//------------------------------// // Echoes // Story: Moments // by Bad Horse //------------------------------// Göschenen, the Swiss Alps, 1876. Henri knelt in the mud, feeling his knees press against the sharp edges of freshly-cracked rock, and leaned forward until the light from his oil-wick cap-lamp crept over the prone man's face. Antonio. He was definitely dead. Bare-chested, covered from head to toe in rock dust the same dirt-gray as the tunnel floor, he lay staring into space with unblinking eyes. Even the eyeballs, Henri saw, now had a thin layer of gray dust. If it weren't for the blood outlining his head in a black halo, he'd look like a gargoyle that had fallen from the roof of a cathedral. He cursed quietly. Why Antonio? He was the only one who'd understood, at least a little, what they were doing here—how important it was, to Switzerland, to the world. The ten miles of rock between Switzerland and Italy were Nature's last barrier to Man's dominion over her. Something glinted on the tunnel floor near the body. Henri bent closer, and saw the flashing reflection again. Acting on instinct, he tilted his headlamp away from it, drawing away the attention of the watching men. Meanwhile he reached out beside himself in the dark to where the glint had been. After a few seconds of feeling around, he found something hard and flat stuck in the mud and gravel. He silently palmed it, then stood up. "What in blazes happened?" he asked the anonymous lamp-flames that bobbed around him in the darkness. He'd come up to find out why the next blast hadn't gone off, and found the miners clustered around the body. "Him and Marco were shouting at each other!" Stefano's voice said. "Sounded like a fight," Paolo added.  It was hard enough fighting a mountain; it always amazed Henri how much energy the men had left to fight each other. Especially in this heat. He wiped his forehead and began taking off his jacket. "Did anybody see?" No one answered. "Where's Marco?" Francesco asked. "Don't let him get away!" "I'm right here," Marco called, nearby enough in the dark that Henri startled at the sound. He sounded tired. His light had gone out. The other lights quickly converged around Marco, shouting anger and accusations. "Madonna santa!" "Why?" "Killer!" Henri stepped into the circle of men standing around Marco, and they quieted. "I didn't kill him," Marco insisted. "What for would I kill him? Was just an argument, is all. I couldn't even see him. He tripped and fell." Henri turned to face him. "Have a light, Marco," he said quietly, tipping his head forward. His headlamp illuminated the wrinkles that sloped down the sides of Marco's face. They glistened with tears. Marco leaned forward until their noses nearly touched, and Marco's lamp sputtered into life. "I didn't," Marco whispered. They stared silently at each other, not moving, until the rumble of an air car rolled down the tunnel and they both automatically looked down around their feet, checking for railroad tracks.  Each took a step back to a more private distance before looking up again. "Why were you fighting with Antonio?" Marco's face quickly turned hard. "Niente. Nothing." He threw up his arms in a gesture of helplessness. "I don't remember." "Nothing?" "It was about a coin!" Stefano said. "A gold coin!" "A coin?" Henri turned back to Marco. "Is this true?" As the headlamps turned towards Marco, Henri lowered his hand into the darkness at his waist and rubbed a thumb over the hard thing in his palm. Yes, a coin. He slipped it into a trouser pocket. Marco sighed, then looked down and nodded. "Tell me about it," Henri said. "We were loading the rubble from the last blast into the hopper, me on this side, him on that side," Marco said, pointing. "He called me over to show me. A gold coin. He said it was a big deal, he was going to take it to the big school in Zurich." "The university," Henri said. "Yes. That. I told him he was crazy, we gotta keep it secret. It's bad enough, doing this work for the wages we get. If the men thought there was gold? The blasting, the tunnel, it would be"—he chopped the air to his sides with both hands—"finito." "Hmm," Henri said. "Did you happen to say anything about sharing the coin?" "Mr. Boucher, on my mother's grave, God rest her soul, that was the farthest thing from my mind. You say every day how important this tunnel is. For the future." Henri nodded. "I do. It is." "So we shouted at each other a little," Marco said. "But I didn't touch him! I swear to God he tripped, Mr. Boucher." "Mm-hmm. So where's this coin now?" "There," Marco said, pointing at Antonio's body. "Somewhere there." "What did it look like?" Marco shrugged. "Shiny and yellow." "So you didn't actually get a close look at it." "Like I said, I didn't touch him." "So you didn't actually touch the coin, either." "No." "Or see anything but something shiny and yellow." Marco threw up his hands, defeated by Henri's logic. "Paolo," Henri said. He nodded towards Marco. "Search him." Paolo stepped forward and went brusquely through Marco's pockets, even taking off the man's shoes and checking under his cap, before stepping back and shaking his head. "Nothing." The other men were already scanning the tunnel floor for the glint of gold. "Thirty francs to anyone who finds me a gold coin," Henri said. They were going to search for it anyway; better they should do it while he was there, pretending to be in control. He hoped there weren't any more coins. He didn't have thirty francs. If there were, whoever found them decided they were worth more than thirty francs, for after listening to the scuttling sounds of men scrambling about the tunnel floor for several minutes, Henri saw their headlamps rise one by one and drift back over to where he still stood. "Now listen up," he said. "There are no gold coins here. We're half a mile—a kilometer below the surface. The first men who've ever been here. The first anything but rock and dust that's ever been here. Not even one God-forsaken breath of air has squeezed its way down here in a million years before today." Paolo's lamp waved slowly back-and-forth, showing that the miner was shaking his head. "That's impossible, boss," he said. "What? Why?" "The Earth, she's only six thousand years old." Henri frowned. The old Italian knew nothing of Hutton, Lyell, and geological time. He probably didn't even know what the fossils were that he shoveled into the air car's rock hopper every day. All he knew about rocks and strata was which kind were hardest to drill through. "The point is," he said, "there's nothing down here but rocks and mud and sweat and dust. You can have as much of any of those as you want. But if I hear one word after this—one word from anyone, anywhere, about gold coins in the tunnel—I swear to God I'll fire every man here today." He gave that time to sink in. "Paolo, Francesco, Stefano, Udo. Find Antonio's jacket and get him back to the surface. Leave him with the priest. Mind his boots stay on him. We don't bury men barefoot. The rest of you, back to work." "What about him?" Stefano asked. "Marco?" Henri looked back over toward the hazy outline he thought was Marco. It seemed to sag. "He goes back to work, too." "Bless you, Mr. Boucher!" Marco said. "I knew you'd believe me." "I don't know what I believe," Henri said quietly. "But I don't want the police involved any more than you do. Keep your stories to yourself and keep working. Good day, gentlemen." He turned and hurried off back down the tunnel, his jacket over one shoulder. He ought to stay and supervise, keep the talk controlled. Marco was right—the men would revolt again if word spread that there was gold in the tunnel. Ten francs a month more than they could make in Lucerne wasn't worth the danger and the hellish conditions. The mountain had literally decimated them; one man in ten who'd worked for him here was now dead. But first and foremost, the coin had to go. Somewhere no one would find it. Favre would agree, Henri was sure. He had to get rid of it before the police got involved. And, he admitted to himself, he urgently wanted to see it. The long, slow walk back down toward the surface—the tunnel sloped down, not up, so water would run out—had never seemed so long, the air never so thick and choking. He smelled the entrance before he saw it. Or rather, he began to smell again, to become aware of the stink of his own body, when the weak breeze from the surface brought enough real air that his nose had different intensities of funk to distinguish. When he finally broke into the sunlight, blinking, he paused to take a few great gulps of air and look down on the little Alpine village below. It had been beautiful until two years ago, when a thousand miners had washed over it like a tidal wave of sewage. He'd often wondered since which smelled worse, the dust and hot sweat of the tunnel, or the shit-strewn mud streets of the overburdened village. He put his jacket back on and buttoned it up, turned in the opposite direction, and climbed a rocky trail, up the side of the stubborn mountain his men were drilling through. Finally, he came to the small high pasture where he and the few others from the village who weren't too lazy to climb this high grazed their horses during the day. It was freezing cold after coming out of the steamy tunnel, but he wouldn't be long. "Here, Dynamite," he called. He pulled a few small, shriveled, precious carrots out of a jacket pocket and dangled them in the air. A bay stallion raised its ears and trotted over. "Good boy," he said, stroking the horse's muzzle as it chomped on the carrots. He was too tired to mount, but he had only a short distance to go anyway. He walked out to the end of the pasture, a small hillock held in place above the valley below by the roots of the edelweiss as much as by the unstable rock beneath. Only then did he stop and take the coin out of his pocket. He spit into his palms and rubbed the remaining dirt off of the coin. Gold? Probably. It wasn't tarnished, anyway. He tilted the coin this way and that in the sunlight. A stamped image of a six-pointed star—not the Star of David; its points were sharper—was still faintly visible. In the center was a single line, the universal symbol for "1". He turned it over and squinted. A face looked back at him, a man wearing a crown bearing that same star. It took him a few seconds to recognize; the man's features were so distorted that at first he thought the coin was damaged. The eyes were too big and too far apart, the nose too long, the ears much too high on the head. Oddest of all, the man was smiling, a thing ancient monarchs were seldom known for. Dynamite had followed him over, still munching the last carrot. Two mares trotted over curiously. "Sorry, ladies," Henri said. "I've got nothing for you." He raised the hand holding the coin. "Just an old hunk of metal." All three horses pricked their ears up. They followed the coin with their eyes as Henri brought his hand down again. "Who are you?" Henri asked the face on the coin. "And how did you get in my tunnel?" Henri hadn't studied history, but he knew there was nothing like this in any of the museums in Zurich or Geneva. The coin might really be, as poor Antonio had said, a big deal. That only made it worse, of course. The most-powerful people in Zurich were tired of cost overruns, and looking for any excuse to shut the digs down. This coin was that excuse. But this was the only place anyone could tunnel through the Alps, and Favre was the only man who could do it. No tunnel, and the two halves of western Europe would stay divided. Mankind would march into the future as it had marched through the past: wearing jackboots and waving flags. "I'm sorry," he said. "Your one chance to be remembered, and you had to show up here." The coin did not reply. "But men died for this tunnel," Henri went on. "Antonio died for this tunnel. So I'll be damned if I can't throw away a coin for it." He walked up to the edge, pulled his arm back, and flung the coin far out into space. He watched it flash three times as it fell silently into the scree on the cliffs below, followed by three pings that echoed back from the opposite promontory like tolling chimes. He thought maybe he should say a prayer for the smiling king he had condemned to be forgotten by the human race. But it had been too long since he'd prayed. "You were a leader of men," Henri muttered as he turned back toward the horses. "You'd do the same if it were my coin and your–" He stopped, mouth open. All three horses stood in a row. Bent low, one foreleg tucked up beneath each chest, their muzzles nearly touched the dirt in a sort of bow. They stood as still as the mountain itself. “Now where,” Henri asked, “did they learn to do that?”