Labyrinth

by Mark T Sullivan

  Gregor blinked, swallowed, and looked at the floor.

  “Answer me. The truth.”

  Gregor’s lower lip trembled. “F-forged your signature.”

  The physicist was quiet for a moment, then he said softly, “My signature? You mean my name was on the official request to the repository?”

  Gregor nodded and cowered as if he expected MacPherson to explode. Instead, his boss leaned back and chuckled as if he could not believe his good fortune. “They’re going to give me the Nobel for this!” he said. “The goddamned Nobel Prize! At last!”

  Gregor’s eyebrows knitted again. He began to blink fast and hard.

  Caught up in the sweep of the moment, MacPherson seemed not to notice. “Shut it down, Gregor. I want to do a complete review of the data, energy in, energy out, the protocol followed. Everything transferred to my computer. My office. Ten minutes.”

  He made as if to leave. Gregor balled his hands into fists. “No!”

  MacPherson stopped and stared at him. “No what?”

  “You had nothing to do with this, sir,” Gregor said. “It’s m-my discovery.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation on MacPherson’s part, then his facial muscles hardened. “In the world of high science, Gregor, he who runs the lab gets the credit. That’s the way it works. You work on my team, not Swain’s. This is mine now. You’ll be listed as part of the team.”

  Gregor’s shoulders began to tremble. “Not this time. You told me the idea of testing a moon rock for superconductivity was foolish. Called me an idiot in front of the entire lab. Everyone heard you. I d-did this on my own.”

  The physicist hesitated again, his eyes flickering past Gregor to the stone. “But I changed my mind, didn’t I? You said it yourself: My name and my signature are on the formal request to Houston. The paper trail you so cleverly devised will clearly show where the credit is due. Now if you want to continue to work in my laboratory, Mr. Gregor, you’ll cut off the energy flow to that rock, shut the sensors down, and get that data transferred to my computer. And you’ll do it now.”

  MacPherson turned and made his way across the laboratory floor.

  Gregor’s jaw quivered as he watched MacPherson go. Tears welled in the young research assistant’s eyes. Then his posture dissolved toward defeat and he turned to the stone. The corona was thickening now, obscuring the dark mass of the center. The little flares of energy erupting off the surface behaved like a play of lightning in a late-summer sky.

  Gregor could not help himself. He peered fondly at the numbers spitting across the sensor’s screen, then back at the stone. Within the electrical storm a single twisting line of energy reshaped itself into a backward S. The shape burst silently and the resultant energy fountained, bathing the young physicist’s face in silver light. He beamed.

  “You’re not what he thinks,” Gregor said to the stone as if it were a living thing. “You’re more.”

  For several moments Gregor was frozen, then his neck and shoulder muscles began to shorten, to bunch up, turning bullish and giving the irrefutable impression of pressurized forces about to coalesce and erupt. His nostrils flared and the veins at his temples writhed like worms after a rain. “I’m more than what he thinks,” Gregor said.

  “Shut it down. Now!” MacPherson bellowed from the top of the staircase.

  The research assistant looked over his shoulder and up at his boss from under hooded brows. Then he turned and typed a series of instructions on the computer keypad on the lab table before him. Immediately the energy levels in the matrix of wires around the stone fell, the humming slowed, and in moments the rock turned inert.

  Behind him, he heard MacPherson cry, “They won’t be ignoring Carson MacPherson in Geneva next December!” Then he heard the door to his boss’s office open and slam shut.

  Gregor let his attention travel down over the banks of electrical equipment that surrounded him to the cement floor and a piece of thin cable lying there. He stared at it for the longest time. Then he stooped, picked up the length of cable, and wrapped his hands in either end. He slowly marched across the lab floor to the staircase and climbed it.

  MacPherson sat before his computer, watching it boot up. Gregor slipped inside, then eased the door shut with a click. Before the older scientist knew what was happening, his research assistant had the cable over his head and cinched tight about his larynx.

  “Can’t let you do this, Doctor,” Gregor snarled without a trace of his lifelong stammer. “I’m the only one who understands that rock’s potential. The only one.”

  ENTRANCE

  JUNE 13, 2007

  11:30 P.M.

  14 VALLEY LANE

  TARRINGTON, KENTUCKY

  WHITNEY BURKE MOANED, TWITCHED, and trembled in her sleep. In her nightmare, muddy water swirled and rose, flooding more of the cave in which she was trapped. She pressed herself back against the underground wall, trying to get away from the water, but it kept surging toward the ledge where she’d taken refuge. There was only two feet of airspace left in the little cavern.

  In the brilliant beam of light given off by the headlamp attached to her helmet, she saw a sudden bubbling in the eddying copper current, as if a large obstruction somewhere downstream had dislodged. The water came up four quick inches. Then up breached the body, facedown, bobbing.

  Whitney groaned as the corpse bumped against her boots. She began to shake so hard she felt her purchase on the cave ledge weaken. She slid and plunged into the chill water next to the body. Her light flared, then dimmed. She clawed at the rock overhead, trying to get back up on the outcropping, trying to get away from the body. The body bobbed against her, then rolled over.

  The drowned figure was her husband, Tom.

  Whitney bolted upright in her bed, perspiration soaking her nightgown. Her strawberry blond hair was matted across her tortured face. She kicked and tore herself free of the covers, then rolled off the mattress and stumbled toward the window, throwing it wide open and gulping at the spiced air of Kentucky in late spring.

  She focused on the shadows the moon tossed across the lawn as a way to still the panic attack that had every inch of her shaking. But despite her every effort, Whitney saw the image from her nightmare again: her husband turned around and around in the waters of Terror Hole Cave, cinnamon liquid pouring out the side of his mouth, his eyes as pupilless as those of a blind cave crayfish.

  She felt a hand on her shoulder, spun, and screamed, “No! Don’t!”

  Tom Burke pulled his hand away as if he had touched a live wire. Whitney’s husband was forty but looked thirty, with short black hair prematurely shot through with streaks of silver. His blue eyes were flecked with bits of charcoal gray. He wore faded red gym shorts and a yellow T-shirt that advertised Petzl climbing helmets. Every bone, muscle, and sinew in Tom’s body looked like it could have been struck from granite. Right at that moment, his face was a carving of fatigue and anger. “Can’t even stand to have me touch you anymore, Whit,” he murmured.

  Whitney’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. She kept seeing her husband spinning in the cave water.

  The door to the bedroom opened behind them. “Mom? Dad?” The voice was that of a teenaged girl, tired and anxious. “What’s going on?”

  Whitney’s attention jumped to her daughter, standing in the doorway in the ratty blue nightgown she always wore to bed. Like Whitney, the young teenager was pretty, athletic, and freckle-faced, with vivid emerald eyes, naturally crimson lips, a bit too much nose, a narrow, dimpled chin, and a funny left ear that folded over at the top. Whitney felt herself about to break down, but clamped a lid on the emotion. You don’t have to go back in the cave anymore, she told herself. She took a deep breath, glanced at her husband’s stony face, and said, “We’re all right. Go back to bed, Cricket.”

  “What? The nightmare again?” Cricket said in a defensive, exasperated tone. “Can’t you just get over this, Mom? It’s been more than a year!”

  “What do you know
about it!” Whitney cried, looking at her daughter and then her husband. “What do either of you know about any of it?”

  “Calm down, Whit,” Tom growled. “She’s just frustrated. We both are.”

  “Well, isn’t that wonderful,” Whitney replied. “I’m the one who’s living in hell! But you two are frustrated.”

  At that, Cricket burst into tears. “I don’t even know who you are anymore, Mom.” She turned and ran from the room.

  “Now look what you’ve done!” Tom bellowed.

  “Me?” Whitney screamed. “I’m not the one taking her into Labyrinth Cave, Tom. You’d think you’d be more sensitive to my situation.”

  “That’s all I’ve been for thirteen goddamned months,” he said. “Sensitive to the point of numbness. Life goes on, Whitney. Our life goes on even if you don’t want to be a part of it.”

  “You’re using her,” Whitney shot back. “NASA’s using her. Have you for one second thought about what might happen to her down in that fucking cave? Has NASA? Or do you even dare to question them? They all but run your life these days, Tom.”

  “Cricket’s an expert,” Tom replied. “I’m an expert. So are you, in case you’ve forgotten. Accidents happen to people who give the cave a chance. We Burkes don’t. NASA knows that.”

  Whitney shook her head violently. “I didn’t give the cave a chance, Tom. It came after me. It could come after you, too! Or Cricket. Or anybody on your team. Leave her here with me.”

  Tom stood there, flexing his hands to fists, then he shook his head. “Cricket’s going in for just six hours. It’s scheduled, and after everything she’s been through the past year, she deserves to go. She deserves the recognition.”

  “After everything she’s been through! How dare you!”

  “Cricket will be in and out in six hours,” he replied firmly. “Six hours.”

  They were silent for almost a minute, staring at each other across the abyss. Then Tom held his palms out to her and said in a softer voice, “You know you could still be a part of it, Whit. The most important cave expedition in history. Everything we ever dreamed about. Maybe if you at least came to the site, maybe—”

  “No. Never. Haven’t you figured that out yet, Tom? That part of my life is over. It’s dead and gone. I’ll never go in a cave again. Ever.”

  He stared at her for a long moment, tears welling up in his eyes. “Then where does that leave us?”

  Whitney stared back at her husband, seeing in her mind the vision of his body swirling in the cave, and fought at the choking sensation in her throat. “I don’t know, Tom. I just don’t know.”

  JUNE 14, 2007

  4:25 A.M.

  NEAR RAWLINS, KENTUCKY

  Five hours later and a hundred miles to the north, the full moon loomed huge in the western sky, casting an ashy glow over the interstate. Tom Burke had the radio in his red Ford F-150 tuned to an all-news station, where a reporter was finishing up a story about the continuing national efforts to create an autonomous source of energy for America to supplant the need for Middle East oil in the wake of September 11, 2001.

  Ordinarily when driving long distances Tom preferred music, reggae in particular. The deep throbbing bass notes always put him in mind of the place in Jamaica where he and Whitney had spent their honeymoon. But lately he could not bring himself to listen to anything with a lazy Caribbean beat; such music reminded him too much of the way his life used to be. Before the accident.

  He flipped on the blinker and eased by a tractor trailer. Cricket sat beside him, her head against the window, her arms crossed, a look of complete boredom on her face. The news story ended, followed by a brief riff of jazz, then a female announcer came on. “Can a perilous cave expedition provide a resolution to the current national debate over whether to return to the moon? NASA seems to think so. Shortly after dawn tomorrow morning, the space agency will launch its first efforts toward returning astronauts to the Descartes Highlands of the moon in search of rare superconducting ores scientists believe hold the future to our energy needs.

  “Tom Burke, widely regarded as the world’s greatest caver, will lead the experiment, a never-before-tried traverse of the giant Labyrinth Cave system in east-central Kentucky,” the anchorwoman continued. “Burke and his team will attempt to negotiate more than one hundred twenty-five miles of dangerous underground passage in less than five days. NASA scientists will closely monitor the trial, hoping to glean valuable data to be used to design training programs for the future lunar miners.

  “In other news …”

  Cricket shot upright. “Did you hear that?”

  Tom turned to her and grinned. “Told you this was big stuff.”

  “You sure I can’t go the whole way with you?” Cricket pleaded.

  “Nope.”

  “Dad,” she said sullenly. “I’m as good as any of those people NASA chose.”

  “The best young caver I know,” he replied. “But we’re going end to end in the Labyrinth, sweetheart. Toughest underground trip I’ve ever heard of.”

  Cricket got up on her knees on the bench seat and batted at a wayward lock of strawberry blond hair dangling in front of her eyes. “How much you want to bet I’d make it out the other side?”

  Tom snorted. “I don’t bet against fourteen-year-olds who take third in the four hundred at the state track meet. But being an ace quarter-miler doesn’t mean you’re going. When NASA asked me to run the Artemis Program, they were looking for data on how adults would deal with a rocky environment in total darkness, how adults would deal with moon mining. Not children.”

  Cricket threw her hands on her hips and shot Tom a look of incensed disbelief. “I’m not a child! I’m a young woman.”

  “Technically, no,” Tom said.

  Cricket turned crimson, then sputtered, “Jesus, Dad, real nice thing to say.”

  Tom winced, knowing he’d gone too far. His daughter was very sensitive about the whole thing. She was fourteen and had not yet had her period. The doctors said her obsessive running may have delayed the onset of her menstruation. The stress the family was under couldn’t be helping things either.

  “Sorry, Cricket,” Tom said. “I was out of line.”

  “No one takes me seriously, not even you,” Cricket brooded. “Everything—”

  “Everything what?”

  “It’s all just so screwed up. Mom. Me. Everything!”

  Before Tom could respond, she turned her back on him, chewing on the inside of her cheek and looking out the window.

  Tom sighed at the unfathomable enigma of surging adolescent hormones amid a family in crisis. He knew she was hurting. They were both hurting at the loss of Whitney in their day-to-day life. But he’d been over this ground so many times that he was just sick of it. His mind longed for other things to dwell on than the miserable state of his family, and, geologist that he was, he turned his attention to the physical world.

  They had been driving nearly an hour from their home near the Tennessee border. A vast plain on the eastern side of the two-lane highway stretched toward nine distant ridges, barely visible even in the strong moonlight. The plain was laid out in pastures and agricultural fields, but here and there trees grew in clusters around circular depressions called sinkholes that were filled with jumbles of logs, branches, and other debris. Somewhere out there, Tom knew, a brook sinewed across a soft green meadow before disappearing into a deep sinkhole.

  Where water goes underground, where sinkholes form on plains, there are always caves. And caves had been a constant part of Tom’s life since birth. His father had been one of the original Flint Ridge cavers, a group of intrepid explorers who discovered much of what was then the longest known cave in the world, the Mammoth Cave system—a 346-mile maze of underground passages north of Bowling Green, Kentucky.

  As a boy Tom had accompanied his father on hundreds of cave trips. His dad had shown him that caves were grand adventure, intrigue, and mystery all rolled into one; you had to be an accomplish
ed mountain climber, a risk taker, and a detective to survive, explore, and understand them. “There’s no greater satisfaction in life than discovery, being an explorer,” his father had always preached. “In a cave, that can happen at every turn.”

  With that kind of upbringing it was no surprise to anyone that after finishing his doctorate in geology at Emory University, Tom set out to find his own cave.

  The Mammoth system lay underneath the western slope of what geologists call the Cincinnati Arch, a fossilized, layered pastry of stone put down hundreds of thousands of years ago by a vast sea called the Mississippian. Back in 1999, Tom had been a newly appointed assistant professor at the School of Cave and Karst Studies at Western Kentucky University. As part of his research, he had decided to look for a new cave in the limestone formations to the north and east of Mammoth.

  That portion of the Cincinnati Arch had a lot of sandstone in it, which made most cavers discount the area as far as full-scale exploration was concerned. But using satellite imagery as well as old mining-drill logs, Tom had pinpointed a remote series of nine ridges north of Irvine and south of the Furnace River where the limestone deposits seemed deeper and purer than anywhere else in Kentucky.

  Every weekend for nearly seven months, Tom, Whitney, and then six-year-old Cricket had walked the ridges and dry streambeds near the Furnace River, searching for cave entrances. They found several small grottoes with leads of hundreds of feet, but ultimately no going cave. Every weekend for seven months they had returned home disappointed and sore. When they told other cavers about their study area, most had just laughed and said everyone knew there weren’t any caves near the Furnace.

  But on Labor Day, 2000, Tom had decided they should search once again on the north end of the first ridge. They’d been there before, several times in fact, but never found any indication of an underground passage. After many hours of tramping through the brush, Cricket had announced she was too tired to go on.

  She sat in the sun on a pile of loose rocks. Grasshoppers buzzed and whirred in the heat. And then Cricket had felt cool, almost cold air puffing at her ankles.