Doctor Who_ The Green Death - Malcolm Hulke [12]
‘A girl?’ said the Doctor. ‘Please stop the lift immediately.’
‘There’s a mate of mine hurt down there,’ said Dave. ‘In some kind of trouble.’
‘All the more reason to stop winding!’ shouted the Doctor. The look on his face was imploring, the tone of voice imperative.
‘Right you are,’ said Dave. He pulled on the brake. Nothing happened. He pulled harder. The wheels of the lift mechanism kept spinning. ‘I can’t stop it,’ he screamed, ‘it’s out of control. Clutch and brake both gone.’
The Doctor noticed an old iron bar lying on the blackened floor. He picked it up and wedged it against the main drum of the machinery. ‘Now reverse the motor,’ he called.
‘It won’t work,’ said Dave. ‘We’ll snap the cable.’
‘Don’t argue, man,’ said the Doctor. ‘It’s their only chance.’ As he spoke he braced himself and pulled harder on the wedged iron bar.
Dave put the electrical motor into reverse. There was a shower of sparks and smoke bellowed out from the machinery. Then it stopped. The Doctor released his grip on the iron rod. ‘That’s done it,’ he said.
‘That,’ said Dave, ‘has seized up the whole works.’
The Brigadier looked at a meter on the wall that showed the depth of either of the twin lifts. ‘According to this, you halted their descent just twenty feet before they hit the bottom. Congratulations.’
‘It’s all right you congratulating us,’ said Dave, ‘but I told you, the machine’s seized solid now. Wherever they are in that lift shaft, they’ve got to hang there until we solve this problem.’
Jo and Bert picked themselves up from the floor of the cage. The force of the sudden stopping had thrown them both down.
‘You all right?’ Bert asked.
‘No bones broken,’ replied Jo. ‘Why have we stopped here?’
‘Maybe I should write a letter to the National Coal Board and ask them,’ said Bert. ‘Seriously, I think it was a brake failure. Can’t happen in theory.’
‘I’ve heard those theories before,’ said Jo. ‘How do we get out of here?’
‘First let’s find out how high we are,’ said Bert. He took a screwdriver from his pocket, and dropped it over the side of the cage into the total darkness below, and listened as it hit the ground beneath. ‘I reckon we’re about twenty feet from the bottom.’
‘A good thing we stopped,’ remarked Jo.
‘Yes. Another two or three seconds and we’d have had our thigh bones up under our arm pits.’ He looked around the cage. ‘I think we may be in luck,’ he said, finding a rope in a coil attached to the wall of the cage. ‘Ever shinned down a rope before, miss?’
‘More than once,’ said Jo. ‘How do we know it’s long enough?’
Bert was paying out the rope, measuring it with the span of his arms. ‘There’s a good twenty feet here.’
‘You only guessed we’re twenty feet from the bottom,’ Jo reminded him.
‘Good point,’ said Bert. ‘It’s a logical young woman you are. So I’ll go first. If I run out of rope and drop ten feet, you may get a chance to fix a couple of those splints you were talking about to two broken legs.’ He attached the rope to the frame of the cage, paid it out over the side, then climbed after it. ‘Don’t forget we’re down here to help a man in trouble, so maybe we should take a risk or two.’
The Doctor completed his inspection of the lift machinery. He wiped his hands on a brightly coloured handkerchief drawn from one of his capacious jacket pockets, and spoke to Dave and the Brigadier.
‘Absolutely correct diagnosis of the situation,’ he said. ‘It’s seized solid. Wherever that lift is hanging in the shaft, it’s going to be there for quite some time.’
‘I noticed coming here,’ said the Brigadier, ‘there are two shafts. Couldn’t we use the other lift?’
Dave shook his head at the simplicity of this English non-miner. ‘It’s a counterweight lift system, man. As one goes down the other comes up. So if one is jammed, the other is jammed, too.’
‘That makes sense,’ said the Doctor, ‘although it doesn’t help very much.’ He scratched the side of his nose and considered the problem. ‘What if we made that other lift independent?’
‘By Jove,’ said the Brigadier. ‘You mean so