The Milestone Pointing to the Gold Vein
Wishville.
Ee-eeek! Ee-eeek! Ee-eeek! Ee-eeek!
Every time the sand-laden wind blew through, the sign hanging from the old wooden buildings gave a protesting creak.
Beyond the paint-stripped window frames, the shops stood empty.
Only the occasional pickup truck rumbled by, its rusted body rattling over the road.
This place, once a thriving mining town, had now been reduced to a shell.
And in the middle of that desolation stood a towering steel structure, impossible to miss.
Thirty meters high.
A latticework tower of iron beams, all of it tangled in red rust and black grease.
At the top, pulleys and wire were knotted together in a complicated web, and from the tower’s core a thick steel pipe plunged straight down into the earth.
At its base, a black diesel generator three times the size of a truck engine grumbled and churned.
Rumble—rrrroooom······
Black exhaust pouring from the stack mixed with the dust and rose into the sky.
At the tower’s waist—about five meters above the ground on the work platform—oil-smeared laborers clung to it like ants, assembling something piece by piece.
On one side of the platform, a metal plaque hung with the following inscription:
<Model: National 110-UE>
<Serial No.: 91-3021>
<Maximum Depth: 10,000 feet>
.
.
A multipurpose drilling rig capable of boring down to a maximum depth of 3,000 meters.
At the foot of the derrick sat a massive rotating disc fitted with countless drill bits around its edge, grinding through bedrock and chewing its way downward into the earth.
With nothing better to do, the old men of Wishville had gathered one by one to watch the enormous rig at work.
They were the typical “rednecks,” sunburned from plowing fields and driving cattle under a blistering sun until the backs of their necks had turned raw and crimson.
One old man, chewing his tobacco as he stared up at the tower, jabbed the man beside him in the ribs and snickered.
“Hell, you’d be better off taking that money to Las Vegas and spinning the roulette wheel. At least they give you free drinks there, don’t they?”
“No kidding. That ground dried up fifty years ago. I don’t know what idiot is digging now, trying to find gold in it······”
“Exactly. Has anything ever come out of here since our granddaddy’s time? Not a damn thing.”
“Renting all that equipment must cost a few thousand bucks a day. Tsk tsk—if you’re gonna waste money like that, you might as well hand it to me.”
“Dig all you want. All you’ll get is worms and muddy water.”
“Hmph. If no gold comes out, they’ll have to sell all that equipment for scrap anyway. Let’s just wait and see them cry about it.”
They were the sort of ordinary small-town Americans who found meaning in the day by sneering at anyone trying to make something of themselves.
***
Meanwhile, I was seated inside the trailer—the mobile office—about fifty meters from the site.
“······”
It was a converted steel container, roughly ten meters long and three meters wide.
Inside was nothing more than a folding desk, two pipe-frame chairs, maps and diagrams stuck to the walls, and a radio set in the corner.
There was no air conditioner, only a ceiling fan turning endlessly overhead.
The front page of the newspaper I had been reading fluttered in the draft.
1.2 Million Manufacturing Jobs Vanish, Crisis Hits the Rust Belt
The Rust Belt—literally, the “rusted belt.”
From the Great Lakes coast through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, all the way to the Midwest reaches of Illinois, this was the new name for what had once been called the heart of American manufacturing.
There had been a time when the factories of giants like GM, Ford, and US Steel crowded the landscape, and the smoke pouring from their stacks was treated as the very symbol of prosperity.
And now?
······There’s no mercy. The recession kicked in, plain and simple.
Detroit’s auto plants, outcompeted by Japanese cars, were shutting down, and Pittsburgh’s steel mills, undercut by imported Chinese steel, were rusting away.
Workers lost their jobs and left; in the cities where the population had dwindled, only empty houses and abandoned factories remained.
It had taken just twenty years for the belt of prosperity to turn into a belt of red rust.
I read on.
<······Robert McCauley, 58, who kept the furnaces of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, running for 34 years, signed his retirement papers last month. He had a corporate pension that was supposed to pay him $2,400 a month. He and his wife had planned to buy a small house in Florida and spend their remaining years there. But earlier this month, the company filed for bankruptcy. The pension fund had already been emptied, and the new amount notified to him after the Federal Pension Guaranty Corporation took over was $680 per month. Last week, McCauley had to cash in the savings he had set aside for his grandchildren’s college tuition. Even that wasn’t enough, so he put up the house where he’d lived for more than forty years. A region once called “the heart of America” was now becoming an unwanted burden······>
These tragedies announcing the downturn came every day now, until they had become routine.
Flap—
I folded the paper and looked out the window.
The window gave a full view of the site.
Beyond the chain-link fence at the perimeter, a few battered pickup trucks had stopped.
Old men from the town and long-haul truckers leaned against the fence, staring this way.
Mocking gestures, body language, faces twisted with ridicule.
I couldn’t make out the details of their conversation from this distance, but I could guess the gist of it well enough.
Go ahead. Laugh all you want. It keeps my competitors from sniffing around here.
People laughing at you is a good thing.
It makes a fine smokescreen, one that keeps sharp-eyed rivals from looking too closely.
I shifted my gaze and looked down at the papers spread across the desk.
They were the underground deep-scan data Armstrong had sent over.
White and yellow contour lines tangled densely across a black background on the diagram.
At the center, one point had been circled in red pen.
The first page of the report read:
///////
<Lower section of Wishville No. 2 Shaft>
- Target depth: 350 meters (approx. 1,150 feet)
- Detection result: strong resistivity anomaly detected at this point
- Electrical resistance markedly lower than surrounding granite strata
- Analysis: typical characteristics of a hydrothermal alteration zone
- Conclusion: quartz vein highly likely to exist.
.
.
///////
Armstrong’s report was telling me there was a vast quartz vein beneath this ground.
And what did the existence of a quartz vein mean?
The answer was obvious.
Gold.
Gold never existed alone.
Deep underground, scorching hydrothermal water—more than 300 degrees Celsius—rose along cracks in the rock over millions of years.
That water carried metals like gold, silver, and copper dissolved in ionic form, and when it moved closer to the surface and the temperature and pressure dropped, those metals began to precipitate.
At that point, gold almost always crystallized together with silica—quartz—and what formed was a quartz vein.
Most people in the world never got the chance to actually see the gold veins buried inside a mine.
For them, I could put it simply: every gold vein in the world is basically a long, massive white lump of quartz with little yellow grains of gold studded through it.
Carlin in Nevada, Witwatersrand in South Africa, Kalgoorlie in Australia······ every giant gold mine that ever spat out real money was built on that structure.
That was why, among miners, there had long been a saying:
“Follow the quartz, find the gold.”
Flap—
I checked the graph attached on the second page.
The horizontal axis was depth; the vertical axis was electrical resistivity.
From the surface down to 300 meters, the curve was relatively gentle, but around 340 meters the values suddenly bent downward.
- Sharp resistivity drop zone: 340–360 m
- Interpretation: mineral-bearing rock layer or fluid-saturated zone present
- When gold is present in a quartz vein, conductivity rises and resistivity falls
- Similar case: same pattern observed at the discovery of Nevada’s Carlin mine.
.
.
···Thunk!
I shut the report and looked out at the derrick.
Something was down there, at the 350-meter mark.
Something no one had been able to touch for the last seventy years because the technology simply hadn’t been there.
Then Armstrong’s voice came through the radio.
Prepare to drill!
Outside, the site suddenly came alive.
Laborers in helmets and work clothes scattered to their positions.
In the field, these men were called “roughnecks.”
The nickname, meaning “rough necks,” had originated in the Texas oil fields in the late nineteenth century.
Workers at drilling sites performed hard physical labor under the blazing sun for twelve hours a day, and the crude oil and dust that rained over them stained the backs of their necks black.
That grime, impossible to wash away, became the symbol of the job, and out of a kind of self-mocking pride, the men had started calling themselves roughnecks.
Everyone on site belonged to the SalmonPink BirdEater Company.
They were an elite drilling crew made up entirely of veterans with at least ten years of experience.
Armstrong climbed up onto the drill floor—the work platform about halfway up the rig—and lifted a megaphone.
“Mud pump pressure!”
“1,200 psi, within normal range!” the derrickmen shouted from below.
For reference, a derrick is the tower itself.
The word comes from Thomas Derrick, a seventeenth-century English executioner, because the gallows he used in Tyburn, London, resembled a towering frame.
So although this was now a tower that pulled oil from the earth, its origin lay in a hanging scaffold.
Maybe that was why every derrickman on this rig carried himself with such tense discipline.
“Drill bit status!”
“Diamond bit installed! No wear!”
“Rotary table!”
“Standing by! Ready to spin at any time!”
The rotary table was the huge, disc-shaped turning mechanism installed at the base of the derrick.
A steel plate about 1.5 meters in diameter gripped the countless pipes descending into the ground and spun them with brutal force.
At the ends of those rapidly rotating pipes were diamond-studded drill blades—the “bit”—capable of grinding even the hardest bedrock into powder like tofu.
Armstrong gave me a hand signal through the trailer window.
He drew a circle with both hands, then gave a thumbs-up.
The signal for ready.
I picked up the radio on the desk and pressed the transmit button.
“Good. Let’s begin, team leader.”
Armstrong gripped the control levers installed beside the drill floor.
Grrrrrrr······ krunnn······ thunk! thunk! thunk! Kwa-kwakwakakakakakakak!
For the record, the diesel powering this giant machine had also come from the oil field I had opened up.
In other words, I was using crude pumped from my own field to run heavy equipment that would dig gold out of a gold mine.
Koo-dududududududud!
I could feel the faint vibration of the ground all the way inside the trailer.
The rotary table began to turn slowly.
The steel pipe locked into the iron disc rotated with it, letting out a low metallic groan.
Kwajijijijik! Pwo-kwa-kwakakakakakakakak!
With a tsunami of dirt, the first diamond drill blade was sucked down into the earth.
As the derrickman sent the pipe down, the workers waiting below on the drill floor received it and connected it to the existing string.
They were called floormen.
Once the connection was complete, the massive blade spun again, and the rig descended another nine meters in a single stage.
Mining was usually just the repetition of that process.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Kwangkwakwakakakakakakak! Bang! Bang! Bang! Kwangkwakwakakakakakak! Bang! Bang! Bang! Kwangkwakwakakakakakak! Bang! Bang! Bang! Kwangkwakwakakakakakak! Bang! Bang! Bang! Kwangkwakwakakakakakak!
Regular metallic blows shook the earth.
Fountains of dirt shot upward, and the sound of the diamond blades grinding through the layers of rock rang out across the site.
I checked the numbers on the instrument panel on the desk.
The depth displayed on the monitor was steadily rising.
30 meters, 50 meters, 80 meters······
The target was 350 meters, so there was still a long way to go—no, a long way down.
***
By the time the western ridge had caught the sun, four hours had passed since drilling began.
I was still seated in the trailer, watching the gauges.
The current depth shown on the monitor was 150 meters.
At that rate, things were going quite smoothly.
The faint vibration in the ground kept a regular rhythm, and the engine sound from the derrick remained stable.
Then—
···Puff!
Suddenly, a heavy jolt traveled through the soles of my feet.
Armstrong’s urgent voice burst from the radio.
There’s a lot of water, and the pressure is higher than expected!
An aquifer.
A rock layer underground where water has collected deep below the surface.
When a drill hole punched through one of these layers, the groundwater, compressed under enormous pressure, would burst back through the hole, forcing up the bit in an attempt to blow the opening apart.
That was called a kick.
If you didn’t catch a kick in time, the water flowing below ground and the gas trapped in open cavities could mix all at once and erupt in a blowout.
If a blowout happened, a column of water or gas dozens of meters high would shoot into the air, and the site above would be turned into a wreck.
Some people might wonder what was so terrifying about a combination of “water and gas,” and not fire and gas—but that was a view held by someone who knew only one half of the problem.
The bullets of water sprayed in every direction by enormous pressurized gas were no less powerful than a machine gun raking across a battlefield.
If it was easier to understand as a water jet capable of cutting industrial diamonds, that would be close enough.
Water fired at ultra-high pressure could pierce and tear through anything.
And if that wasn’t a thin jet but a wave—a tsunami—rushing in?
······There’d be no more horrific disaster than that.
Just four years earlier, an explosion caused by this very sort of blowout had killed 167 people at a gas field in Britain.
But I’d already predicted this.
I looked out over the site through the window.
The pipes locked into the rotary table were jerking violently.
Gray mud was overflowing from the huge tank beside the drill floor—the mud tank.
This mud was a special fluid called drilling mud.
It was a gray, viscous liquid made by mixing bentonite clay with water, and the workers pumped it down through the pipe to send it deep below the surface.
And yes, this was the same bentonite used in cat litter.
The same stuff that got slippery and sticky when it met water, then hardened over time.
Ssshhhh······
The heat from the rapidly spinning drill bit was quickly cooled by the slick mud.
It also carried rock chips and soil debris cleanly back to the surface as it circulated.
And most importantly, that heavy liquid was suppressing the gas surging up from underground cavities.
“Increase mud weight! Add barite!” Armstrong ordered the crew.
Barite.
This gray powder, almost white in color, was barium sulfate.
Mixed into the drilling mud, it made the mud much heavier.
Once the heavier mud traveled down the pipe into the earth, it could force back gas or groundwater trying to surge upward simply by weighing it down.
The workers hauled fifty-kilogram white sacks out of the storage shed and dumped them into the tank like madmen.
The mixer roared to life, and the mud—now with an extremely high specific gravity—was pumped down underground.
The force of the erupting water column visibly weakened to the naked eye.
One minute passed like ten.
Cough! Cough! Thud······ Cough! Cough! Cough! Cough!
The pump, which had been trembling like it was gasping for breath, gradually settled down.
The shaking pipes steadied again.
The needle on the pressure gauge slipped out of the red danger zone and returned to the green, normal range.
Armstrong’s voice came over the radio again.
[We’ve passed the aquifer! Borehole stabilized!]
The mud had clumped together and sealed off the aquifer completely.
As expected, a veteran was a veteran.
I unclenched the hand that had been gripping the edge of the desk.
“Good work, team leader. Continue.”
[Roger that, boss!]
The stabilized rig picked up speed again.
***
By the time they had passed through the aquifer and drilled deeper still, night had fallen over the surface.
···Bang! ···Bang! ···Bang! ···Bang!
Light towers were switched on across the site.
White beams lit up the entire derrick as brightly as daylight.
I opened the trailer door and stepped outside.
The cool night air brushed my face.
I walked over to the shale shaker installed on one side of the site.
The shale shaker was the device that filtered out what came up from underground.
When rock fragments brought up with the drilling mud spilled across the vibrating wire mesh, the sieve-like screen trembled and shook, letting the liquid fall through while leaving the solid fragments on top.
The filtered fragments were pushed aside and piled onto a metal tray.
These fragments were called cuttings, and they were evidence of what stratum the drill was currently tearing through.
Armstrong, having come down from the rig, picked up one of the fragments from the tray with a gloved hand.
Under the light towers, he inspected the broken face of the rock.
“Granite. Just as expected—very hard strata.”
Gray stone dust fell from his fingertips.
Precambrian granite.
Rock formed hundreds of millions of years ago.
It had a fearsome reputation for hardness, but before the heavy equipment of the SalmonPink BirdEater Company equipped with Texas granite diamond bits, it was being sliced apart like butter.
I asked, “What’s the current depth?”
“280 meters. Seventy left to the target.”
I nodded and went back into the trailer.
The numbers on the gauge kept climbing steadily.
290 meters, 300 meters, 310 meters······
The moment the depth meter hit 340 meters—
Kwaaang—! Kkagagagak!
The entire trailer shook with a shriek of metal so loud it felt like it was tearing my ears apart.
I shot to my feet and ran to the window.
The rotary table was jerking violently upward, letting out a scream of scraping steel.
The entire derrick swayed as if it had been caught in a storm.
Armstrong’s shout burst from the radio.
Kill the engine! Shut it off, now!
The engine stopped, and the pipe, still spinning from its own momentum, gave a squealing groan before finally coming to rest.
I kicked open the trailer door and ran toward the site.
Armstrong was crouched in front of the shale shaker, examining the fragments that had just come up.
In his hand was a piece of gray granite, and embedded in the crack was a single transparent crystal that flashed like glass under the light towers.
“Quartz! Quartz has come up! Finally!”
What Armstrong held in his hand was a transparent crystal lodged in a gray fragment of granite.
A hexagonal mineral gleaming like glass in the floodlights.
I took it from him and examined it closely.
Quartz, a mineral crystallized from silica, SiO2.
When it is transparent, it’s called rock crystal, and depending on its impurities, it can also be cut into various gemstones such as amethyst, citrine, or rose quartz.
Quartz itself was already useful in quite a few ways.
For one, it was a raw material for glass and ceramics; thanks to its piezoelectric properties, it also went into quartz watches and radio oscillators.
Because it had excellent heat and acid resistance, it was essential in semiconductor manufacturing equipment and fiber-optic components, and it was also used in construction countertops and abrasives······ a mineral with almost nothing to throw away.
But quartz’s value right now was not in any of that.
Quartz is the milestone and the gatekeeper, telling us there’s a strong chance of gold here.
That was why Armstrong and the rest of the technicians were buzzing with excitement.
Finding quartz in such a clear crystal form meant the drill had punched through the edge of the quartz vein and was driving toward its center, and what lay inside that center was······.
“Let’s drill ten more meters.”
We’d know the moment we cracked it open.