Gunther's Cavern

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by Edward Etzkorn


  “He’s in a cave. He’s been kidnapped.”

  No, Dicey told herself. The girl’s nuts—everybody knows it. She couldn’t possibly have been in contact with Gunther.

  And yet, she and Kelila were in some way kindred spirits. Like Dicey, Kelila believed in a dimension beyond the one that greeted her senses each morning. “Who kidnapped him, Kelila?”

  “I can’t tell for sure. Aliens. But not really aliens. But not normal creatures either.”

  Thank you for clearing that up. “Is anybody else with him?”

  Kelila nodded vigorously. “A lot of kids. June. And others. I think they’re the kids that disappeared from New Calar. I see Serge—but he’s not right. Something’s happened to him.”

  Thank God Cathy stopped where she did, Dicey thought. “Is June okay?”

  “June’s fine. She’s mad at Gunther, though. I feel a lot of negative energy coming from her.”

  Dicey tossed her shoulders. Yeah, so? “So what do we do to find them?”

  “We have to find the cave.”

  Dicey stopped in her tracks. “There really is a cave?”

  Kelila looked back at her as if Dicey were one of Lola’s “Special Needs” kids. “Isn’t that what we’re looking for?”

  “Yes, but … Of course.” She started walking again. “Yes, Kelila. That’s what we’re looking for.”

  The spring with its miniature waterfall and surrounding swamp looked refreshing and beautiful. Dicey felt ashamed she’d never seen it before. It formed a perfect Zen hideaway, and she swore to whatever God was listening to her thoughts that she would visit here more often—perhaps even write some poetry here. But on one condition, and one condition only. If He wanted to hear her poetry, He had to help her find the cave entrance.

  Some fifteen meters above the waterfall, at the edge of the swamp, Zeke sat atop his machine. As if to remind her and her searchers of his presence, he revved his engine.

  When Dicey looked his way, he made the sign of the cross. “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida, baby,” he sang. He shook his head in appreciation. “Garden of Eden. Beautiful.”

  His demeanor made her feel confident, and oddly comfortable. “Where are my children, Zeke?” she cried out, as if he knew every answer.

  “I can’t smell out children,” he said, sadly. “But like I told you—I can smell out caves. And we’re close. Very close. You’re the one who’s got to pick out our starting point. Picture you’re looking for a baseball that someone hit into the hay before it was cut. Pick your most likely spot, and line everybody up. Have them walk arm in arm in ever-widening circles. Anything looks out of place—stop and check it out.” He pointed a finger in her direction. “If people have to walk in the swamp, so be it. If they get covered with mud or muck—such is life.”

  His voice grew louder as he extended his arms toward the heavens. One by one, in rapid succession, all the heads in the group turned to look at him. “Yea, if we walk the swamps and grottoes of trial and tribulation, Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has been there before us! He will show us the Way. Lord Jesus, show us the Way!”

  For about the fifth time this short morning, Dicey felt as if she would cry. “You should have been an evangelist,” she murmured.

  “I am an evangelist. WCAV, Hour of Power. You never heard me?”

  Resisting an urge to genuflect, Dicey shook her head. “No.”

  “Sundays at 7. Be there. Aloha. Else Jack Lord in heaven will beat the holy crap out of you.”

  She choked back her tears, smiled, laughed, then turned away to focus on the task ahead. A quick glance around her revealed all her workers watching her, looking toward her for guidance. In particular, she registered Spike’s ridiculous smile. Why was he not leading this venture? Why did things always fall on her?

  “Pick your spot,” Zeke called her. “Call on the Lord for help.”

  Kelila stepped up beside her. “Mrs. Cowley, I’m not the Lord. I’m not even Yahweh or Allah. I’m not even Christian. But I think I can help.”

  Dicey breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank you, Kelila. This is all a bit overwhelming. I’d like your help.”

  With a meek smile, the girl bowed her head. She looked up toward the sky, then down toward the ground. She shut her eyes, then opened them. Like a dervish, she began turning, spinning in a counterclockwise motion. Faster, faster, faster—then stopped. Again, slower. Slower. And stopped again. When she opened her eyes, she was looking at a huge rock that seemed to be guarding the stream. “There,” she said, pointing.

  The spot corresponded precisely with the spot Dicey herself had selected. The giant rock.

  Dicey clapped her hands as if she were about to begin a poetry reading. “Okay, everybody—we’re going to start at that rock. We’re all going to line up next to each other and lock arms. The rock will be our focal point. From there, we go around in a circle. There’s no hurry. If anybody sees or feels or kicks something unusual, we all stop and wait until we check it out. If we finish that circle and haven’t found anything, we regroup at the outside edge of the circle and go around again. We keep on going around, further and further out, until we find it.”

  The searchers gravitated in the direction of the rock, but seemed uncertain how to begin. All at once Spike darted forward. “I claim the rock!” he announced.

  Like the overgrown kid he was, he darted across the waterfall and over the cataract that ran down from it. Patting the rock as if it were a family friend, he held out a hand and waved it in invitation. Lucky Cohen leaped to grab on, followed by Vern and Cal. Within thirty seconds, all the rescuers had linked arms.

  As Dicey linked arms with Kelila, she heard Cal’s voice. “That’s an odd-looking rock, Spike. Look how the moss starts a few feet up. You’d think it would start right at ground level.”

  She turned to see Spike shrug. “Yeah. Guess it’s got something to do with the flow of the stream.”

  Uncertainty filled Cal’s voice. “Maybe.”

  All at once—Dicey could not have said where the impetus began—the circle of parents and friends began to move in a slow counterclockwise circle around the rock.

  Focus, she told herself. Hear your children.

  Dad, are you there? It’s Eurydice, the Weird One. The one most like you.

  CHAPTER 15

  “As you already know, tardigrades are microscopic animals. They usually grow to be about one millimeter long, but big adults can reach one and a half millimeters—sometimes even two.”

  Rad’s voice conveyed a sense of urgency. She spoke as if she were taking an oral exam with a favored teacher whom she had to impress. She, Gunther, Hood, and June sat cross-legged in The Sink, a craterlike depression in the rock at the foot of the cliff twenty or thirty meters from the group’s sleeping area. Hood’s eyes shifted tentatively from her to Gunther and back again, while June stared with mistrust first at her, and then at Hood and Gunther.

  “Without a microscope, they look like periods or commas wiggling on a page, but with even a scanning microscope you can see them easily. For over a hundred years, people have called them ‘Water Bears.’ Partly because under the microscope they look like cute little teddy bears, partly because they have to be surrounded by a film of water so they don’t dry out.”

  “Cute little teddy bears,” June scoffed, sounding like Billy.

  “They have to be surrounded by a film of water,” Gunther repeated, trying to focus his attention on Rad and ignore the others. June’s attitude in particular irritated him. All their lives they’d been best friends as well as siblings. Now her skepticism unnerved him. It had something to do with Rad, he was sure. He himself had to keep focusing on the words, rather than the person. Something about Rad made him feel like butter spread on toast.

  “Yes,” Rad said. “If they’re not surrounded by a sheen of water they’ll dry out and either die or go into a sort of hibernation—cryptobiosis, it’s called. Most of the time, they’ll go into cryptobio
sis. They’re hard to kill. They can live in the most extreme environments you can imagine—like Antarctica or the Himalayas. Scientists have recorded them as living in temperatures as low as minus 80 degrees Celsius.”

  June spouted her disbelief. “That’s minus 112 degrees Fahrenheit.”

  “Exactly,” Rad said.

  Hood chuckled. “Whatever, little sister. It’s freaking cold.”

  Several laughs came from The Sink’s borders, and Gunther realized that more and more kids were sliding in behind them. Tiff had already insinuated herself between Hood and June, and Kara had somehow seated herself beside Gunther. He hadn’t heard her approach, nor felt her touch.

  “So why are these tardigrades so big?” Gunther asked. “Or are they really something else, and not tardigrades?”

  “Oh, they’re really tardigrades,” Rad answered. “I think we have to assume that what they told you is correct. They’ve been evolving down here under the earth’s crust for a hundred thousand years. They’ve grown a little bit in size during that time, and their brains and inner organs have evolved.”

  “A little bit!” came Rocky’s voice.

  A titter of laughter spread throughout the group.

  “Like people.”

  A pause followed. Heads turned, trying to identify the speaker.

  Kara gulped, then continued. “We know that people came out of Africa. The interesting thing is that there’s more DNA variation between southern Africa and the Serengeti Plain than there is between the Serengeti Plain and Asia or the Americas. We white Europeans are tied closer to our African ancestors than are people in other parts of Africa.”

  Another moment of silence followed. Then, from Rocky VII:

  “Hood! You really are my brother!”

  Laughter followed, which Gunther interrupted, afraid of losing control of the discussion. “Stop! Stop! We’re all Brothers! Or Sisters! Back to the Tardies. So Rad—like how do they keep from drying out? What do they eat? Do they sleep? Do they, like”— he gritted his teeth—“mate?”

  “I haven’t seen any baby Tardies,” June commented.

  Gunther glanced at her, to see that her face had become once again the face of his sister, the face he knew and loved. The skepticism had evaporated, replaced by her usual curiosity.

  “I don’t know about tardigrades down here in the cave,” Rad continued. “Maybe they all belong to the same species. But above ground, there are at least 400 species of them. They feed through a buccal apparatus—that mouth-like thing on the top of their heads. They have a stylet inside the buccal apparatus that can pierce other creatures’ cells and suck the fluid out of them. Most tardigrades feed on primitive plants, but a few eat microscopic animals. They usually just suck the fluids out of them and leave the outer membrane, but a few species swallow other animals whole, or are cannibalistic.”

  “Eat me, baby!” Rocky quipped.

  Gunther wished someone would suck his brain. Probably not enough there to make a meal.

  “There are male and female tardigrades. Species differ in how the males fertilize the eggs, but usually the females lay from three to thirty eggs at a time. If conditions are right, baby tardigrades hatch within two weeks. If the eggs find themselves in a hostile environment, they can lie dormant for years, even get blown away and hatch a hundred miles away, a hundred years later.”

  “How do you tell a male tardigrade from a female?” came Sass’s voice.

  “It’s hard even under a microscope,” Rad answered. “And some species …”

  “Only another Tardy knows for sure,” said Rocky.

  Rad clucked her tongue. “Some species are hermaphrodites—each individual has both male and female organs. And some are parthenogenic—just one single animal can give birth to more.”

  Several embarrassed laughs followed.

  Ignoring the laughter, Gunther struggled to process Rad’s information as fast as he received it. Although he found her information fascinating, his brain persisted in looking for some weakness in the tardigrades’ life system that he could exploit to help him and his friends escape. Whether or not humans and tardigrades could continue to evolve in peace in the future was an issue that could wait for a future day. For the present, he wanted out.

  “What species are our tardigrades descended from?”

  “I don’t know for sure, because they all look so much the same. But these guys look an awful lot like the one I did my report on. Milnesium tardigradum.”

  Several voices murmured comments. Gunther made out a few:

  “Aha! I knew it!”

  “Didn’t I tell you?”

  Sass. “Well, that’s a wrap!”

  “Is there anything special about Milnesium tardigradum?” Gunther continued. “Bigger brains? Special adaptive features?”

  June added: “Are they meat-eaters?”

  Rad pursed her lips. “Milnesium tardigradum is the most widespread of the tardigrade species. They tolerate dryness better than other tardigrades. They’re larger than other tardigrade species—they’re the ones that reach the high limits. They reproduce sexually, and yes, June—they are carnivorous.”

  No voice or movement pierced the silence.

  Then came Kara’s voice, barely audible. “The most widespread species would be the one most likely to evolve.”

  “Because there are more of them to start with,” Giles added. “More chance for a slip-up in the DNA.”

  The silence returned, deep, uncomfortable.

  “What kind of animals do they eat?” June asked.

  “What you’d expect. Microscopic things—rotifers, tiny worms, little weird wiggly stuff … Nothing major. Sometimes they eat them whole, sometimes they attach their buccal apparatus— the inner mouth parts—to them and suck out their juices.”

  Although the answer had been obvious, Gunther felt a collective sigh of relief pass through the group. What had they expected—that a sixteenth-of-an-inch water bear could gulp down a wolf?

  He felt a bit more relaxed when he posed his next question. “So Rad—how long can a Milnesium guy last if he’s suddenly put out of his cave—say, in a field up in New Calar?”

  Her reaction took him by surprise. She leaned forward, arms outstretched on the ground. “Oh, Gunther …” All of a sudden she pushed herself to her feet, walked two or three paces, and then turned back to him. “Gunther, how do you expect me to know that? It was only a high-school science project. I only wanted to get an ‘A’ so my parents wouldn’t bug me. I’m not like a Ph.D. in invertebrate biology, okay?”

  Gunther watched her a moment, letting her run her hands through her hair and jog in place for ten seconds. Some misdirected thought made him want to run his hands through her hair.

  “I’m sorry, Rad. But you’re the only one who can help. Can you guess?”

  Breathing harder, she returned to her place with the group. “I can guess, but I might be wrong.”

  “That’s okay. None of us can offer anything better.”

  Once again her face grew intense. “It would depend. If they were in weeds or grass, and there was dew in the morning, they’d do fine. But if it was a dry spell, they’d probably go into cryptobiosis. Their metabolism would like stop, and they’d shrivel up to where their water content was almost zilch.”

  “Until the next rainfall,” June said.

  “Uh-huh.”

  From Tiff: “How long can they survive in cryptobiosis?”

  “Nobody really knows. Up to six months, in some studies. Some scientists think they could exist like that for over a century.”

  Several children gasped.

  June: “And when they get wet again, how long before they wake up and become their normal Tardy selves?”

  “It depends how long they’ve been down. Probably no more than a few hours.”

  Gunther was growing frustrated. Too many pieces were still missing from his puzzle. He was grateful for Giles’s voice that both
broke the silence and filled the void in his brain.

  “So much for the Tardies, mate. How about the giant bugs?”

  “Good question. Wish we had Internet access.”

  “I hate bugs,” Sass interjected.

  Another round of laughter followed.

  “The insects all seem to be cave species,” Gunther said. “They probably were normal insects that got trapped in the cave hundreds of thousands of years ago. As far as I can tell, they’re all blind—which means they’ve been here for many generations.”

  “They probably evolved along with the Tardies,” June added. “As each generation developed, they grew a little larger.”

  “They don’t seem any smarter than other bugs,” Kara said.

  “Maybe we’d think differently if we met the Insect Leaders,” said Tiff.

  “If there are any Insect Leaders.” Hood stood and masqueraded like a person at a Halloween dance. “Personally,” he sang, “I think the Tardies run the show.”

  “I think so, too,” Rad sang.

  A spell of silence fell over the group. Gunther saw and heard some of the children fidgeting about.

  “Thanks, guys,” he said at last. “Remember that everything we just said will have been heard by the Tardies.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Along with the nameless tardigrades that usually guarded the dinner table, Teddy himself made an appearance that evening, with Thomas at his side. To a human eye, Teddy was bubbling with delight, a Santa Claus of merriment and good cheer.

  June bumped Gunther’s shoulder and whispered. To his surprise, she gestured not toward Teddy, but toward the pit in the middle of the dining rock that usually bustled with larvae. It was empty.

  “Good evening, human guests,” Teddy said when the children had all sat around the rock. “I have something special to announce to you tonight. As I believe you already know, your leaders and I have reached a pact of mutual understanding that we hope will make all our lives more pleasant.”

  Eyes wandered from Teddy to Hood to Gunther and back again.

 

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