'Lights out. Don't move,' Quantrill hissed. A second later they squatted immobile in total blackness as countless bats hurtled past them in a whisper that became a fluttering roar. Sandy uttered one tiny bleat of fear as the sound of their passage grew, yet not once did they feel a single impact. Instead they detected hundreds of feathery touches, hardly more than breaths, against hair, arms, shoulders. The experience, Quantrill thought, was exactly like squatting in a dry waterfall, a spattering fluid cascade of sound without the moisture. The tiny mammals had to be echolocating adroitly to avoid striking them, their squeaks no longer audible to the humans.
For several minutes the waterfall of leathery wingbeats roared around them; then it began to subside.
Finally Quantrill risked the flashlamp again, directed downward now, and saw ghostly flickers wheeling in the room below, some whispering past them. 'Proceeding,' he said quietly, and began the descent anew.
The mottled gypsum surfaces were wet but not slick, hand- and footholds frequent. He saw scars in the scaly gyp, probably made by eleven-year-old Sandy who had braved this ten-meter descent with only a chemlamp. He marveled that she could have navigated this grotto lugging anything heavier than a handkerchief. He saw a featureless floor sloping away, gingerly stepped onto damp sand, realized that water had smoothed away Sandy's footprints.
The others followed quickly, their echoes sharing the void with hollow plops of water in some nearby pool. Quantrill, recalling a spelunker's lecture; 'Could be pockets of quicksand. Water level can rise after a long hard rain.' Occasional vagrant sweeps of flashbeams revealed that the dome was within five meters of the outside world, to judge from black roots that clung to the dome in espalier fashion as though fearing to extend down into the cavern. Quantrill couldn't blame them.
Sandy released her safety line, hurrying past an elbow made by translucent crystalline carbonates, her flashlamp forcing ghostly glows through them. 'My corridor was over — oh Lordy,' she said as the men reached her. Her lamp beam penetrated the two-meter depth of water to reveal a smoothly worn channel, the water wondrously clear except for tiny eddies at its banks. Distorted by refraction, the mouth of Sandy's corridor glowed faintly — half a meter below the. surface.
They searched long and fruitlessly for some alternative passage, one too high or too subtle for a little girl with a chemlamp. They found two crevices, neither large enough for a human body, and returned at last to the slow-moving water that issued from Sandy's submerged corridor. In a week, Quantrill guessed, the water level might dwindle. Or with October rains it might rise further.
Finally he pursued a line of questioning he would have preferred to ignore. How long was the passage?
Perhaps fifteen meters. Did it slope up? Down? No, almost level. It seemed likely, he said, that rising water had forced the bats up from their usual haunts in lower unexplored reaches of the cavern. Was the roof of her treasure room higher than the present water level? Yes, much higher, with ancient water-swept benches like church pews and strange formations like coral or petrified roots that protruded from the upper walls. Sandy could not remember how high she had placed her few treasures. By now they might have been swept away, lodged somewhere downstream, perhaps at the bottom of some drowned abyss. Quantrill persisted: still there was no reason why a strong swimmer couldn't work upcurrent to emerge in her grotto?
No, said Sandy, 'If he were one part fish and nine parts crazy. Neither of you fits that description, I hope.'
'I don' swim that good, compadre. Maybe we can come back with scuba gear, otra vez.'
Quantrill thought of the delays, the risks, and then of Sanger. 'The hell with another time. The water's not too cold, and I'm fresh.' He began to strip, establishing a rope-tug code as he reconnected his harness, preparing his body for the trial with long draughts of air, easing himself through fine sand and refusing to shiver as he tested the current. It was stronger than he'd thought.
Sandy watched his preparations in silence. Her first impulse was to invent some barrier, a white lie to turn Quantrill aside from this imponderable risk. But he claimed to be a good swimmer — and as he stood in abbreviated shorts adjusting his harness to tow the safety line, she felt a swelling surge of confidence.
Beside the tall, slim-hipped, slender-legged Lufo, Ted Quantrill seemed small. But the muscles of his legs and back were distinct bundles of cable flowing beneath the skin. His arms and shoulders possessed the terrible whipcord beauty of a light heavyweight boxer in peak condition. For such a physical specimen, she thought, the drowned tunnel might just be navigable.
As Quantrill clamped the flashlamp handle in his teeth, he heard Sandy's, 'Enjoy your tea-party, Ted.' He nodded without understanding, inhaled again, kicked away toward the hole.
For the first five meters it seemed a cinch, though his elbows scraped painfully against the narrow sides of the tunnel. He hugged the bottom, peering ahead and upward to study the undulating roof in hopes that Sandy had exaggerated the distance.
If anything, she had underestimated. He felt tension on his harness and a flash of anger at Lufo for paying out the line too slowly; rolled slightly, banged his head; nearly lost the flashlamp. Then he was kicking hard again, using his hands for purchase where he could, telling himself he had plenty of time.
After a half-minute struggling against the cur rent he saw a transverse rim of rock ahead with a milky reflective gleam beyond, pulled himself past it, realized he was in a deep pool, so deep that it was for all practical purposes bottomless. But the tunnel roof arched up here, and he saw surface eddies above him, and he rolled onto his side, feeling for the roof. There was none. He forced himself to rise carefully; saw in the sweep of the lamp that he was now in another room; fought the current as he grappled for handholds. In another few seconds he sat on a cold bench of stone, pulling in more line as Lufo paid it out, moving his head to play the flash lamp around.
He hauled in the line quickly, jerked twice, felt two jerks in answer; jerked twice again. Faintly, as though from a great distance, he heard a male shout and a lighter female rejoinder. There was an air passage somewhere, he thought — but a labyrinthine one. No sense in his shouting back — certainly not when it might bring a mountain down on his head.
Quantrill anchored his line around the bole of a stone pillar and made a careful assessment with his lamp, pinned between worry and awe; worry that Sandy's treasures could never be found, awe at the ineffable beauty around him.
Across the pool, a great cream-white formation emulated a pipe organ rising from liquid blackness.
Nearer stood a pinkish gleaming array of translucent stalactites hanging from lips of gypsum in imitation of gigantic Spanish combs. And nearer still, above benchlike tiers smoothed by many floods, an incredible forest of coral-like helictites glowed in flesh tones, thrusting out in all directions in evident unconcern for gravity.
Then, somehow most bizarre of all: a stippled mound like a formation of gleaming orange snow with a child's plastic tea set nestled among its undulations. Quantrill laughed aloud, remembering that he had swapped a lapel dosimeter for those toys in Sonora; remembering also Sandy's ecstasy as she'd pressed them to her breast, six years before. Now he understood her remark about a tea party.
He found a moldy paper tablet and pencils of the old type, a curling polaroid — of himself in profile, for God's sake, aged fifteen! — and then, near a hollow filled with small-caliber ammunition, a finless canister the diameter of a cantaloupe. His heart leaped in recognition; Sandy had correctly identified it.
His footing was treacherous, the little nuke rust-stained; and he could not unsnap the small ribbon chute.
A frayed cable-end trailed a meter long from an electrical pop-disconnect, and Quantrill wondered if there could possibly be any live power cells inside. Would it be damaged by brief immersion in water?
He would have to chance it.
He pulled on the polymer line near the pool's surface, felt it taut, made three quick tugs, heard another shout. Now Lufo knew their goal was very near.
Quantrill folded the nylon ribbon chute into a bundle, thrust it within his body harness, cradled the heavy canister in his arms as he lowered himself into the water and took deep breaths to suffuse his tissues with oxygen. With the current and the heavy canister he would not need to attach his safety line, or so he imagined; and so he made his catastrophic error. He sank down to the lip of stone, saw the drowned tunnel in the light of the flashlamp, and started back. Headfirst.
Without encumbrances he would have had both hands free, might have slowed his progress, might have noticed the stone nubs like stubby fingers that his free harness ring engaged when he rolled side ways halfway down the tunnel. The ring was at his left side but in twisting to free himself he only managed to wrench his harness so that he could not reach the ring. The current was cold, cold, and too swift, and in his struggles he felt the ribbon chute slipping from his harness.
