Jacob Fastbinder III tried to make his eyes work better. The details of the mole’s interior were crisp. He lifted one heavy arm and poked the teenager in the shoulder. Jack Fast felt real, too.
“Yep, it’s really me. I got here just in time, too. The atmospheric toxins were at lethal levels. You were almost a goner.”
“How?”
“I made an earth drill.”
Of course. The teenage boy simply built his own mechanical mole and used it to drill down into the earth and rescue his father. Why not? the old man thought. He was surely mad, and he poked at the figment of his imagination again.
“Ow!” The kid grabbed his abused nostril.
“Not real.”
“Am too.”
“Hallucination.”
“Take that!” Jack poked his father in the stomach hard, and Fastbinder bent double, hacking. When he stopped coughing he realized the oxygen mask was gone. Jack was holding it. The air in the Iron Mole smelled stale but breathable, and Fastbinder was standing on his own two feet.
“I don’t understand. How could you do it?”
“Come on and look.”
They stepped out of Fastbinder’s Iron Mole and into a tunnel. When Jack turned on his battery lantern, the tunnel sparkled as if it were a room of diamonds.
“Neat, huh?”
“Magnificent!” Fastbinder’s eyes fell on the device that created the tunnel, and he was astounded again.
The vehicle had three pairs of treads. It rode on two heavy-duty treads, while two steel supports each lifted another pair of smaller treads to the roof of the tunnel, not quite touching the fragile-looking crystalline walls. The treads were all welded against a gleaming stainless-steel compartment shaped like a stubby rocket. A tapered point extended toward Fastbinder, and when he peered through the treads at the other end he saw another tapered end.
“Cool, huh?” Jack asked. “No back, just two fronts, so if you get stuck you just reverse it. The extra treads extend automatically to grip the ceiling if the descent gets too steep, for one hundred percent traction. The thing can even ride on the extra treads if it gets flipped on its side.”
“But, Jack, how does it do zee drilling? And what is all this?” Fastbinder looked at the roof of spun crystal.
“That’s the coolest thing. Pops! The whole exterior surface is imbedded with proton discharge devices making really big honkin’ wads of static electricity. You should see this thing at work. Lightning everywhere! It makes, like, this air hammer that breaks it all down to particulate, dirt or sand or rock or whatever, and sends it flying around, and the particles at the perimeter of the proton discharge get melted in place, and the swirling crumbles stick to ’em and it builds a crystallized support structure. The crystal makes it strong enough, and the computer guides the protons to make tempered, noncrystalline filaments for more support—like rebar inside of concrete. See?”
Fastbinder was still woozy. He understood the concepts his son was throwing at him, and yet…
“You built this thing from nothing? How long have I been down here?”
Jack’s grin faded. “Six days, about. You should have taken more oxygen. You shouldn’t have even tried this in that old junker of yours.”
Fastbinder glanced at the hole where they had emerged from the Mighty Iron Mole. It was a classic, a one-of-a-kind marvel of engineering, built in 1938 by a demented inventor in Oregon. The inventor used it once, boring just eighteen feet into the rich black soil before the engine seized up. The inventor exited through the rear hatchway and was pulled out of his tunnel by rope. The tunnel collapsed as he and his assistants were discussing engine improvements.
The Mighty Iron Mole remained buried, and over the years its very existence came into doubt. Fastbinder, who was an avid collector of antique engineering oddities, heard the rumors, saw the sixty-year-old photos and paid the son of the inventor ten thousand dollars for excavation rights on the property, then paid another hundred thousand to purchase the MIM after he located it.
Fastbinder told the inventor’s son that the mole would be restored and put on display at the Fastbinder Museum of Mechanical Marvels.
“Not restored so’s it will
“Not quite,” Fastbinder said.
The inventor’s son considered the machine a death trap, but Fastbinder was in love with the Mighty Iron Mole long before he ever laid eyes on it. He’d intended to restore it fully—and he did. He even improved it. Still, it took blind desperation to convince him to actually use it.
The Iron Mole hadn’t exactly proven itself to be mighty. Now it looked almost as dead as when he’d first dug down to it in Oregon—a metal hulk, smothered in the earth. The entrance made by Jack was an ugly, burned gash in the aluminum-plated steel shell.
“I would like to put this old junker in zee museum, even if she did almost kill me,” Fastbinder lamented. “She is a special machine. Nothing was like her, ever.”
