Moscow a few days later and left me to figure out what had to be done.
I had never been in a mine before in my life, and for weeks I was terrified every time I entered the place. I walked bent forward into the shadowy dark as if every step would be my last. I was terrified by the mass of rock hanging down over my head, by the narrowness of the passages, by the pounding hammers and explosions that shook the earth, by the dark, the wet, the running water, the candles, the lanterns that lit my way or blew out in some subterranean wind leaving me groping the walls for the next turn in the passage or picking my way over the rocky path to some pinpoint of light who knows how many yards ahead.
I tramped through those miles of corridors following the eccentricities of the vein, up and down, around corners, into the bowels of the earth. I went down from level to level, riding in a bucket, clinging to a chain in the dark. I went to the mine face where in the underground heat men, stripped to the waist, held drills to the rock face for other men to hit with sledgehammers. I watched the explosives being packed in the hole, the wick touched with flame, spurting, flaring, and everybody running back, stumbling over me to escape the explosion.
You felt as if you had gone back a thousand years, ten thousand, to the mines of the Pharaohs, King Solomon, or the Incas. The miners were beasts of burden, moving the raw ore back from the mine face in baskets hung from their foreheads onto their bent backs. There were children among themâboys eight, ten, twelveâhandling the simpler underground jobs, delivering the fuel to the lanterns, guiding the mules. I never got used to it.
Mitya, Smitty, and the others were suspicious of what I was up to. They didnât like me; they didnât want me coming in questioning what they were doing. But for all that, they told me what I needed to know, and what had to be done. The mine was operating just as it had when it opened a half century before, and nobody had spent any money on it since. There were no mechanized shovels, no electric drills, no mechanical crushers to break down the ore. The men still worked mainly by hand, with pickaxes and shovels, in the light of kerosene lamps or even candles, and mules pulled the ore cars up the slope to the mine entrance. So the solution was obvious. You mechanized where you could. But Mitya and Smitty didnât like that. They worried about the men. You introduced this equipment and you put people out of work.
I told them that that wouldnât happenâI hoped it wouldnâtâwe would increase the output of the mine instead. The miners were suspicious as well when they got word of what I was planning to do. So I began holding talks with their union, until I discovered that the union meant nothing, that everything was run by the local town council, the local soviet, that is. And since as concessionaire I was the representative of the government the party would deny me nothing.
At the Miller School of Typing & Shorthand in New York, I had taken the courses Manny had prescribed for me and had discovered that accounting, at least, was not all that uncongenial to me. I liked reducing everything to numbers, manipulating these numbers to produce changes in the real world. All that winter, I pored over my worksheets with fingers so stiff I could hardly move them, calculating the cost of every procedure we undertookâfrom breaking up the ore, moving it out of the mine, loading it onto the sledges, and moving the sledges to the rail head.
But we were still losing money and so I came up with a scheme to build some incentives into the system. We would no longer pay the men by the day, but by how much they produced. The more tonnage the miners produced, the more money they would make. However, I couldnât just divide these gains equally. People had always been paid according to their skillsâan explosives expert earned more than a driller,
I had never been in a mine before in my life, and for weeks I was terrified every time I entered the place. I walked bent forward into the shadowy dark as if every step would be my last. I was terrified by the mass of rock hanging down over my head, by the narrowness of the passages, by the pounding hammers and explosions that shook the earth, by the dark, the wet, the running water, the candles, the lanterns that lit my way or blew out in some subterranean wind leaving me groping the walls for the next turn in the passage or picking my way over the rocky path to some pinpoint of light who knows how many yards ahead.
I tramped through those miles of corridors following the eccentricities of the vein, up and down, around corners, into the bowels of the earth. I went down from level to level, riding in a bucket, clinging to a chain in the dark. I went to the mine face where in the underground heat men, stripped to the waist, held drills to the rock face for other men to hit with sledgehammers. I watched the explosives being packed in the hole, the wick touched with flame, spurting, flaring, and everybody running back, stumbling over me to escape the explosion.
You felt as if you had gone back a thousand years, ten thousand, to the mines of the Pharaohs, King Solomon, or the Incas. The miners were beasts of burden, moving the raw ore back from the mine face in baskets hung from their foreheads onto their bent backs. There were children among themâboys eight, ten, twelveâhandling the simpler underground jobs, delivering the fuel to the lanterns, guiding the mules. I never got used to it.
Mitya, Smitty, and the others were suspicious of what I was up to. They didnât like me; they didnât want me coming in questioning what they were doing. But for all that, they told me what I needed to know, and what had to be done. The mine was operating just as it had when it opened a half century before, and nobody had spent any money on it since. There were no mechanized shovels, no electric drills, no mechanical crushers to break down the ore. The men still worked mainly by hand, with pickaxes and shovels, in the light of kerosene lamps or even candles, and mules pulled the ore cars up the slope to the mine entrance. So the solution was obvious. You mechanized where you could. But Mitya and Smitty didnât like that. They worried about the men. You introduced this equipment and you put people out of work.
I told them that that wouldnât happenâI hoped it wouldnâtâwe would increase the output of the mine instead. The miners were suspicious as well when they got word of what I was planning to do. So I began holding talks with their union, until I discovered that the union meant nothing, that everything was run by the local town council, the local soviet, that is. And since as concessionaire I was the representative of the government the party would deny me nothing.
At the Miller School of Typing & Shorthand in New York, I had taken the courses Manny had prescribed for me and had discovered that accounting, at least, was not all that uncongenial to me. I liked reducing everything to numbers, manipulating these numbers to produce changes in the real world. All that winter, I pored over my worksheets with fingers so stiff I could hardly move them, calculating the cost of every procedure we undertookâfrom breaking up the ore, moving it out of the mine, loading it onto the sledges, and moving the sledges to the rail head.
But we were still losing money and so I came up with a scheme to build some incentives into the system. We would no longer pay the men by the day, but by how much they produced. The more tonnage the miners produced, the more money they would make. However, I couldnât just divide these gains equally. People had always been paid according to their skillsâan explosives expert earned more than a driller,
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