Voices in Stone (3 page)

When everything was checked, they led us out through a door on the other side of the Portacabin. Now I could see what was hidden from view when we’d been in the car park.

The hill sloped away from us, and the grass and soil had been cleared off a wide strip of it. There were big mounds of earth piled up at the bottom of the slope, and broken trees stacked into tangly heaps. The rumbling clattery noise was from a couple of massive diggers, busy scraping up more soil and uncovering the grey-white, clay-looking layer beneath. The big teeth on their buckets had left scratch marks, like the hillside was being gnawed on by giant rats.

“Wow,” said Jayden, “look at those!” He was pointing at a couple of huge dumper trucks, the biggest you’ve ever seen, wheels as high as a house. But I didn’t care about them; I kept staring at the diggers, chewing away at the hillside.

When I was younger I was really into bird spotting, and Dad used to take me out to places to look for them, wooded valleys like this one. There couldn’t be any birds living here now, not even an insect, probably.

“It’s such a mess,” I said, and I got why Dad hated the quarry.

Mr Watkins heard and glared at me, but Dr Harcourt only smiled her phony smile.

“Yes, I suppose it might look a bit of a mess, if you don’t understand what you’re seeing. But of course our environmental controls are to the highest standard, and after we finish here, in around 2050, we’ll be reseeding the site with grass and planting new trees.”

“Isn’t that great?” said Mr Watkins, sucking up again. I didn’t say anything, only looked at the long grey trunks of the piled-up beech trees. They would’ve towered over us when they were standing. They would’ve taken a hundred years to grow to that size.

Dr Harcourt turned to the rest of the group. “So, can anyone tell me what we’re mining for here?”

A few people put their hand up. I mean, everyone knew – it’d been on the TV news, and not just the local stuff no one ever watches, it was even on
Newsround
. But still only a few people put their hand up – the rest only ever answer if they’re made to.

Dr Harcourt picked Liam.

“Rare earth metals,” he said, looking a bit panicked at actually having to answer.

“And what are they?”

“Um, metals that are rare?”

Mr Watkins frowned at us. “We covered this only last week.”

“Oh, um…” You could practically see the cogs working in Liam’s brain. “They’re formed in supernova explosions?” Dr Harcourt nodded. “And… they’re found all over the planet?” Liam trailed off and Mr Watkins sighed.

“Would anyone else like to tell Dr Harcourt what we know about rare earth metals?” he said.

Ruksar had her hand up so high it was amazing she didn’t dislocate her arm. Dr Harcourt smiled at her.

“Rare earth metals are seventeen metals, mostly lanthanides,” she said, all pleased with herself. “They can change the properties of other metals when they’re mixed with them. They are usually only found in low concentrations and they’re also really difficult to mine. They’re often found together with radioactive materials, so—”

“Not here!” snapped Dr Harcourt. “There are no radioactive elements at this site, I’d like to make that
completely
clear.”

“Oh,” said Ruksar, going bright red.

Dr Harcourt looked away from her, all smiles again. “And does anyone know what rare earth metals are used for?”

After what happened to Ruksar, there were even fewer hands up this time. Mr Watkins looked around. In lessons he picks on someone who doesn’t want to answer, but he probably didn’t want Dr Harcourt to think we’re thick, so he chose Gav.

“They’re used in smartphones, and tablets and things…” Gav trailed off. I mean, by then we’d said everything we knew.

Luckily Dr Harcourt was pleased. “That’s right,” she
said. “Rare earth metals have some unusual properties that make them perfect for use in new technologies. Without them, we wouldn’t have touchscreens, and think how boring that would be.”

Mr Watkins giggled. Honestly.

“So shall we go and have a closer look?” asked Dr Harcourt.

Mr Watkins nodded enthusiastically, and it didn’t really matter what the rest of us wanted.

“The diggers will stop working while we’re on-site,” she said, “For safety reasons.”

A few people made disappointed noises, and she smiled. “But don’t worry, we’re going to give you a special demonstration.”

Now I think about it, there was something about the way she said that. It was about the only time she sounded excited.

We walked out on a gravel track, wide enough for even the biggest of dumper trucks to get along. There was a bit of mud, and I noticed that all the people from the mining company, even smart Dr Harcourt, were wearing boots. Of course, we were all wearing our school shoes,
and pretty soon people, well girls, were making a fuss about it.

“My shoes are dirty!”

“I can’t walk in this!”

Mr Watkins started getting stressed and snappy, and Dr Harcourt looked like she wished she could just have us hauled away and disposed of. But she still carried on with her lectures.

“The rights to quarry here were allocated more than fifty years ago, but at the time it was thought the only use would be clay for brick making, and there were other more accessible supplies of that. However, about ten years ago UK-Earths bought the rights, for a modest sum, and things got very exciting after tests revealed what an astonishing deposit of rare earth metals we are dealing with here. An extremely unusual mixture, in a very concentrated deposit. We believe this will be an incredible boost for our economy, and open up new applications in a range of hi-tech industries.” She stopped and none of us said anything. She looked a bit put out, like we were meant to be clapping.

“What you need to appreciate,” Mr Watkins broke in,
stressing again, “is how amazing this quarry is! Rare earth metals shouldn’t even be here according to the geology of the surrounding area…”

He wittered on about clay and sedimentary rock while we walked, and Dr Harcourt looked as if she wished she could squash us like flies. Mr Watkins listed all the different theories about how the oh-so-special metal had ended up in a hill near our town: ancient volcanoes, prehistoric rivers, the effects of glaciation. Of course they were all completely wrong, as it turned out. But you could tell he wasn’t really talking to us – he was trying to impress Dr Harcourt. Maybe he was hoping she’d give him a job.

I wasn’t really listening because we were getting close to the most interesting things in the whole boring place, which were the two diggers. From where we’d started out, they’d looked small enough to be toys, but as we got nearer, there were murmurs of excitement at the size of them. The diggers towered over us like mechanical dinosaurs. If you’d stuck three of our coaches on top of each other, those machines would still have been taller. The caterpillar tracks alone were as high as a bus.

When we were about 15 metres away from them, Dr Harcourt held up her hand and we all stopped.

“Can’t we go and see them up close, miss?” asked Gav.

“It’s doctor, actually, not miss,” snapped Dr Harcourt. “And we have to stop here. It wouldn’t be safe to get any nearer.”

The digger’s driver looked like a flea from where we stood.

“Why’s the driver wearing a gas mask?” asked Jayden.

“It’s not a gas mask,” said Dr Harcourt, smiling her weird smile. “It’s a dust mask. Just basic health and safety, because he’s out here all day.”

“Do the children need one?” Mr Watkins asked, sounding a bit worried.

Dr Harcourt shook her head. “Not for one visit! If they got jobs here it would be a different matter.” She turned to us, and said in this really patronising way, “So who’d like to work here?”

Liam’s hand shot up. “Me! I want to drive one of those!”

“Would you like a demonstration of what it can do?” Dr Harcourt asked him.

Suddenly everyone was enthusiastic. Dr Harcourt waved
at the driver of the closest digger, and I saw him raise his hand in reply. There was a roar and blast of diesel fumes as the engine started up. This close, it wasn’t a distant clattery sound, it was like a motorway full of cars; most of us put our hands over our ears because it was so loud.

“Shouldn’t we move back a little?” yelled Mr Watkins.

“It’s perfectly safe!” Dr Harcourt shouted back.

The digger’s arm jerked and lifted, the bucket opening smoothly.

“We have been preparing the site for some time,” yelled Dr Harcourt over the noise, “but it’s only recently that we’ve reached the layers of material we are interested in. These two machines aren’t clearing topsoil any more, they are mining rare earth metals.”

“Do you do all the mining that way?” Ruksar shouted.

Dr Harcourt shook her head, as the digger arm moved through the air and began to lower.

“Impressive as they are, these machines can’t extract enough raw material by themselves. Very soon we are going to start blasting. By which I mean explosive charges will be used to dislodge far greater quantities of material from the hillside.”

“Can we see
that
?” someone shouted. Now the trip was getting better!

But Dr Harcourt shook her head. “The entire site will be cleared, and the explosives detonated by remote control. No one gets to see the blast go up, I’m afraid.”

Behind her, the bucket smashed into the ground with an enormous
thunk
, and everyone in our class jumped. The jaws bit, then closed and lifted. You could see that even though they talked about clay, what the machine was digging was more like soft rock. Chunks fell from the bucket jaws as the arm lifted up again.

“Each scoop of these diggers moves ten tons of material,” shouted Dr Harcourt.

The top of the digger spun on its base, and the bucket jaws opened again, dropping ten tons of rocky clay. The sound rumbled like an earthquake. A cloud of grey-white dust rose up and spread into the air above us.

“I think maybe we are too close,” called Mr Watkins.

Dr Harcourt looked at him. “There’s really nothing to be frightened of.”

But Mr Watkins was right, because now the grey-white dust was drifting down, settling on everyone’s hair and
faces. It was all over me, coating my skin, inside my mouth. People were coughing and wiping their eyes. My eyes started watering, scraping grit every time I blinked, so everything was sparkling and blurred.

You know in
Superman
films, how the kryptonite glows? Well that’s got to be wrong, because kryptonite’s only a chunk of Superman’s planet and you can’t have a whole glowing planet. I bet kryptonite just looks like ordinary rock, otherwise Superman would fly off as soon as he saw it. The rock in the quarry looked ordinary too, and we all thought the dust was just dust.

“You’d be amazed at the quantity of ore-bearing mineral we have to mine, to get usable quantities of metal,” shouted Dr Harcourt over the noise of the digger. “Wouldanyoneliketoguesshowmuch?”

Her words were really fast and close together, her voice high-pitched like a recording sped up. I stared at her. Was she mucking about?

“Areyouallrightthere’snoneedtomakeafussit’sonlyabitof dust,” Mr Watkins said, also at super-high speed.

I stared at them through the dust and tears. What was going on?

Then everything went black.

I read once that black holes have such strong gravity they pull everything towards them, even stars, and if you were in a spaceship you’d just plunge in and nothing you could do would stop it. It was sort of like that. I couldn’t see where I was, but I still had this feeling of falling, like I’d dropped off the top of a skyscraper, at night, with no lights on anywhere, not even stars.

It was really quiet.

My dad always complains during sci-fi films when they have sounds of explosions and spaceships whizzing by.

“It’s a
vacuum
,” he shouts at the TV. “How can you have sound without air?”

Well this was silent, like a vacuum would be. I had my mouth open, screaming, but there wasn’t any sound. Only silence and blackness and me falling. On and on, so I thought it would never end. Then –
bang!
– I was back where I’d been standing.

I stumbled forwards and fell over.

“What are you doing, Gray?” shouted Mr Watkins.

I lay on the ground and thought,
Am I having a stroke? Maybe I’m going mad, right here.

Then I saw everyone else.

Zack had his eyes wide open, and was standing stock-still. Jayden was letting out these squawking noises and Ruksar was sitting with her head on her knees. Three metres – but what felt a thousand miles away – Jared threw up.

The digger engine cut out, and in the sudden quiet I could hear Gav shouting, “Help me! Help me!”

Mr Watkin freaked out, at a super-fast speed.

“What’sgoingon?” he speed-squeaked.

“What’swrongwithallofyou?”

He was shouting at us, shouting at everything, telling us to do one thing, then something else completely. I managed to sit up, my body feeling all strange and stretchy like it wasn’t mine, and then I saw the shapes.

Shapes? What do you mean?

At first I thought it was my eyes, or an earthquake. The ground seemed to be shimmering, something drifting out of it like a heat haze, except the haze was piling up into small pillars instead of drifting away, each one as
tall as a person. You know how snowmen don’t look anything like people, not even the right shape, but if you see them at night they’re still spooky, like they might turn their head as you walk by? Well the shapes were like that. I could feel them watching, even though they had nothing to watch with. I was sure they were closing in on me.

“Mr Watkins,” I croaked, but he didn’t pay any attention because Hayley was screaming. A lot of people were screaming by then, and Mr Watkins was flapping around shouting contradictory instructions.

Only Dr Harcourt seemed calm. Not even a bit worried that we were all going mad and being sick. She was examining us; she looked like she was taking mental notes. It’s weird how now I can remember her being like that, really clearly, but at the time I hardly even noticed because the shapes started making this noise, over and over.