Thump. Thump. Whock.

“What was that?” asked Christ, lowering his shovel to look at where the noise had come from. The noise that wasn’t thump was strange to him.

Lisa shrugged, and put down his shovel to paw dirt away from where his shovel had made the new sound. Christ peered over Lisa’s shoulder as clods of dirt fell far down below, down through the narrow tunnel…down, down, down. Soon Stock came up, confused as to the clods.

“Why aren’t you shoveling?” he asked, sounding frustrated. For an answer, Lisa aimed his shovel above his head and made the sound again. Whock.

“Christ, what is it?” asked Stock. He was always asking this, because Lisa never made a sound.

“We were digging, Stock,” answered Christ. “And all of a sudden Lisa’s shovel made that noise. Instead of normal. We don’t know what it means.”

“Get Vol up here,” Stock ordered, and Christ nodded and slowly began to make the treacherous way down the tunnel. He was gone for two minutes, during which Stock examined the place Lisa’s shovel had been, and Lisa stood silently, unmoving.

Vol, whose full name was Volcano, came up soon after. “Christ told me about the sound. Do it again, Lisa.” The quiet man obeyed, thwocking his shovel a third time and making that mysterious noise. Vol stroked his chin. “You know what I think it is?” he asked the assembly of dirty, brown-clad, attentive men before him. Even Stock listened when Vol asked a question.

“What is it?” Stock asked.

“It’s something hard,” answered Vol. “But I’m not sure what.” He stroked his chin more. “But I think we need to know what it is before we dig any more.”

Stock nodded. Then, in the booming voice he always used, he hollered down the tunnel, “camp, men! Camp!”

A score of questioning voices from lower in the tunnel. “Camp?” they asked. “Camp? But it’s not time yet!”

“I know!” yelled Stock, “but we’ve got something important to do, so just make camp, willya?”

‘Making camp’ was a mysterious phrase, one that Stock used but didn’t understand. No one had the first time he used it. He had hollered “make camp!” once and everyone asked ‘what does that mean?’ He had shrugged. But now it meant ‘rest.’ So all the men, down in their alcoves carved into the tunnel wall—to keep them from being rained on by dirt from above—rested.

Stock, Christ and Vol remained up in the top of the tunnel, but Lisa was allowed to go down. As soon as the quiet man had left, the other three began a talk. These three were more or less the leaders of this group of men, because they were the ones to stand up and help the others find out what to do.

“So,” said Stock, beginning the conversation as he always did, “what’s the problem?”

“Not so much a problem,” Christ corrected, “as something new.”

“I think,” Vol said, touching the place where the sound had come from, “it is a problem.”

“What is it then?” Stock asked impatiently. Christ raised a hand to calm Stock as a cascade of dirt fell from where Vol’s hand touched the dirt.

“I know what it is,” Vol said after a few moments of silence. “It’s rock.”

“Rock?” Christ asked. The word sounded familiar to him.

“Rock,” repeated Stock, but the word was stranger to him.

“You remember rock, don’t you?” said Vol, a deluge of realization suddenly hitting him. Stock gave him a questioning look, so Vol continued. “It’s like really hard dirt. We’ve hit rock.” Now he picked up his own shovel, because no one went anywhere without their shovels, and whacked the blade against the rock. It made a sharp clang now, because there was no dirt to muffle the sound.

“But what do we do about it?” asked Stock.

“Wait, I think I understand,” Christ interrupted, and then put the blade of his shovel to the steep-sloping tunnel floor. “Is it like,” and he drew a line with the shovel in the dirt, “like a roof over our heads?”

“Roof?” asked Vol.

“Covering us,” said Christ. And he drew little hash marks. “There we are…and here is the tunnel. And the rock is over us. Like that?”

“I think so,” Vol said.

Stock growled. Then he ripped his glove off of one hand and let a drop of spittle fall slowly into it. The other men watched him, serious. They watched the drop fall straight down. “No,” Stock concluded, licking the precious moisture and then putting his glove back on, “we’re digging the right way. How are we going to get past this stuff? How far does it stretch?”

Christ shrugged, and Vol said “I don’t know. The only way we’ll know is to spread out.

Stock’s eyes grew wide, and Christ’s jaw dropped. “Spread out? Are you mad?”

“It’s our only chance.”

“How thick is it?” asked Christ, and now it was Vol’s turn to shrug.

“I’ve got no way of of kn—wait, wait, I think I do. Does anyone have anything to cut with?”

“Need I remind you that all we have is our shovels?” asked Stock grimly. So Vol aimed up with his shovel and hit the rock. The clang came again.

“If that sound changes, then the rock is getting thicker…or thinner.”

“Which is it?” asked Stock impatiently.

“Well, if the sound gets higher, then it’s thinner. Lower, thicker. I think.”

Stock nodded for a minute or two, then, having finished his plan for action, called down the tunnel to the rest of the men: “Break camp! We’re spreading out! Children, Space, Holland? You’re with me. Family, Connie, Booze: you’re going with Christ. Lisa and the rest? You’re staying with Vol to try and break through the rock.

A flood of brown-uniformed men came up the tunnel, crawling like ants along the steep floor. And so they set out in two directions; Stock went with his team, and Christ went with his. Vol stayed behind with the other five men to try and break through the rock.

Christ’s party’s progress was decent. They worked in shifts and kept up a low conversation; not too strenuous while the men were digging, but still interesting enough to take their minds off of the monotony. “Tell us, Christ,” Connie said as soon as he sunk his shovel into the dirt, “what’s going on?”

Christ explained as best he could. Family seemed to understand, and Connie punched the ceiling experimentally in affirmation, but Booze shook his head. “I don’t get it. Why don’t we just dig around it?”

“That’s what we’re trying to do, stupid,” Family said. “But we’ve gotta find out how wide it is. Christ, is it flat? Or rounder?”

“I don’t know,” Christ admitted, as he made room for Connie to dig. “I’m not sure I understand it all, either.”

Family shrugged. “I trust Vol. He’s gotten us this far.”

And so it went; they dug out a horizontal tunnel. They made sure the rock was always above them by tapping with their metal shovel blades, and they made sure they weren’t sloping down by drooling into ungloved palms.

Stock’s team fared about the same. True, there was much less equality and more dictatorship when Stock ran the group, but there was still conversation and shifting of shovellers. Children hummed as he worked. “Why do you do that?” Space always asked as soon as Children started.

“I don’t know,” was usually the answer, but this time the reply was “habit, I guess.”

“Habit?” asked Holland. “What’s habit?”

Children straightened up, a puzzled look on his face. “I’m not sure…hold on while I think about it.” The other men conceded; this happened a lot. There was an odd haze that stretched over much of the language down in the tunnel. Finally Children spoke. “Something…something you do a lot. Just gets to be natural.”

Holland nodded in consent. Just then Stock turned around and saw Children standing. “Shovel, man, shovel. We can’t get around the rock by standin’ around!”

Children was happy with having remembered another word. He seemed to be getting faster at remember what he meant; it used to be annoying, how he couldn’t remember what he’d intended to say. It was a wonder, Children mused, that they’d remembered this much.

‘Shovel,’ for instance. Vol had remembered that one. Much of the short sounds—’as,’ ‘and,’ ‘too,’—had sort of…come. And though Booze and Lisa would ask “what do you mean?” Most of the men understood each other, and others would follow. Stock remembered ‘clothes’ and some words about the men themselves. Children was glad to’ve contributed to the growing collection of meanings.

Children continued to hum as he worked.

Eventually it came time to rest, and all the men gathered at the crux of the tunnel; “safety in numbers” came out of Stock’s mouth, but no one had enough energy to ask what that meant. Fifteen tired, sweaty men gathered together to slump on the sides of their dirt home and close their eyes.

Before falling asleep, Vol recounted the day.

They’d spent much of the time planning a system of attack for the sheet of rock overhead—for now, Vol was pretty sure it was a sheet, not a random boulder. ‘Boulder’ he had recalled shortly after the group had split, but he was still trying to remember another word…a word for a sheet of rock.

Either way: the group searched for a seam in the rock and finally found a place where the material changed colors. Into this they tried to wedge Vol’s shovelblade. They spent hours making an inch-deep dent. The men went to sleep discouraged, and Vol asked Stock if the groups could rotate; the answer was no.

Ah well, though Vol. Stock had been a good leader up until this point, I’m sure he’ll prove right. Vol remembered that first moment. Waking. Birth.

Vol remembered with vivid clarity when he had woken; he had opened his eyes to the faces of Stock and Christ, bending over him. Stock looked angry; Christ looked concerned.

Shaking off the memory of that first day, Vol shut his eyes and went to sleep, but not before remembering the word ‘bedrock.’