the thirtieth hour, they knew what it was like to be roasted alive. Head draped with a red-and-white checkered cotton scarf, Ike warned them to keep covered. The NASA survival suits were supposed to wick their sweat to a second layer to circulate and cool. But the humidity inside their suits became unbearable. Soon everyone had stripped to underwear, even Ike in his kayak. Appendix scars, moles, birthmarks all went on display; later the revelations would fuel new nicknames.
Ali had never known thirst like this.
'How much longer?' a voice croaked from the line. Ike grinned. 'Drink,' he said.
They moved on, mouths open. The batteries of their boat motors had run down. They paddled listlessly, spooning at the river.
At one point the tunnel wall became so hot, it glowed dull red. They could see raw
magma through a gash opened in the wall. It arched and seethed like gold and blood, roiling in the planetary womb. Ali dared one glance and darted her face away and stroked on. Its hush was like a great geological lullaby.
The river looped around and through the volcano's searing root system. There were, as always, forks and false paths. Somehow, Ike knew which way to go.
The tunnel began to close on them. Ali was near the end of the line. Suddenly screams issued from the very back. She thought they were under attack.
Ike appeared, his kayak scooting upriver like a water bug. He passed Ali's raft, then stopped. The walls had plasticized and bulged in on the tunnel, confining the very last raft on its upriver side.
'Who are they?' Ike asked Ali and her boatload.
'Walker's guys,' someone answered. 'There were two of them.'
The shouting on the far side of the opening was anonymous. The hemorrhaged stone made a noise like a ship's ribs cracking. The outer sheath of stone splintered, throwing shrapnel.
Walker and his boat of men came paddling from lower down. The colonel assessed the situation. 'Leave them,' he said.
'But those are your men,' Ike said.
'There's nothing to be done. It's already too narrow to get their raft through. They know to retreat if they get cut off.' The soldiers in Walker's boats were lockjawed with fear, veins snaky from wrist to shoulder.
'Well, that won't do,' Ike said, and shot upriver.
'Get back here!' Walker shouted after him.
Ike darted his kayak through the narrowing channel. The walls were deforming by the minute. Part of his checkered scarf touched the walls and caught fire. The hair on his head smoked. He popped through the maw at full speed.
The sides bloated in behind him. The bottom ten feet of the opening fused shut with a kiss. A gap remained open near the ceiling, but it was easily nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit through there. No one could conceivably climb through.
'Ike?' called Ali.
It was as if he had just changed into solid rock.
The new wall quickly choked back the river. Even as Ali's boat of people sat there, the river's bottom grew more exposed, inch by inch. The corridor was filling with steam. It was going to be a race to keep ahead of the deprivation.
'We can't stay here,' someone said.
'Wait,' Ali commanded. She added, 'Please.'
They waited and the riverbed drained lower. In another few minutes their raft would be sitting upon bare stone.
Ali's cracked lips parted. God the Father, she prayed. Let this one go free.
It was not like her. True devotion was not quid pro quo. You never cut deals with God. Once, as a child, she had pleaded for her parents' return. Ever since, Ali had decided to let be what was. Thy will be done.
'Let him live,' she murmured.
The walls did not open. This was not a fairy tale. The stone stayed welded.
'Let's go,' said Ali.
Then they heard a different sound. Dammed on the far side, the river had built height. Abruptly, a jet of water shot through the molten aperture at the top.
'Look!'
Like Jonah being vomited from the whale, one, then two men came blasting from the hole. Sheathed in water, they were protected from the scalding rock and thrown clear into the lower river.
The two soldiers staggered downstream through the thigh-deep water, weaponless, burned, naked. But alive. The raft of scientists returned and pulled the two bleating,
shocked men onto their floor. 'Where's Ike?' Ali yelled to them, but their throats were too swollen to speak.
They looked to the hole of spouting water, and a shape sprang through the torrent. It was long and black with mottled gray, Ike's empty sea kayak. Next appeared his paddle. Ike came last.
He held onto the gunnel of his kayak, half cooked. When his strength returned, he emptied the craft of water and got himself in and came paddling down to them. He was burned, but whole, right down to his shotgun.
It had been the closest of calls, and he knew it. He took a deep breath, shook the water from his hair, and did his best to stop down the big grin. He looked each of them in the eye, last of all Ali.
'What are we waiting for?' he said.
Many hours later, the expedition finished its marathon beneath the seamount. They pulled onto a shoal of green basalt in cooling air. There was a small stream of clear water.
The two lucky soldiers were returned to Walker, naked. Their gratitude to Ike was obvious. The colonel's shame at abandoning them was like a dangerous cloud.
For the next twenty hours, people slept. When they woke, Ike had stacked some rocks to pool the stream for them to drink. Ali had never seen him so happy.
'You made them wait,' he said to her.
In full view of the others, he kissed her on the lips. Maybe that was the safest way he could think to do it. She went along with it, even blushing.
By now, Ali was beginning to recognize the archangel inside Ike's sausage skin of scars and wild tattooing. The more she trusted him, the more she did not. He had an esprit, an air of immortality. She could see how each brush with great risk would serve to feed it, and how eventually even a kiss might destroy him.
Naturally, they called the river Styx.
The slow current lofted them. Some days they barely dipped a paddle, drifting with the flow. Hundreds of miles of shoreline stretched by with elastic monotony. They named some of the more prominent landmarks, and Ali jotted the names down to enter onto her maps each night.
After a month of acclimation, their circadian rhythms were finally synched to the changeless night. Sleep resembled hibernation, profound crashes into dream, REMs practically shaking them. Initially they lapsed into ten-hour stretches, then twelve. Each time they closed their eyes, it seemed they slept longer. Finally their bodies settled on a communal norm: fifteen hours. After that much sleep, they would usually be good for a thirty-hour 'day.'
Ike had to teach them how to pace such a long waking cycle, otherwise they would have destroyed themselves with exhaustion. It took stronger muscles and thicker calluses and constant attention to respiration and food to stay mobile for twenty-four hours or more at a time.
If not for their watches, they would have sworn their biological clocks were the same as on the surface. There were many advantages to this new regimen. They were able to cover vastly more territory. Also, without the sun and moon to cue them, they began to live, in a sense, longer.
Time dilated. You could finish a five-hundred-page novel in a single sitting. They developed a craving
