Wright shook his head dubiously. "We don't want to die down here any more than you do, boss, so we'll do our damndest--but how in _hell_ do you figure you can hold her to her work?"
"Rig a yoke. Cut a stretcher up for canvas and padding. It'll pound, but a man can stand almost anything, in short enough shifts, if he's got to or die."
And for a time--two minutes, to be exact, during which the rotary chewed up and spat out a plug of rock over five feet deep--things went very well indeed. Two men, instead of the usual three, could run the rotary; that is, they could tend the complicated pneumatic walking jacks which not only oscillated the cutting demon in a geometrical path, but also rammed it against the face with a steadily held and enormous pressure, even while climbing almost vertically upward under a burden of over twenty thousand pounds.
An armored hand waved a signal--voice was utterly useless--up! A valve was flipped; a huge, flat, steel foot arose; a timber slid into place, creaking and groaning as that big flat foot smashed down. Up--again! Up--a third time! Eighteen seconds--less than one-third of a minute--ten inches gained!
And, while it was not easy, two men could hold the burley--in one-minute shifts. As has been intimated, this machine "pimped" for the rotary. It waited on it, ministering to its every need with a singleness of purpose impossible to any except robotic devotion. It picked the rotary's teeth, it freed its linkages, it deloused its ports, it cleared its spillways of compacted debris, it even--and this is a feat starkly unbelievable to anyone who does not know the hardness of neocarballoy and the tensile strength of ultra-special steels--it even changed, while in full operation, the rotary's diamond-tipped cutters.
Both burley and rotary were extremely efficient, but neither was either quiet or gentle. In their quietest moments they shrieked and groaned and yelled, producing a volume of sound in which nothing softer than a cannon-shot could have been heard. But when, in changing the rotary's cutting teeth, the burley's "fingers" were driven into and through the solid rock--a matter of merest routine to both machines--the resultant blasts of sound cannot even be imagined, to say nothing of being described.