online

  “That’s our school,” Liu Xin said, pointing off at a large mining school that housed both primary and secondary classes. The athletic field on the campus was conspicuously large. It was there they had lain to rest their childhood and youth.

  “Do you think you remember everything?” Li Minsheng said tiredly as he sat down on a nearby rock.

  “I do.”

  “That afternoon in late autumn, when the sun was hazy. We were playing football on the field, when the building’s loudspeaker came on … do you remember?”

  “It was playing a dirge, and then Zhang Jianjun came running over barefoot to say that Chairman Mao had died…”

  “We called him a counterrevolutionary, and walloped him, even as he was crying out that it was true, honest to Chairman Mao it was true. We didn’t believe him, though, and dragged him off to the police…”

  “But we slowed down at the school gate, since the dirge was playing outside too, as if that dark music was filling the whole world…”

  “That dirge has been playing in my mind for more than two decades. These days, when the music plays it’s Nietzsche who runs over barefoot and says, ‘God is dead.’” Li Minsheng barked out a laugh. “I believe it.”

  Liu Xin stared at his childhood friend. “When did you turn into this? I hardly even recognize you.”

  Li Minsheng jumped up and glared back at him, jabbing a finger at the gray world at the foot of the hill. “When did the mine turn into that? Do you still recognize it?” Then he sat down heavily again. “Our fathers were such a proud group. Such a proud, grand group of miners. Take my dad. He was a level-eight worker* and earned a hundred and twenty yuan a month. A hundred and twenty yuan in the Chairman Mao era, no less.”

  Liu Xin was silent for a moment, then tried to change the subject. “How’s your family? Your wife … uh, something Shan, is it?”

  Li Minsheng smiled thinly. “Last year she told me she was taking a work trip, told her work unit she was taking annual leave, and took our daughter and left me and vanished. Two months later she sent a letter, posted from Canada, in which she said she had no wish to waste her life with a dirty coalman.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. You’re a senior engineer!”

  “Same difference.” Li Minsheng swept his hand about them. “To those who’ve never been below, it’s all the same. We’re all dirty coalmen. Do you remember how badly we wanted to become engineers?”

  “Those were the days of record-chasing production,” Liu Xin said. “We brought our fathers lunch. It was the first time we’d been down the shaft, and it was so dark down there. I asked my father and those standing near him, ‘How do you know where the coal seam is? How do you know where to dig the tunnels? And how are you able to get two tunnels dug from different directions to meet so precisely so far down?’ And your father answered, ‘Child, no one knows except for the engineers.’ And when we got to the surface, he pointed out a few men carrying hard hats and clipboards, and said, ‘Look, those are engineers.’ Do you remember that, Minsheng? Even we could see that they were different. The towels around their necks, at least, were a bit whiter. We’ve achieved that childhood dream now. Of course, it’s not all that glorious, but we have to at least fulfill our duty and accomplish something. Otherwise, won’t we be betraying ourselves?”

  “That’s enough,” Li Minsheng said, standing up with a sudden anger. “I’ve been doing my duty this whole time. I’ve been accomplishing things. But you? You’re living in a dream! Do you really believe you can bring miners up from the mines? Turn this mine into a gas field? Say all that theory is correct and your test succeeds. So what? Have you calculated the cost of the thing? Also, how are you going to lay tens of thousands of kilometers of pipe? You realize that we can’t even pay rail shipping fees these days?”

  “Can’t you take the long view? In a few years, or a few decades…”

  “The hell with the long view! The people here aren’t certain about the next few days, much less the next few decades. I’ve said before that you live on dreams. You’ve always been that way. Sure, back in your quiet old institute headquarters in Beijing you can have that dream, but I can’t. I live in the real world.”

  Li Minsheng turned to leave, then added, “Oh, I came to tell you that the director has arranged for us to cooperate with your experiment. Work is work, and I’ll do it.” Then he set off down the hill without looking back.

  Liu Xin silently surveyed the mine where he had been born and spent his childhood. Its towering headframes and their enormous top wheels spinning, lowering large cages down the shaft out of sight; rows of electric trams going in and out of the entrance to the shaft where his father had worked; a train outside the coal-separator building easing past more piles of coal than he could count; the cinema and soccer field where he had spent the best moments of his youth; the huge bathhouse—only miners had ones so large—where he had learned how to swim in water stained black from coal dust. Yes, he had learned to swim in a place so far from rivers and oceans.

  Turning his gaze toward the distance, he saw the spoil tip, the accumulation of more than a century’s worth of shale dug out of the mine. It seemed taller than the surrounding hills, with smoke rising where the sulfur heated the rain.… All of it black, blanketed over time in a layer of coal dust. It was the color of Liu Xin’s childhood, the color of his life. He closed his eyes, and as he listened to the sounds of the mine below, time seemed to stop.

  Dad’s mine. My mine …

  * * *

  The valley was not far from the mine, whose smoke and steam were visible beyond the ridge during the day, whose glow projected into the sky at night, and whose steam whistles were always audible. Liu Xin, Li Minsheng, and Aygul stood in the center of the desolate valley. In the distance, a herder was driving a flock of scrawny goats slowly along the foot of the mountain. Beneath the valley lay the small isolated coal seam that Liu Xin wanted to use for his subterranean gasified coal extraction experiment, found by Li Minsheng and the engineers in the geology department after a month of combing through mountains of materials in the archives.

  “We’re pretty far from the main mining area, so we’ve got fewer geological details on it,” Li Minsheng said.

  “I’ve read the materials, and from what we have now, the experimental seam is at least two hundred meters from the main seam. That’s acceptable. We should get to work,” Liu Xin said excitedly.

  “You’re not an expert in mining geology, and you’re even less familiar with the actual conditions here. I advise you to be more cautious. Think about it some more.”

  “There’s nothing to think about. The experiment can’t proceed,” Aygul said. “I’ve read the materials too. They’re too sketchy. The separation between exploratory boreholes is too large, and they were made in the sixties. They need to be redone, to prove conclusively that the seam is independent, before the experiment can begin. Li and I have drawn up an exploratory plan.”

  “How long until exploration is complete, according to your plan? And how much more investment is needed?”

  Li Minsheng said, “At the geology department’s current capacity, at least a month. We didn’t run the investment numbers. To estimate … at least two million or so.”

  “We have neither the time nor the money for that!”

  “Then put in a request to the ministry.”

  “The ministry? A bunch of bastards in the ministry want to kill this project! The higher-ups are anxious for results, so I’m dooming the entire project if I go back and ask for more time and a bigger budget. Instinct tells me there won’t be major problems, so why not take a little risk?”

  “Instinct? Risk? Not on a project like this! Dr. Liu, do you realize where we’re starting this fire? You call that a small risk?”

  “I’ve made my decision!” Liu Xin cut him off with a wave of his hand and walked off alone.

  “Engineer Li, why aren’t you stopping that madman? The two of us are on the same side,” Aygul said.<
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  “I’m going to do what I’m required to,” Li Minsheng said.

  * * *

  Three hundred men were at work in the valley. Besides physicists, chemists, geologists, and mining engineers, there were a few unexpected experts. Aygul led a coal-seam fire brigade of more than ten members, and there were two entire drilling squads from Renqiu Oil Field in Hebei Province, as well as a number of hydraulic-construction engineers and workers who would erect subterranean firebreaks. On the work site, in addition to tall rigs and piles of drilling poles, there were piles of cement bags and a mixer, a high-pressure slurry pump whining as it injected liquid cement into the ground, rows of high-pressure water and air pumps, and a spiderweb of crisscrossing multicolored pipes.

  Work had been progressing for two months, and an underground cement curtain more than two thousand meters long had been constructed surrounding the seam. Liu Xin had thought of adapting hydraulic engineering technology used in waterproofing the foundation of dams to the subterranean firewall: high-pressure cement was injected underground, where it hardened into a tight fireproof barrier. Within the curtain, the drills had sunk nearly a hundred boreholes, each directly into the seam. The holes were connected by pipes that split into three prongs attached to different high-pressure pumps that could inject water, steam, or compressed air.

  The final bit of work was the release of the “ground rats,” as they called the fire sensors. The curious gizmos, Liu Xin’s own design, resembled not rats but bombs. Each was twenty centimeters long with a bit at one end and a drive wheel at the other, and once released into the borehole, it could drill nearly a hundred meters farther into the seam and reach its designated location autonomously. Operable even under high temperatures and pressures, it would transmit the parameters at its location back to the master computer once the seam was ignited via seam-penetrating infrasound. More than a thousand of these ground rats had been released into the seam, half of which were positioned outside of the fire curtain to detect potential breaches.

  Liu Xin stood in a large tent in front of a projection screen showing the fire curtain, with flashing lights that indicated the position of each ground rat according to the signals. They were densely distributed, giving the screen the look of an astronomical chart.

  Everything was ready. Two bulky ignition electrodes had been lowered down a borehole at the center of the enclosure and were directly wired to a red button switch in the tent where Liu Xin was standing. All of the workers were in place and waiting.

  “There’s still time to change your mind, Dr. Liu,” Aygul said quietly. “Or to take more time to think on it.”

  “Aygul, that’s enough. You’ve been spreading fear and uncertainty from day one, and you’ve complained about me all the way to the ministry. To be fair, you’ve contributed immensely to this project, and without your work this past year, I wouldn’t be so quick to conduct the experiment.”

  “Dr. Liu…” Aygul was pleading now. Liu Xin had never seen him like this. “We don’t have to do this. Don’t release the demon from the depths!”

  “You think we can quit now?” Liu Xin smiled and shook his head, then turned toward Li Minsheng.

  Li Minsheng said, “As you instructed, we reviewed all of the geological materials a sixth time. We found no problems. Last night we added an additional curtain layer to a few sensitive spots.” He pointed out several short lines on the screen, outside the enclosure.

  Liu Xin went up to the ignition switch, and when his hand made contact with the red button he paused and closed his eyes as if in prayer. His lips moved, but only Li Minsheng, standing closest to him, heard the word he said—

  “Dad…”

  The button made no sound or flash. The valley remained the same as ever. But somewhere deep underground, a glittering high-temperature electric arc was created by more than ten thousand volts of electricity in the seam. On the screen, at the location of the electrodes, a small red dot appeared and quickly expanded like a blot of red ink on rice paper. Liu Xin moved the mouse, and the screen switched to a burn model produced from the data returned by the ground rats, a continuously growing, onion-like sphere, where each layer was an isotherm. High-pressure pumps roared, pouring combustion air into the seam through the boreholes, and the fire expanded like a blown-up balloon.… An hour later, when the control computer switched on the high-pressure water pumps, the fire onscreen twisted and distorted like a punctured balloon, although its volume remained the same.

  Liu Xin exited the tent. The sun had set behind the hill, and the thunder of machines echoed in the darkening valley. More than three hundred people were assembled outside, surrounding a vertical jet the diameter of an oil barrel. They made way for him, and he approached the small platform at the foot of the jet. Two people were standing on the platform, one of whom twisted the knob when he saw Liu Xin coming; the other struck a lighter to light a torch, which he passed to Liu Xin. The turning of the knob produced a hiss of gas from the jet that rose dramatically in volume until it roared throughout the valley like a hoarse giant. On all sides, three hundred nervous faces watched in the faint torchlight. Liu Xin closed his eyes and spoke silently to himself again. Then he brought the torch to the mouth of the jet and ignited the world’s first gasified coal well.

  With a bang, a huge pillar of fire leapt into the air, shooting up almost twenty meters. Closest to the mouth of the jet, the column was a clear, pure blue, but just above that it turned a blinding yellow before gradually turning red. It whistled in the air, and those closest to it could feel its surge of heat. Its radiance lit the surrounding hills, and from a distance it would look as if a sky lantern were shining over the plateau.

  A white-haired man, the director, emerged from the crowd and shook Liu Xin’s hand. He said, “Please accept the congratulations of a closed-minded relic. You’ve succeeded! But I hope you’ll extinguish it as soon as possible.”

  “Even now you don’t trust me? It won’t be extinguished. I want it to keep burning, for the whole country and the whole world to see.”

  “They’ve already seen it.” The director pointed to the throng of TV reporters behind him. “But as you well know, the test seam is no more than two hundred meters from the surrounding main seam at its closest point.”

  “But we’ve laid three firebreaks at those spots. And we have high-speed drills on standby. There won’t be any problems.”

  “You’re engineers from the ministry, so I have no authority to interfere. But there’s potential danger in any new technology, no matter how successful it may seem. I’ve seen my share of dangers in my decades in coal. Maybe that’s the reason for my rigid thinking. I’m truly worried.… However,” and the director again extended a hand to Liu Xin, “I’d still like to thank you. You’ve shown me hope for the coal industry.” He gazed at the pillar of fire again. “Your father would be pleased.”

  Two more jets were ignited in the next two days, so there were now three pillars of fire. The production volume of the test seam, calculated at a standard supply pressure, had reached five hundred thousand cubic meters per hour, equivalent to more than a hundred large coal gas furnaces.

  The underground coal fire was moderated entirely by computer, with the scale controlled to a stable-bounded area no larger than two-thirds of the total area within the curtain. At the mine’s request, multiple fire-control tests had been conducted. On the computer, Liu Xin described a ring around the fire with the mouse, and then clicked to constrict it. The whining of the high-pressure pumps outside changed, and within an hour the fire had been contained within that ring. Meanwhile, two more fire curtains, each two hundred meters long, had been added in the risky direction of the main seam.

  There was little for him to do. Most of his time he devoted to taking media interviews. Major companies inside and outside of China, including the likes of DuPont and Exxon, were swarming to propose investment and collaboration projects.

  On the third day, a coal-seam firefighter came to Liu Xin to say that t
heir chief was about to collapse from fatigue. Aygul had for the past two days led the firefighting squad in a mad series of subterranean firefighting exercises. He had also, on his own initiative, rented satellite time from the National Remote Sensing Center to survey the region’s crust temperature. He hadn’t slept in three days, spending his time instead doing rounds outside the curtain ring, each circuit taking all night.

  When Liu Xin found Aygul, he saw that the stocky man had gotten much thinner, and his eyes were red. “I can’t sleep,” he said. “The nightmares start as soon as I shut my eyes. I see those fire columns erupting all around me, like a forest of fire…”

  “Renting a sensor satellite is a huge expense,” Liu Xin said gently. “And although I don’t see the need, you’ve done it and I respect your decision. I’ll be needing you in the future, Aygul. I don’t think your firefighting squad will have much to do, but even the safest place still needs a fire team. You’re exhausted. Go back to Beijing for a few days’ rest.”

  “Leave now? You’re insane!”

  “You grew up above ground fire. That’s why your fear of it goes so deep. Right now we may not be able to control a massive fire like the one in the Xinjiang mines, but we soon will be. I want to set up the first gasified coalfield for commercial use in Xinjiang. When that time comes, the underground fires will be under our control, and the land of your hometown will be covered in glorious vineyards.”

  “Dr. Liu, I respect you. That’s why I’m working with you. But you overestimate yourself. Where ground fire is concerned, you’re still just a child.” Aygul smiled bitterly and walked away, shaking his head.

  * * *

  Disaster struck on the fifth day. The sun had just come up when Liu Xin was shaken awake by Aygul, who was out of breath, wild-eyed, and almost feverish. His trouser legs were soaked through with dew. He held a laser-printed photograph in front of Liu Xin’s face, so close it blocked his vision entirely. It was a false-color infrared sensor image returned from the satellite, a vibrant abstract painting he couldn’t understand, so he just stared in confusion. “Come!” Aygul shouted, and dragged Liu Xin out of the tent by the hand.