'Left is harder, but you're short and flexible,' Iverson said encouragingly.
Anna grunted and pretzeled farther over in the slot that sandwiched her in. The left proved easier. Small blessings. She'd take what she could get. 'I'm loose.'
'Get your body as straight as you can,' Iverson told her. She squirmed her bones into a line. Every movement was dogged by difficulty. Clothing and gear caught and dragged. Her hard hat pulled, choking then blinding her. Fear built. She began to count in her head to drown out the distant buzz of panic, a sound like a swarm of angry bees.
'Okay. Good. Grab my knees and pull yourself the rest of the way in.'
Anna worked her arms back over her head and felt the warmth of Oscar's thighs. Hooking her fingers behind his knees, she dragged herself toward them.
'Watch your light!'
She stopped just before she rammed his groin with the apparatus. 'Caving is not conducive to human dignity,' she grumbled.
'Nope. Just to long and meaningful relationships,' Oscar said, and Anna laughed to let him know she appreciated the effort. 'You're home free. Take off your helmet and push it ahead. Keep going till you come out in a place that looks like it's made of cheese. Wait for us there.'
Inching along like a worm, Anna oozed between Oscar's legs. The passage opened enough so she could roll over onto her stomach, then closed down again so tight she had to turn her head sideways to make any progress. The bees whined, the noise threatening sanity.
She scratched ahead with her toes. Tugged forward with fingertips and stomach muscles. Humped along like a caterpillar, ignoring the rake of stone knives down her shoulder blades. Each foot achieved was a goal to be celebrated. When she thought she couldn't take any more she was granted a reprieve. The Wormhole bored out of the wall into a large room, and she spewed gratefully to the floor.
Oscar Iverson's choice of metaphor had been apt. As if she had entered a mouse's dream of paradise, Anna had arrived into what looked like a giant piece of Swiss cheese. Uniformly pale round passages twisted away in all directions. Without moving she could count twelve openings, some as small as the Wormhole, some big enough to walk through upright. The place was a three-dimensional maze, confusing and disorienting. But it was bigger than a bread box, and Anna contented herself with that.
In less than twenty minutes the men joined her. 'Eight thirty,' Iverson said, looking at his watch. 'We're way slow. Everybody okay to pick up the pace?' Too tired to speak, Anna nodded. Packs were redistributed, and they resumed travel. Again Oscar set a brutal pace. Anna worked until there was no room for thought, for observation, no room even for fear. Holden's promise held true; there were no more creepy crawly bits and only a handful of places they had to chimney or stoop-walk. The earth's interior was so riddled with airspace it was a wonder great tracts of the Trans-Pecos didn't collapse periodically.
Wonders flashed past in a sweating stream, caught in light fragments like views from a rain-streaked train window. Falls of liquid stone the color of old brass emptied into a lake so clear that the bottom, thirty feet down, looked no farther away than Anna's toes. There was no way around it, and the three of them stripped naked lest their filthy clothes sully water kept pure for millennia. Clothing was put in zipper-lock plastic bags to keep it dry. For the climb back out of the water filled room, they donned rubber beach shoes so they would not scar the perfect surface of the flowstone, tumbling in a waterless fall frozen in place for all time.
After the lake, they dressed and laced on their boots for Razor Blade Run. Aragonite bushes, white and as freeform as coral, bloomed in the utter stillness. The slightest touch by a passing caver was enough to snap the delicate crystals. Tunnels of these fragile, razor-sharp feathers were eased through with aching slowness and a constant mantra of 'be careful. Look out. Big one. Take it slow…' from Iverson.
'Watch those big feet. Laymon says Oscar walks like an elephant on a pogo stick…' from Holden.
Anna's legs carried her. Hands grasped rope. She poured water down her throat. Miracles passed by.
By the time they arrived in Tinker's Hell, where Frieda lay, it was after two in the morning. Anna hadn't slowed the cavers down. She hadn't gotten hurt. And she hadn't gone nuts. All in all, a successful day.
Tinker's, where the survey team was camped, was an immense chamber; Shea Stadium could have been tucked inside with room left over for a taxi stand. Anna, Holden, and Iverson entered through a jumbled corridor devoid of decorations and uniformly dirt-colored. The passage emerged halfway between the floor and the ceiling of Tinker's, spilling onto a high balcony guarded by a natural parapet of stone. Oscar was astraddle this wall drinking water when Anna came into Tinker's Hell.
Every muscle in her body melted with fatigue. Aches and pains would come with rest. For the moment she felt only warm and liquid, her mind as pliant as her limbs. With a poorly concealed grunt of exhaustion, she dumped her pack and dragged herself up beside him.
Sixty feet below, in the immense room, was a scene of rampant destruction. Breakdown littered the floor; blocks of limestone, some the size of houses, lay one on top of the other like the building blocks of a spoiled giant flung across his nursery. Amid this majestic rubble were cones and pillars of gold and burnt umber, stalactites and stalagmites that had been growing for countless ages and now lay broken and scattered.
'Jesus,' Anna said. 'Earthquake?'
'Who knows? I've never seen anything like it. But the breaks are old, old, old. Whatever happened, happened a long time ago.'
Holden joined them, his light weaving in with theirs as they looked at the magnificent ruin.
'Yup,' Holden said after a few minutes' study. 'It looks like a bomb hit a tinker's cart. Have you spotted the camp yet?'
From his pack Iverson dug a secondary light source, a powerful six cell flashlight, and played the beam over the jagged floor. Near the end of the great room, on a flat place tucked up near the left-hand wall, his light picked out the litter of humanity. Looking pathetically small and fragile in the confusion of elemental stone, six people lay in sleeping bags. The wrinkled forms were soft and shapeless, like larvae on a deserted patch of beach. The necessities of human existence- packs, stoves, water, and food-were piled neatly at one end of the clearing. The group had been there four days, one since Frieda was hurt. The camp appeared clean and well organized.
'Another twenty minutes and vacation's over,' Iverson said.
They donned packs and started the tedious climb down to the cavern floor. This time Holden Tillman led.
Underground operations had officially commenced.
By the time they neared the camp, Anna was so tired she was stumbling. It was as if her brain, recognizing that the end was in sight, had quit holding her muscles together. The only workable mode of travel across Tinker's Hell was boulder-hopping. At each leap, she found herself keeping her center of gravity closer to the ground. When Dr. Peter McCarty came from the camp to meet them, she was traveling on all fours, the wolfman reverting to type.
McCarty and Tillman exchanged greetings, and introductions were muttered. Anna dredged up a nod. A handshake was beyond her. She was even too far gone to protest when McCarty took her pack to carry it the last ten yards. At that point she doubted she'd have put up much of a fight if he'd offered to carry her.
Even with the stamp of the cave on him and five days from a showerhead, Peter McCarty was a handsome man. Not matinee-idol pretty-Anna would have found that off-putting-but with enough flaws to keep his face interesting. His lips were chiseled but a little too thin, his jaw strong but with a crude boxiness at the angle of the bones. His voice was light but pleasant, with an adenoidal quality to it as if he suffered from a slight head cold. His curling brown hair was thinning at the hairline. Anna guessed his age to be forty, or near enough-it didn't matter.
He and Holden fell into a close, whispered conversation, needing to share information but not wanting to disturb the sleepers. They'd forgotten to douse their helmet lights, and feeling mildly righteous, Anna switched hers off and leached from them as she staggered in last and folded onto the floor. She was too tired even to sleep without being told to and sat lumpishly staring at them as they conversed in tones too low for her to make sense of.
At length, Holden broke away and came over to where she waited, beyond patience and nearly in a state of catatonia.
'Frieda?' she asked.
'No better, no worse.'
