Somebody Maintains This

Hiro is on the other side. It is sixteen degrees and raining. The ground is mud where it should be red dust, and somewhere down the valley there are lights. He does what he always does. He counts. Forty-one lights, which makes it a town. Then forty-two — and the forty-second one is moving. Back on Earth it is 06:14 and nobody has moved since the power came back. By 11:40 the mine belongs to the Commonwealth. By nightfall his crew are outside the wire, and the only man who knows what is through the gate has been gone eleven hours. Twenty pages.