said McGill involuntarily.
‘I have three rapacious old vultures who call themselves my uncles and half a dozen cousins who follow the breed. They’re only interested in loot and between them they’re running the show into the ground. They’re great ones for merging and asset-stripping, and they squeeze every penny until it hurts. Take this mine. Up in Auckland I have a Comptroller of Accounts who reports to London, and I can’t sign a cheque for more than a thousand dollars without his say-so. And I’m supposed to be in charge.’
He breathed heavily. ‘When I came here I went underground and that night I prayed we wouldn’t have a visit from the Inspector of Mines before I had time to straighten things out.’
‘Had someone been cutting corners?’
Ballard shrugged. ‘Fisher, the last managing director, was an old fool and not up to the job. I doubt any criminal intent, but negligence combined with parsimony has led to a situation in which the company could find itself in serious trouble. I have a mine manager who can’t make decisions and wants his hand held all the time, and I have a mine engineer who is past it. Oh, Cameron’s all right, I suppose, but he’s old and he’s running scared.’
‘You’ve got yourself a packet of trouble,’ said McGill.
Ballard snorted. ‘You don’t know the half of it. I haven’t said anything about the unions yet, not to mention the attitude of some of the town people.’
‘You sound as though you earn your pay. But why the hell stick to a Ballard company if you feel like this?’
‘Oh, I don’t know – some remnants of family loyalty, I suppose,’ said Ballard tiredly. ‘After all, my grandfather did pay for my education, and quite extensive it was. I suppose I owe him something for that.’
McGill noted Ballard’s evident depression and tiredness and decided to change the subject. ‘Let’s eat, and I’ll tell you about the ice worms in Alaska.’ He plunged into an improbable story.
The next morning was bright and sunny and the snow, which had been falling all night, had stopped, leaving the world freshly minted. When Ballard got up, heavy-eyed and unrested, he found Mrs Evans in the kitchen cooking breakfast. She scolded him. ‘You should have let me know when you were coming back. I only learned by chance from Betty Hargreaves last night.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I forgot. Are you cooking for three?’ Mrs Evans usually ate breakfast with him; it was a democratic society.
‘I am. Your friend has gone out already, but he’ll be back for a late breakfast.’
Ballard consulted his watch to discover that he had overslept by more than an hour. ‘Give me ten minutes.’
When he had showered and dressed he felt better and found McGill in the living-room unwrapping a large parcel. ‘It came,’ said McGill. ‘Your truck got through.’
Ballard looked at what was revealed; it was a backpack which appeared to contain nothing but sections of aluminium tubing each nestling in an individual canvas pocket. ‘What’s that?’
‘The tools of my trade,’ said McGill. Mrs Evans called, and he added, ‘Let’s eat; I’m hungry.’
Ballard toyed with his breakfast while McGill wolfed down a plateful of bacon and eggs, and pleased Mrs Evans by asking for more. While she was out of the room he said, ‘You asked me here for the skiing, and there’s no time like the present. How’s your leg?’
Ballard shook his head. ‘The leg is all right, but sorry, Mike – not today. I’m a working man.’
‘You’d better come.’ Something in McGill’s tone made Ballard look at him sharply. McGill’s face was serious. ‘You’d better come and see what I’m doing. I want an independent witness.’
‘A witness to what?’
‘To whatever it is I find.’
‘And what will that be?’
‘How do I know until I find it?’ He stared at Ballard. ‘I’m serious, Ian. You know what my job is. I’m going to make a professional investigation. You’re the boss man of the mine and you couldn’t make a better witness. You’ve got authority.’
‘For God’s sake!’ said Ballard. ‘Authority to do what?’
‘To close down the mine if need be, but that depends on what I find, and I won’t know that until I look, will I?’ As Ballard’s jaw dropped McGill said, ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes at what I saw yesterday. It looked like a recipe for instant disaster, and I spent a damned uneasy night. I won’t be happy until I take a look.’
‘Where?’
McGill got to his feet and walked to the window. ‘Come here.’ He pointed at the steep slope above the mine. ‘Up there.’
Ballard looked at the long curve, blinding white in the sunlight. ‘You think …’ His voice tailed away.
‘I think nothing until I get evidence one way or the other,’ said McGill sharply. ‘I’m a scientist, not a soothsayer.’ He shook his head warningly as Mrs Evans came in with a fresh plate of bacon and eggs. ‘Finish your breakfast.’
As they sat down he said, ‘I suppose you can find me a pair of skis.’
Ballard nodded, his mind busy with the implications of what McGill had said – or had not said. McGill dug into his second plateful of breakfast. ‘Then we go skiing,’ he said lightly.
Two hours later they were nearly three thousand feet above the mine and half way up the slope. They had not talked much and when Ballard had tried McGill advised him to save his breath for climbing. But now they stopped and McGill unslung the backpack, dropping one of the straps over a ski-stick rammed firmly into the snow.
He took off his skis and stuck them vertically into the snow up-slope of where he was standing. ‘Another safety measure,’ he said conversationally. ‘If there’s a slide then the skis will tell someone that we’ve been swept away. And that’s why you don’t take off your Oertel cord.’
Ballard leaned on his sticks. ‘The last time you talked about avalanches I was in one.’
McGill grinned. ‘Don’t fool yourself. You were in a little trickle – a mere hundred feet.’ He pointed down the mountainside. ‘If this lot goes it’ll be quite different.’
Ballard felt uneasy. ‘You’re not really expecting an avalanche?’
McGill shook his head. ‘Not right now.’ He bent down to the backpack. ‘I’m going to do a little gentle thumping and you can help me to do it. Take off your skis.’
He began to take aluminium tubing from the pack and to assemble it into some kind of a gadget. ‘This is a penetrometer – an updating of the Haefeli design. It’s a sort of pocket pile-driver – it measures the resistance of the snow. It also gives us a core,
