ground, but that was enough to kill her very dead if she came off. It had required every ounce of effort and concentration not to panic. Easily the most unpleasant experience on rock she had ever had. Some few climbers thrived on free soloing, Hallie knew, but the experience had taught her that she would never be one of them.
Now she did as she had learned to do climbing in the world of light, concentrating on the rock inches in front of her face, breathing deeply and slowly, and using the big muscles in her legs. Foot, foot. Hand, hand. She was about fifty feet down when Bowman called out, “How’re you doing, Hallie?”
“Good! These things are unbelievable, thank God.”
“Thank DARPA.” He was being ironic, but she heard more relief in his voice than she’d expected, and that pleased her. “I’m going to start the others down. They’ll be on different lines, so don’t worry about rockfall.”
The only tricky thing, she found, was peeling the gloves off the wall. If she didn’t do it at just the right angle, they wouldn’t let go. It was like peeling very sticky Velcro strips apart. After almost an hour, about halfway down, she stopped to catch her breath, hanging straight-armed from the glove attachments to let her skeleton take the weight and her muscles rest. At that moment Haight appeared fifteen feet to her left.
“Hey. I am just plain blown away. Can y’all imagine builderin’ with these?”
“I don’t think DARPA would be happy about that. But it occurred to me, too.”
“Do y’all mind if I go on down?”
“My guest.”
Hallie was a good climber and knew it, but she also knew truly artistic work when she saw it. Haight was as smooth as a great ballroom dancer, so effortless did he make the descent seem. It was
Choosing caution over speed, Hallie took another half hour to cover the remaining 250 vertical feet. Finally, she stepped back onto the cave floor, moved away from the base of the cliff, and found a nice, waist-high boulder with a flat top to rest against. Haight, enthralled, was climbing back up. It was nice to have a few minutes alone here, away from the chatter and distractions of the team.
She said to the cave spirit,
Fifteen minutes later, Cahner stepped down onto the cave floor. “Unbelievable.” Panting but obviously pleased, he came to sit beside her. “It makes one wonder what other things they’re doing at DARPA.” He paused. “You are an amazing climber.”
“Thank you. It helps that I started as a teenager and loved it right away. But for a
“He’s something. I caught glimpses of him while I was coming down.”
“Hey, Al, does it seem to you like Rafael is taking a long time on the wall?”
“Yes, now that you make mention of it.”
“Nothing to do but wait, I guess.”
They talked for another ten minutes before Arguello and Bowman dropped down together. Bowman hopped off the wall, then helped Arguello.
When the two of them had joined the others, Haight asked, “How do we get the things off?”
Bowman held up his two open hands in front of his chest, fingers splayed out. “Watch.” He touched the tips of his fingers and thumbs together. For a moment nothing happened; then the gloves appeared to inflate slightly. Bowman slipped them easily from his hands. “They neutralize each other’s forces when aligned in a certain way, as I just demonstrated. Go on, try it.”
It felt to Hallie like the loosening of a blood pressure cuff, and the gloves did slip off easily after that. She watched while Bowman brought his feet together, touching the inside surfaces of his overshoes to each other. They loosed just as the gloves had, and he removed them with a light pull. It made her think of Dorothy, clicking her heels in
“We need to keep moving,” Bowman told them. “Hallie, what’s the route from here?”
“This level chamber we’re in now ends after a couple of hundred yards. There’s an exit passage we named Frankenstein’s Staircase because that’s what it’s like—a series of big shelves interrupted by vertical down-climbs. That runs for about a half mile. Then we hit Satan’s Anus.”
“It
He and the others were standing around a ragged-edged pool twenty feet in diameter through which black water swirled. On the pool’s far side, blank cave walls rose straight up, barring any farther progress on the surface.
Bowman unwrapped a chocolate bar, broke off equal sections, and handed one to each of the others. After chewing a bite he looked around and said, “Anybody else feeling it?”
“For sure,” Haight said. They two of them looked at the others.
“Yep,” Hallie acknowledged.
“Indeed,” Cahner said.
“Oh, yes,” Arguello said.
Hallie knew what “it” was. A slowly but steadily increasing sense of—how to describe it?—“dread” was the best word she could think of. It was the caving analogue to what climbers called exposure, by which they meant a fear of falling that grew sharper and harder to ignore with every vertical foot climbed. She had felt it before in very big caves and was feeling it now, a gnawing anxiety that kept her looking over one shoulder or the other and intensified with every foot they down-climbed. It was annoying but not a serious hazard—as long as the thing stayed in its cage. Broken free, it could devour sanity in an instant.
“I always think it’s best to talk about such things,” Bowman said. “Helps defuse them.”
“What exactly is happening?” Arguello asked.
“Remember back at BARDA we talked about the Rapture?” Hallie said. “This is how it starts. It’s manageable now. But at some point it might not be. And it’s different for every person, so you need to pay very close attention to how you’re feeling, because once it hits, you go around the bend in two heartbeats and it’s really hard to come back. The key is to understand what’s going on before that happens.”
“But what if one of us does feel it coming on?” Arguello asked. “What can be done?”
“The only thing that helps is going up. So you’d have to ascend on your own until you felt better and wait for the rest of us to pick you up on the way back out.”
Arguello shuddered. “I do not know which would be worse,” he said. “Losing the mind or spending days alone in here waiting.”
“Hobson’s choice,” Hallie said, and could think of nothing worth adding. Nor, apparently, could the others. They stood around quietly after that, munching snacks, drinking from their poly bottles. After ten minutes, she spoke again:
“Let me brief you on the dive. We go in here. The entrance to the sump is like dropping down into a manhole for about twenty feet. Then the tunnel slopes at forty-five degrees, passing through the underwater face of that wall over there, drops to eighty feet, levels off, and continues straight for about two hundred feet. At that point, it makes a sharp turn to the right and narrows. If we were diving on conventional scuba, we’d have to doff our tanks and push them ahead of us. That’s how we got through on my first trip, and it was not fun. But with these new rebreathers, we should be able to pass through.”
“Wait a second. How narrow is
“After the right turn, the tunnel shrinks to about five feet in diameter. Big enough to pass through with the packs—barely—but not big enough to turn around in. Any problems before the halfway point, you have to back your way out. I don’t recommend it. It stays level like that for three hundred feet, then rises at an easy angle for about five hundred feet. That long, slow ascent takes care of any decompression obligation, so you won’t want to hurry there. You’ll surface in a place we named Grand Central Cavern.”
“About the rebreathers.” Bowman held up his own. “We briefed in Reynosa, but let’s do a quick check again. They have heads-up displays for all critical functions. Self-activating, triggered by submersion. Basically all you have to do is breathe and swim.”
“A couple of other things,” Hallie said. “The silt in here is really bad. We don’t have fins so we’ll be pulling
