by R. A. Nelson
“I know,” I said, giving him a fake scowl. “Don’t push your luck.”
We motored on. Next on the agenda was something Sagan called “high bays” where engineers once tinkered with Saturn V rocket boosters. I tried to feign interest. “So what’s inside there now?”
“A bunch of basketball courts with a ceiling two hundred feet high.”
Next, the “world-famous Neutral Buoyancy Simulator, where the astronauts practice underwater to simulate weightless conditions,” Sagan explained. It was a giant white tank shaped like a sphere with little portals around the sides.
The swamp was more interesting. I asked him to park and we walked down to the water’s edge. Black and brackish and still as a painted picture. Every once in a while a dragonfly buzzed by or bubbles rose from the bottom, making concentric circles.
“Swamp gas,” Sagan said. We didn’t see any alligators.
“Any snakes?” I said. I wondered if vampires were vulnerable to moccasins and rattlers but didn’t want to test the theory.
“All you can eat,” Sagan said. “Come on, I saved the best for last.”
“The wastewater treatment plant?”
“Funny. Get in.”
We drove back in a big circle. It almost looked as if he was taking me to …
“The Solar Observatory? Why are you bringing me back here? No dark asteroids, Sagan. I’m begging you.”
“Relax, grasshopper.”
Instead we continued along the river. At last we came to a beaten-down gravel road with two iron posts standing on either side of the entrance, a rusty chain stretched between them.
I looked at Sagan. “End of the line?”
“No way.”
He backed the Jeep up a little, then left the paved road and drove right around the post on the far side.
“We’re not supposed to go here, right?” I said, a feeling of worry tickling my stomach. “Won’t we get in trouble?”
Sagan grinned. “Nope. Security never comes out here. Why would they? No secrets. Nothing to steal. I used to come out here with my dad all the time. I never once saw the road actually open.”
“So … where does it go?”
“You’ll see.”
We wound along in silence, zipping around saplings that had sprung up through the gravel and easing over fallen timber. The trees began to thin, and suddenly I started to recognize the clearing. He was taking me to my tower.
The Jeep rolled to a stop not fifty feet from where I had vomited the night before. I climbed out, trembling slightly, wondering how good a job I had done at hiding my defenses.
“Why … why are we here?” I said, deliberately turning my back to the tower. “You don’t expect me to climb that thing, do you?”
“Huh? Naw. There’s really not much to see. I’ve been up there a million times. That’s the old test stand they were going to use to test-fire liquid oxygen rocket engines back in the sixties—that big flue-looking thing at the bottom is where the exhaust and fire came out. That was before they realized they couldn’t use it and had to build a new one farther away.”
“How come?”
“Too dangerous. Because of what it was built on top of.”
“What?”
“You’ll see.”
He unzipped the back of the Jeep and brought out a small knapsack and two flashlights, handed me the red one and kept the blue.
“Okay?” I said.
“Follow me.”
We marched over to the bunker. My bunker, the one where I bathe, I thought. There was still a little water standing on the floor.
“Huh, looks like somebody’s been messing with the faucet,” Sagan said.
I followed him inside, feet sloshing almost as loudly as my heart. Had I left anything lying around? Shampoo? Soap?
We walked past the faucet and came to the metal net at the back that I had seen before. Sagan knelt at a corner and flipped up a little flap of metal that I never would have noticed. There was a sturdy padlock hidden beneath it holding the screen in place. He took out a key and undid the lock. Slowly pushed the heavy net over far enough for us to get through. I could feel that same subterranean breath blowing in my face, and now there was nothing between me and it.
“Let’s go,” he said.
We had to step carefully. Here and there were little chunks of concrete rubble and something that looked like pieces of brownish wasp nests but were hard like stone to the touch.
“Karst,” Sagan said, without explanation.
I could see everything, so following Sagan was like following a man who was practically blind. Concrete slabs. Concrete walls. Forty-gallon drums that Sagan said were full of old gasoline for the generators.
“They stopped maintaining this place years ago,” he said. “Even before the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
“What is it?”
“A nuclear blast shelter. Let’s keep going.”
We went deeper. The concrete walls gave way to big clunky shapes and long slanting fault lines, then pieces of stone that seemed to flow down the walls like solidified lava. The room was still mostly flat, but now there were big pieces of slag everywhere. Real stalactites. Side tunnels and channels. Pits in the floor and holes in the ceiling. We were in a cave. A real live cave.
“I’ve … I’ve never been in anything like this before,” I said, barely managing a whisper.
“This is why they abandoned the old test stand. It was built on top of a series of caves.”
“How far does it go?”
“How far do you want to go?”
“Any chance of us getting lost?”
“Oh yeah. It’s a big cave.”
I was pulling him along now, impatient to see.
“Hey, slow down, Emma! We don’t want to fall into anything.”
“I won’t let us fall,” I said. I had taken my sunglasses off. “I can see.”
To my vampire eyes, everything had a ghostly tint of color. Greens, browns, yellows. The walls of the caverns seemed alive with it. We came to a place where the room narrowed down and the ceiling appeared to have collapsed. We duck-walked past the rubble, all the time slanting downhill. There were other places where the rubble was so deep we had to scramble over it.
“Watch your clothes,” Sagan said.
I surged with excitement and raced ahead, my flashlight dangling from a belt loop. We entered a gigantic room with a rounded dome of a ceiling at least fifty feet high.
“Grotto,” Sagan said, beaming his light up to show me the dagger-like formations above us and layers of concentric stripes that made the roof look like a huge stone target. “This whole system is part of a karst aquifer where everything has slowly collapsed over the centuries. What’s left is mostly limestone. There are pyrites and gypsum too. They’ve mapped twenty-six separate caves, and geologic surveys show it’s even more complex than that. They think the caverns we’re standing in were probably inhabited lots of times over the last ten thousand years. Maybe longer ago than that.”
“You sound like a tour guide,” I said, accidentally putting my light in his face.
“Is that bad?”
“It’s perfect.” I wanted to squeeze his hand but didn’t. We kept going down.
Now as we descended, the rubble gradually went away and the ceilings and floors got more and more smooth, almost glistening like wet clay. Finally we came to a place that had humongous humps of slick stone that rolled right down to something unbelievable.
“Oh my God. An underground lake.”
I walked closer, in total awe. I had thought the swamp had been still—here the water was so motionless, I wondered if the molecules even moved. I looked up, could feel the eons sitting on top of my head. It was thrilling and strangely scary.
“What?” Sagan said.
“It’s this weird little fear of mine. I’ve always been kind of freaked by things that never change, never see the sun. I always wonder what all that time and darkness has done to it.”
; “To what?”
“The stones, the water. Everything. I always think everything is alive. “Let’s turn off our lights,” I said.
“You sure? Have you ever been in a cave before and turned out the lights?”
“No.”
“It’s a pretty bizarre experience.”
“Okay, now we have to do it.”
We did a little countdown … “Three, two, one,” and clicked off our flashlights simultaneously. At first I thought there was nothing but blackness there, which was kind of a relief when all your eyes ever do is see. But then I began to make out shapes and more and more detail as my eyes adjusted. I don’t know how. We were so deep underground, there had to be no light at all. But I could see … the vaguest hint of color, but mostly the structures of things, stones, my hand in front of my face, and especially Sagan’s body, even in this no-light, glowing dimly blue.
He extended his arms out in front of himself, not saying a word, and then I realized he was trying to find me. He was going in the wrong direction. I edged toward him and got in his way; he stretched right past my shoulders, reaching too high. Just as we were about to bump, I kissed him. I heard the intake of his breath and saw him flinch backward in surprise.
“Hey!”
Then our arms were around each other.
Sagan kissed me, pulling me close to him. I had never really kissed anyone before. Not like that. Not even Lane Garner. I had to fight the urge to kiss him too hard. I wanted to take hold of his head, pull his face to mine, tug at his hair.
It was hard to remember to let him breathe. I had to take Sagan’s cue when to break free, and then started up again. I was so hungry for his mouth, I could barely stand how gentle we were being. I wanted to be fierce. I could hear water dripping. If he hadn’t returned my kiss, I just might have thrown myself in.
We ate our lunch in the cave. Baloney and cheese sandwiches that Sagan had brought in the knapsack. Time went away. Hunger. Thirst. Pain. Even feelings, to a certain extent. The only things left were the stones around us and his lips on mine and the way he held me.
We propped our lights on a flat rock, letting them fan out across the silent lake.
“I …”
I started to say something after we had been chewing awhile without speaking. How much this meant to me, how unexpected … how perfect. Then I realized I had no idea what words I should use.
“I … wonder … any fish in there?” I said a little lamely.
“Blind ones,” Sagan said.
“No way.”
“Want to see?”
My vision was about a hundred times better than his, but I couldn’t see a thing beneath the water.
“You’re looking in the wrong place.” Sagan took me closer to the edge where there were shallow pools between the humped stone. Sure enough, there were tiny white fish there.
“Their eyes are like bumps,” I said, totally enthralled. We watched them dart around, making the barest ripple.
“Here’s the coolest thing,” Sagan said. “Scientists took some of these fish out of here one time, put them in a tank in the light.”
“So what happened?”
“After a few weeks, they started to grow eyes.”
“You’re lying.”
“It’s true. You can look it up online. It took about six weeks in all, but all of them had grown eyes. Think about that. Whatever message is coded in their DNA that grows eyes … it had survived countless births and deaths of fish without the code ever being turned off completely. It was just lying dormant, waiting for the sun to flip the switch. Generation after generation, maybe going back thousands of years, no contact with the sun at all, but somehow the light brought them back.”
I thought about that for a while, watching the fish move. “Why don’t they go out in the deep water?”
“Nobody knows. I figure … living things, they are so used to a place, so used to being what they are, they just keep following everything that is old. Nobody ever tries anything new. That’s why evolution takes millions of years to do very much. They’ve found spiders in amber fifty million years old that look almost exactly like spiders living today.”
That started me wondering … vampires. Was I the first step in some new phase of evolution?
“What are you thinking about?” Sagan said.
“Nothing.”
He grinned. “I thought you were supposed to be so honest.”
“Okay, something. I just … don’t know what to think about it.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. I was thinking about you.”
We picked up our flashlights and kissed some more. I hoped I didn’t taste like baloney.
As we left the lake, Sagan took me back by another path. “There are blind crayfish too,” he said. “But you have to crawl on your stomach to get to them. It’s in this ridiculously low stretch of cave hardly anybody knows about.”
“Take me there,” I said.
And he did. He led me to a place where there was a crevice in the wall that was nearly invisible if you didn’t know where to look. We slithered through, then got down on our bellies.
Sagan wasn’t joking about the crawl—I practically ruined my clothes. But I had to see them. The crayfish were smaller than my pinky and lived in little pools not much bigger than a birdbath. The ceiling was so low, you had the feeling you were seeing the very last days of a once-mighty chamber. Sagan called it “the King’s Chamber.” He said it had been dropping for centuries. We were there just in time to see the finish.
When we came out, the sun was so dazzling it hurt, even after I put my shades back on. I couldn’t believe how green everything was.
“That’s what a cave does to you,” Sagan said. “The world never looks more beautiful than it does coming up from underground.”
I nodded. But to me nothing could have been as beautiful as that strange, silent, monochromatic lake.
As we made our way back to the Jeep, I noticed something odd about the position of the sun.
“What time is it?” I said.
Sagan looked at his cell. “Five forty-seven.”
“It can’t be that late!”
He laughed. “That’s another thing spelunking does to you.”
“Spelunking?”
“Caves. They distort time. You don’t have any frame of reference, so you’re not as aware of time passing. Nothing moves. Not enough sensations.”
“I had plenty of them,” I said, resisting the urge to touch his mouth with my index finger.
“A French guy, a scientist, did an experiment,” Sagan said. “He went down in a cave with tents, lights, all kinds of recording devices. His friends stayed on the surface monitoring everything he did. He stayed down there for six months.”
“Holy crap. Dedicated.”
“He wanted to acclimate to the cave’s environment completely. No clocks. He ate when he felt hungry. Slept when he was sleepy. It was ‘morning’ when he decided it was morning and turned on the lights. Same thing for bedtime. By the end of the six months his friends were amazed.”
“He’d turned into a bat?”
“Listen,” Sagan said.
“Sorrrrrry. So his friends were amazed …”
“Yeah. Turns out the scientist had been living fifty-six-hour days.”
“What! No.”
“Yep. Without any clocks or other references, his artificial ‘days’ settled into a pattern of fifty-six hours instead of twenty-four. He had utterly no idea how long he had been down there.… He thought it was only about three weeks.”
“I could do it,” I said.
“What?” Sagan said.
No way was I going to say it. But I thought it. Three weeks in a cave. With you.
I let him drop me off at the observatory.
“Is your thing on?” he said.
I smiled. “My thing?”
“Shut up. Your headset—the radio thing I gave you.”
“Oh no. You gotta go?” I whined,
trying to make him feel bad for leaving.
“I told my dad I would help him take the pool cover off. We always open it about a month earlier than anybody else.”
“A pool! You didn’t tell me you were rich.”
He snorted.
“Yeah, right. It’s thirty-two by sixteen. Mom’s going to skin me alive. I was supposed to be home hours ago.”
I put my arms around his neck.… He felt warm. “I thought you were going to help your dad.”
“Mom’s the official skinner.”
“So where do they think you are?”
He looked at me funny. “With you.”
I pulled my arms away. “You didn’t tell them about me, did you?”
“That’s my new nickname for the observatory.”
“What?” I said.
“Emma.”
“Oh! I almost forgot,” Sagan said as I walked him back to his Jeep. “You’ll love it. Not as cool as a cave, but …”
He reached into his pocket and pulled something out. It looked like a large gold locket on a short chain. Too heavy for a necklace. He showed me how it flipped open. My breath caught.
“A pocket watch!” I said. “I’ve always wanted one of those! Papi carries one around with him. He always used to put it in bed with me when I was really little to help me go to sleep.”
“It’s an old one of my dad’s he doesn’t use anymore,” Sagan said. “Wish I could claim it’s a priceless family heirloom, but they’ve got hundreds at Walmart for $12.95.”
I put the watch next to my ear and listened to the ticking. I had to swallow a couple of times, feeling tears behind my eyes. I was thinking about Papi. How afraid he must be for me.
“Thank you,” I said. “Are you coming back tomorrow?”
Sagan made a face. “Nah. Figured I would hang out with my sisters around the house. Maybe do some laundry.”
I punched him.
“You’re crazy,” he said, rubbing his shoulder.
I kissed him. Then I started to smile. I tried to stop, but I couldn’t.
“What?” Sagan said.
“A bat.” I finally managed to choke it out. “I didn’t see a single bat.”