at the end of the device farthest up the man’s arm.
“Some kind of fancy watch?” said Louise.
Reuben clearly decided to ignore this mystery for the moment; he placed his index and middle fingers over the man’s radial artery. “He’s got a decent pulse,” he announced. He then lightly slapped one of the man’s cheeks, then the other, seeing if he could bring him to consciousness. “Come on,” he said in an encouraging tone. “Come on. Wake up.”
At last the man did stir. He coughed violently, and more water spilled from his mouth. Then his eyes fluttered open. His irises were an arresting golden brown, unlike any Louise had ever seen before. It seemed to take a second or two for them to focus, then they went wide. The man looked absolutely astonished by the sight of Reuben. He turned his head and saw Louise and Paul, and his expression continued to be one of shock. He moved a bit, as if trying perhaps to get away from them.
“Who are you?” asked Louise.
The man looked at her blankly.
“Who are you?” Louise repeated. “What were you trying to do?”
“Dar,” said the man, his deep voice rising as if asking a question.
“I need to get him to the hospital,” said Reuben. “He obviously took a nasty hit to the head; we’ll need skull x-rays.”
The man was looking around the metal deck, as if he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Dar barta dulb tinta?” he said. “Dar hoolb ka tapar?”
“What language is that?” Paul asked Louise.
Louise shrugged. “Ojibwa?” she said. There was an Ojibwa reserve not far from the mine.
“No,” Reuben said, shaking his head.
“Monta has palap ko,” said the man.
“We don’t understand you,” said Louise to the stranger. “Do you speak English?” Nothing. “Parlez-vous franсais?” Still nothing.
Paul said “Nihongo ga dekimasu ka?” which Louise assumed meant’, “Do you speak Japanese?”
The man looked at each of them in turn, eyes still wide, but he made no reply.
Reuben rose, then extended a hand down toward the man. He stared at it for a second, then took it in his own, which was huge, with fingers like sausages and an extraordinarily long thumb. He let Reuben pull him to his feet. Reuben then put an arm around the man’s broad back, helping to hold him up. The man must have outweighed Reuben by thirty kilos, all of it muscle. Paul moved to the man’s other side and used an arm to help support the stranger as well. Louise went ahead of the three of them, holding open the door to the control room, which had closed automatically after Reuben had entered.
Inside the control room, Louise put on her safety boots and hardhat, and Paul did the same; the hats had built-in lamps and hearing-protection cups that could be swung down when needed. They also put on safety glasses. Reuben was still wearing his own hardhat. Paul found another one on top of a metal locker and proffered it to the injured man, but before he could respond the doctor waved the hat away. “I don’t want any pressure on his skull until we’ve done those x-rays,” he said. “All right, let’s get him up to the surface. I called for an ambulance on my way over.”
The four of them left the control room, headed down a corridor, and walked into the arrival area for the SNO facility. SNO maintained clean-room conditions—not that it mattered much anymore, Louise thought ruefully. They walked past the vacuuming chamber, a shower stall-like affair that sucked dust and dirt off those entering SNO. Then they passed a row of real shower stalls; everyone had to wash before entering SNO, but that, too, wasn’t necessary on the way out. There was a first-aid station here, and Louise saw Reuben looking briefly at the locker labeled “Stretcher.” But the man was walking well enough, so the doctor motioned for them to continue out into the drift.
They turned on their hardhat lights and began trudging the kilometer and a quarter down the dim dirt-floored tunnel.
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