Project BTB

by E. G. Ross

  The first passage had no side branches. It wound on for a good quarter-mile back and up into the heart of Darkhorse Butte, dead-ending in a pile of rock rubble. Dan chipped some of the material with a miniature prospector's pick. He looked at it in his palm, turning it this way and that under his miner's light, muttering, "Hmmm" several times. Finally he declared that the rock probably was part of a series of cave-ins from when the original volcanic cone had eroded as it turned itself into an ordinary butte. He said that the tunnel we were in was undoubtedly once a major gas vent. How he knew that I hadn't the slightest idea. I wasn't even sure what a gas ventwas . Dan could be funny like that. When I asked how he knew something, he'd often be a fountain of information. But on other days, he'd shrug one shoulder and keep quiet with his eyes blank. Maybe it sounds silly, but I think he was self-conscious about how much he knew. I think he held it in on purpose, so that people wouldn't believe he was lording it over them. Eventually, I'd figured out that he was more than a little embarrassed about his extraordinary brain power. At times, I'd feel sorry for him, almost scared for him. I wanted to tell him that he didn't have to feel embarrassed around me, his first cousin and best buddy. But I guess I hadn't quite developed the guts for that kind verbal of intimacy. Anyway, Dan wouldn't have liked it. Maybe kids today can say those things. We couldn't back then. We grew up with too many tough guy ideas. It was the early 1980s in relatively rural America, and that often meant that it might as well have been the 1950s.

  The next passage was a score. It wasn't long, but after a few hairpins, it leveled off into a room about twenty feet wide. Running down the left was a series of small pools. Always, a foot or so higher, a smooth rock floor snaked along the right. You could stroll by and look down into pool after pool, running into one another through tiny waterfalls. It was beautiful and kind of surreal, almost artificial. But the beauty wasn't what got Dan's mind going. What excited him was that in some of the pools there were fish; pure, white, weird fish without any eyes. I'd never heard of anything like it, but Dan had read something inNational Geographic orNature or one of the many science magazines and journals that his folks got him in order to keep his hyperactive mind from eating itself up with boredom.

  After several tries, he managed to make a net out of his T-shirt and catch and dissect one of the squiggly little devils. He said they were an unknown species of carp, kind of like wild goldfish. He said they had gotten trapped down in Darkhorse way back, maybe millennia ago, even before the Indians were around in Western Oregon. I guess mutations can take some wild turns. Dan naturally knew all about them and rattled on about genetic drift and mutation statistics and how they might all be explained by cellular automata theory-whatever that was.

  After we got back to the room where the rope dangled from the level above, we debated whether to pull it down. We decided not to. We had plenty of rope. It was, after all, our main way back upstairs. If we took it down, we'd have to scale the tunnel to return to ground level. That seemed like a lot of pointless trouble, especially if we needed to get out fast. That little warning in the back of my head was blinking a tiny bit brighter, but for the life of me I couldn't have told you why. Maybe my cellular automatas had gone wrong, I thought, trying to dismiss it. But it was hard to shake. It was an odd feeling, kind of like the ache that sometimes flashes at you a couple days before you get the flu. It felt like something wascoming , but I didn't know what. Maybe those blind fish had given me the creeps. Try as I might, I couldn't identify a rational reason for the sensation. I tried to mentally brush it off. I certainly didn't tell Dan about it. Rational men handle their own misgivings, right?

  According to our watches, it had gotten pretty late. We were feeling the strain. Our legs and backs throbbed from unusual use and we had innumerable scratches and scrapes that we didn't remember getting. You have to take spelunking slow. It's not like hiking out in the woods. There you know that if you get lost the chances are good that you'll find your way out or someone'll spot you eventually. In a cave like Darkhorse, with its intestinal maze of tunnels and passages, especially if you're unfamiliar with them, it's not like that. You have to depend on yourself for everything. In fact, Dan had told me that the first rule of spelunking was to assume that no one would find you. Ever. That way, you'd be more likely to avoid getting lost in the first place. He said it was an economic principle that applied to all human action. "Negative incentive," he called it.

  "Is that like saying if we're not careful, we'll get our cocks cooked?" I asked.

  He laughed and said, "An excellent vernacular summary of the principle. Wouldn't look good in an Econ 101 textbook, though."

  We rolled out our inflatable air mattresses that Dan's folks had bought us the previous summer, blew 'em up, and laid out our sleeping bags. I put on an extra sweatshirt I'd brought. Down this far, the caves felt chillier and damper. It was as though by descending, we'd also somehow moved out of summer and into fall. The sensation contributed to my growing uneasiness. It felt as though-well, as though something wasoff and getting worse. It was almost like someone had begun to trail us, silent and purposeful and not necessarily friendly. I'd been glancing over my shoulder for two hours, but Dan hadn't seemed to notice. He'd been too busy chipping rocks and analyzing the cave crud that he found. I considered sharing my rising uneasiness with Dan, but decided that tough guys just didn't do that. Besides, my logic circuitry couldn't find anything substantive to focus on. I told myself that the reaction was probably a stupid hormone-driven emotional impulse. Anyway, in the face of raw emotion, reason is supposed to win, right?

  Yeah

  , a sarcastic voice in my head said,so why isn't it?

  * * *

  CHAPTER 3

  I growled to myself and stuffed the messy, bothersome misgivings into a corner in the back of my mind.

  We had some jerky and dried apples for dinner while we talked about what we'd seen. There wasn't anything around to build a fire with, but we'd brought a small kerosene lamp. The place was passably cheery. At least it was for Dan. He apparently wasn't uneasy about anything. I'd seldom seen him so keyed up and animated. He showed me bits of rock and pebbles and pieces of sticks and seeds and other plant life that had washed down from above. He discoursed merrily about their implications. It was one big science field trip. I envied him his ability to keep his rational faculty in the forefront. Mine seemed doomed to constantly struggle against my emotions. At the same time, it made me look up to Dan even more than I always had. Maybe he wasn't John Galt, the ideal man, but I figured he was a lot farther along to being enlightened that I was. After awhile, his assured manner lifted my mood. I was tired, but feeling okay again.

  We decided that if either of the remaining two passages was likely to lead us down farther, maybe to a sub-subbasement, it would be the next one in the rotation. When we aimed our headlamps down it we could see a steady slope for almost fifty yards. It looked like it would be an easy trek.

  Our talk drifted to movies, video games, and what girls we knew had the largestreal breasts and we were both grinning and chuckling when all of a sudden Dan's smile disappeared. He held up his hand for me to be quiet.

  "What?" I asked.

  "Thought I heard something."

  I perked my ears for a minute, but I didn't hear a thing. I started to smile. Dan kidded around sometimes. He could act, too. Practical jokes were part of his personality.

  I started to say, "Gotcha, Dan! The giant no-eyed goldfish are gonna grab-"

  Then I heard it, too.

  It sounded like a far-off animal-a faint but definite howling, like a creature badly frightened or hurt. The sound was coming from the next passage, the easy one-the one that we were supposed to head into in the morning.

  I shivered involuntarily. I looked skeptically at the lamp's flame. Moments ago it had been cheery. Now it seemed like a damned puny hedge against a big, dark unknown.

  "Shit, Dan," I began, "what do you suppose-"

  He cut me off with a non
chalant wave of his hand. He was grinning broadly, even though we could hear the howling louder than ever.

  "Nothing to worry about, ol' bud. Didn't mean to raise the hair on your balls. It's just that I'd never heard one before."

  "What?" I demanded peevishly, ankle deep in adrenaline. "Heard the fuckwhat ?"

  He calmly opened his canteen and replied, "Air currents." He took a long swallow of water, wiped his mouth, and added, "You know, the flute effect."

  "Flute effect?" I asked a bit raggedly, as the howling carried on like a trapped, unearthly bloodhound. I wanted to trust that Dan would come up with his usual reassuring explanation and make me feel safer. I badly wanted the anchor of reason.

  Maybe he sensed it, because he gave me an appraising look and said calmly, "In passages like some of these, you've always got air currents, see? Some of 'em get pretty strong. When they blow across openings, such as small vents, they can make goofy sounds like that. The flute effect."

  He pointed, unconcerned, at the guilty tunnel.

  "Oh, well- I guess, if you'resure ."

  "Hey," he said, softening his voice as he all but openly acknowledged my fright, "I know what it is. I've read about this effect. Believe me, this is what they described. Nothing to worry about."

  I nodded, shivering, but willing myself to accept his explanation and drive out the banshees in my brain. The fear gradually, reluctantly trickled away, like thick oil running off my skin. Dan, after all, knew so much. Hehad to know what he was talking about. He always did, right? I looked at his big, wide, intelligent face. I couldn't see any reason to doubt a face like that. He was smiling and relaxed, and simultaneously concerned for me, his same-age, somewhat younger brother of spirit. We were cousins, but I always thought of him more as an older brother. I think he knew it, but never mentioned it. He accepted the relationship as natural, and so did I.

  Soon we were joking again about the bra sizes of the girls we knew, challenging each other's estimates of which girls woulddo it andput out and what it would take to make us their willing victims. Off and on we'd hear the howling in the background. Sometimes it would fade away, then come back stronger, but it seemed progressively more distant now that I wasn't as scared of it. Finally, Dan said he was tired, yawned, stretched, and rolled over. Before I could have said five sentences, he was snoring.

  It was too abrupt. I resented him, always did, because of how he could shut off the world and drift into the safety of sleep. I never could manage it that fast or that easily.

  Almost as soon as he zonked out, the howling started to get to me. Was it maybe a little closer than before? Or was it purely my nasty imagination? No matter how I forced myself to remember Dan's oh-so-rational assurances, the eerie sound ate at me. The fright started to slither back, like a big snake advancing half-seen through the brush. I hugged myself, shaking slightly, and looked longingly at Dan's broad back. I thought how I'd like to snuggle up for comfort-and immediately felt awash in horror and guilt, thinking that maybe I'd developed hidden Perverted Tendencies. That's how we looked at it in those days. Any thought of that kind of physical contact with a man, no matter how innocent-well, you just weren't supposed to go there.

  After sitting with my knees to my chest for about twenty minutes, my eyes finally started to feel sleepy. I made myself curl up in a ball inside my sleeping bag and I tried to imitate Dan's courage and ease of mind.

  I guess it worked. Before I knew it, Dan was shaking me awake and telling me that breakfast was on. I sniffed. Something smelled wonderful. I squinted. He'd rigged up a little cooker using the kerosene lamp. He was frying two small fish.

  "This boy's been workin'!" he said, catching my eye and winking.

  I sat up in my sleeping bag and rubbed my eyes with my knuckles, tasting the overnight sewage paste in my mouth, unaccountable longing for orange juice, which I usually didn't like. I took a swig of water from my canteen, rinsed me mouth, and spat off to the side.

  I stretched and asked, "Where'd you get the fish?"

  He lifted one eyebrow and squinted conspiratorially. Then I knew where he'd gotten the fish. He'd gone all the way back to the pools, leaving me alone to face the howling. At first, I felt a flash of anger. Then the sensation evaporated because his leaving was proof that he trusted his own judgment as to what the howling was. Dan would never do something like that if he wasn't convinced that I was safe. He purely wouldn't. He was a big kid, already topping six feet, and he'd defended me against bullies. In fact, he had saved my life at least once when I'd almost fallen out of a tree. That's the kind of guy he was-smartand committed to doing the right thing.

  I cocked my head, listening for the howling. It wasn't there.

  "How long's our noisy vent been asleep?" I asked as casually as I could, getting out of the sleeping bag and working on some stiffness in a shoulder.

  "Hmmmmm," he replied. "Hadn't paid much attention after I figured out what it was."

  "I noticed. You dropped off like a turd going over a cliff last night."

  He smirked and said, "Yep, that's me. Turd the First. Course that makes you Turd the Second."

  I mock-punched at him and he jumped back.

  "Hey, Dan," I asked after I'd rolled up my sleeping bag and fixed it to my pack, "how come the sound stopped cold like that?"

  "Happens. Wind, you know. Not constant anywhere, not even on the surface. Although-"

  He was frowning slightly.

  "Although what?" I asked, almost absently. My mind was more on the frying fish than on last night's events. Food is a big attention getter when you're a teen. It tends to march front and center without much provocation.

  "It's just that I thought cave breezes tended to be more stable," he said.

  "Why would that be?" I inquired, getting out our old tin Scout dishes that we always took along. I edged closer to the fish, which Dan was turning over with a knife and salting as he talked.

  "Temperature differentials. A lot of air flows through caves like these, ol' bud. All the time. But they tend to be pretty cool when there's spring water running through. Acts like a natural refrigerator and the ground above acts like insulation."

  He flopped a sizzling fish into my tin.

  "Anyhow," he continued, "you've heard that cool air is heavier than warm, right?"

  "Yeah, I guess."

  "Take my word for it. The hotter the air, the more gaseous and lighter it is, see? The cool air is always flowing out through lower level openings of the caves. That draws warmer air in through the upper vents, like the one we came in."

  An idea struck me. I asked, "But wouldn't that turn around in the winter, I mean, when it's colder outside?"

  "Could. If it's cold enough. Then the warmer cave air, insulated from any quick outside temperature change, would rise out the upper tunnels and draw cooler air in through the lower ones."

  I tried a bite of fish. It wasn't bad. Bony, but kind of like halibut.

  I pointed my aluminum fork at Dan and said, "Sounds like you really don't think the howling should have entirely stopped, though."

  "Uh, no. Must be some natural fluctuation of which I'm unaware. Funny how these things work sometimes."

  His frown deepened and I caught him looking sideways at the vent.

  "Uh-huh," I replied, "real funny."

  Irrationally, I felt myself growing angry again about his leaving me to go fishing. I didn't say anything, though. In a complicated way, the situation made me feel closer to him. I'd never fully realized that Dan didn't know everything. Oh, I mean, sure, I knew it intellectually. But I hadn't felt that way. It's hard to react otherwise when ever since you've known him, your best friend has been a walking library. Then I got irritated at myself as it hit me just how much I'd let myself depend on Dan over the years. Something tightened up inside me, like a clamp closing a pipe. Out of nowhere-or so it seemed-I decided to start doing more of my own thinking when I was with Dan. The resolution made me feel good, but at the same time a little disloyal. I shook
it off and grinned wryly to myself. I had a long way to go before I became the ideal man of reason.Man did I have a way to go.

  We ate our fish in silence, neither of us with much gusto. I caught myself trying to keep myself facing the howling vent, which was supposed to be sounding off, but wasn't. I looked at a forkful of fish. When I thought about them having no eyes, I felt nauseous, like I'd somehow compromised myself to the howling, or whatever was making it. It was an idiotic thing to feel, and I knew it at the time. Even so, I couldn't shake it for several minutes. I almost had to throw up twice. I think Dan noticed, but he kept his peace and let me work it out.

  We both dawdled, trying to delay going into the howler tunnel. Neither of us was willing to admit it then, but I think if either had suggested that we forget heading into the sub-subbasement and just high-tail it out of there, we would have done it in a second. At least I would have. Dan, maybe; maybe not. Twice I caught him looking sideways at the vent. What that gaze meant, I couldn't say for sure. Part suspicion, maybe, but also determination, like when you rise to a challenge, the "you're not beatingme " look that young guys tend to get. A third part of his expression was the intense curiosity that Dan always exhibited when faced with a puzzle.

  Since neither of us was going to admit anything that a rational man "shouldn't" be feeling, we fought it by loading up our gear, taking deep breaths, and heading into the howler vent. I sprayed a lot more arrow-blazes than I needed to.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 4

  The vent descended at a fairly steep, straight angle for a couple hundred yards. The character of the rock began to change, too, looking less gray and black and more creamy and light brown, sometimes slightly greenish. There were small stalactites here and there, too. We hadn't seen any of those before in Darkhorse. Without warning, the passage branched off into a warren of tunnels, tiny rooms, and squiggly vents. It was considerably different that the levels above and the perspective was all screwy. If it hadn't have been for gravity keeping our feet in one direction, I wouldn't have been able to tell which way was up. There was also an odd smell in the air, almost like burnt electrical wiring. It came and went for awhile, then finally faded away. Dan frowned some more, but offered no reassuring explanations.