But that – like everything else – was something I would have to worry about later.
If a hole five feet deep as well as forty-two feet long and five feet wide had been required, it really would have been impossible, of course, bucket-loader or not – I might just as well have planned to send him into outer space, or drop the Taj Mahal on him. The total yield on such dimensions is over a thousand cubic feet of earth.
“You’ve got to create a funnel shape that will suck your bad aliens in,” my mathematician friend had said, “and then you’ve got to create an inclined plane that pretty much mimes the arc of descent.”
He drew one on another sheet of graph paper.
“That means that your intergalactic rebels or whatever they are only need to remove half as much earth as the figures initially show. In this case…” He scribbled on a work sheet, and beamed. “Five hundred and twenty-five cubic feet. Chicken-feed. One man could do it.”
I had believed so, too, once upon a time, but I had not reckoned on the heat… the blisters… the exhaustion… the steady pain in my back.
Stop for a minute, but not too long. Measure the slant of the trench.
It’s not as bad as you thought, is it, darling? At least it’s roadbed and not desert hardpan.
I moved more slowly along the length of the grave as the hole got deeper. My hands were bleeding now as I worked the controls. Ram the drop-lever all the way forward until the bucket lay on the ground. Pull back on the drop-lever and shove the one that extended the armature with a high hydraulic whine. Watch as the bright oiled metal slid out of the dirty orange casing, pushing the bucket into the dirt. Every now and then a spark would flash as the bucket slid over a piece of flint. Now raise the bucket… swivel it, a dark oblong shape against the stars (and try to ignore the steady throbbing pain in your neck the way you’re trying to ignore the even deeper throb of pain in your back)… and dump it down in the ditch, covering the chunks of asphalt already there.
Never mind, darling – you can bandage your hands when it’s done. When he’s done.
“She was in pieces,” I croaked, and jockeyed the bucket back into place so I could take another two hundred pounds of dirt and gravel out of Dolan’s grave.
How the time flies when you are having a good time.
Moments after I had noticed the first faint streaks of light in the east. I got down to take another measurement of the floor’s incline with the carpenter’s level – I was actually getting near the end. I thought I might just make it. I knelt, and as I did I felt something in my back let go. It went with a dull little snap.
I uttered a guttural cry and collapsed on my side on the narrow, slanted floor of the excavation, lips pulled back from my teeth, hands pressing into the small of my back.
Little by little the very worst of the pain passed and I was able to get to my feet.
All right, I thought. That’s it. It’s over. It was a good try, but it’s over.
Please, darling, Elizabeth whispered back – impossible as it would have been to believe once upon a time, that whispering voice had begun to take on unpleasant undertones in my mind; there was a sense of monstrous implacability about it. Please don’t give up. Please go on.
Go on digging? I don’t even know if I can walk!
But there’s so little left to do! the voice wailed – it was no longer just the voice that spoke for Elizabeth, if it had ever been; it was Elizabeth. So little left, darling!
I looked at my excavation in the growing light and nodded slowly. She was right. The bucket-loader was only five feet from the end; seven at most. But it was the deepest five or seven, of course; the five or seven with the most dirt in it.