“The kid’s right,” Boulter said to Swain. “You asked if the tent poles were metal.”
“Yes, yes,” Swain said. “Get to the point. I assume you have one.”
“I do have one, a good one,” Chester shot back. “Lets say that just before the earthquake, that tremendous bolt of lighting hit the right ridge, the ridge where the stone is hidden. Let’s say all that energy reached the stone, got amplified, broken down, and re-formed by quark decay, and then accelerated—”
Swain saw what his nephew was getting at and his irritation gave way to unbridled dread. The physicist’s face turned as gray as his ponytail and he had to sit down because he thought he might faint.
Boulter caught the transformation in Swain and moved to stand in front of him. “What’s the kid saying?” he demanded. “You obviously think he’s right.”
Swain sat there stunned for a moment before looking up at the trooper. “He’s saying that if we don’t find that rock soon and this storm gets as bad as they’re predicting, we could have Hiroshima beneath our feet.”
5:02 P.M.
DANTE’S TUBES
LABYRINTH CAVE
Cricket wanted to puke. Below her in the shaft, Gregor shook and bucked, his jerky actions echoing up the slick rope to where she and Tom tried to attach her rappelling rack to the line.
“Get her down the rope,” Kelly yelled, waving the pistol at them. “He’s dying down there.”
“We’re trying but this is fucking tricky,” Tom shouted back at him. “And we don’t need you in our face while we’re doing it.”
Tom kept trying to get the third bar closed over the rope, but it wouldn’t bend because of Gregor’s weight. “You’ll have to go with two bars and a hot seat,” he said, a sickened look on his face. “If anyone can do it, you can.”
Now Cricket wanted to puke and cry. To descend safely on a climbing rope you needed to weave the line through at least three metal bars so they could then be squeezed together to create enough friction to control your speed. It was the first rule of vertical rope work. She knew it was theoretically possible to descend a rope by loading it on a diagonal through just two bars, and then bending part of the rope back around the hip and butt in a “hot seat” rappel. But the technique was absolutely unsafe according to every modern climbing protocol. Cricket knew that if she made any mistake, she would go zipping down the rope in near free fall. But her dad’s life was at stake here. She had to save Gregor to save him.
“I’m scared,” Cricket said.
The stricken look on her dad’s face deepened. His chin quivered and she understood his thoughts. Cricket was all he and her mother had, all they would ever have. A year after Cricket’s birth, Whitney had developed a fibroid tumor in her uterus, making any more children an impossibility. And now their only child was being forced to do what most adults would not even consider. Her dad had to be thinking, What in God’s name was he going to do if she screwed up and he somehow survived?
Then he gritted his teeth, put his hand on her shoulder, and looked her in the eye. “I’m scared too, sweetheart,” he said. “But that’s not going to change the fact that you’ve got to do this. I want you to imagine you’re at the starting line at the state finals. You shut everything out except the right now. Focus on the now. Okay?”
Cricket swallowed and nodded, then got on her knees before the fright they shared could paralyze her. She immediately became hyperaware of everything around her: the way the toes of her boots scraped against the slick edge of the stone platform; the way the waterfall threw mist against the back of her neck; the way her arms quivered with the appalling concentration required to run an unsafe climbing rig.
The rope slipped across her butt, around her rib cage, and up, under and over the two brake bars of the rappelling rack mounted above her seat harness. She watched the rope pass through the gear works inch by inch until only her head projected above the edge of the platform and her feet hung free of the wall, out in space.
“Go just that speed,” her dad said. “When you get to the falls, don’t look up, the water pressure could blind you. Once you get to him, you tie him into your rappel rack, then get yourself swinging on the rope. You’ve got to get yourself to that nylon ladder on the wall down there. I left it there years ago when hanging this rope.”
Cricket glanced down between her legs, seeing the purple nylon etrier that was bolted into the wall about twenty feet below her. She looked back up at her dad and nodded, but she could feel hysteria worming its way up her spine. Before it could possess her, she pressed the rope below the rack against her hip as hard as she could and began to descend again. The rack shuddered under the strain. Her outer thigh began to burn. The mist from the waterfall became a fine rain and she had to squint to see.
In seconds, she was just above Gregor. She could see him, or rather the blurred outline of him, there inside the three-foot-wide roaring cascade. The water ballooned out around him like rapids around a boulder. She eased her way down until they were only eight feet apart. Her boots were inches from the waterfall. The crashing of the water against the cave wall hurt her ears.
“You’re doing great,” her father called down.
Gregor must have heard him. The rope below Cricket began to twist and toss.
“Stop!” she yelled.
But Gregor’s thrashing turned frantic. Cricket felt the rope slide across her hip. “For God’s sake, stop!” she screamed.
In desperation she tried to pull the line up onto her rappel rig to arrest her descent, but Gregor’s weight made that impossible. Her right hand slipped. The rope jumped free of her hip and snapped toward the center of her rappel rack. All friction was lost. She plunged into the falls and expected to die.
The water burst around her head, a raging white experience. It buffeted her from all angles, pounded in her ears. She slammed into something and stopped falling. Her senses were all but extinguished by the ungodly weight, pressure, and noise of the falling water that rammed her chin down against her chest and beat against her back.
At least it wasn’t in her eyes; the flange of her helmet acted like an umbrella, giving her about two inches of clear vision. She moved her head and saw that her rappelling rack had collided with Gregor’s, stopping her fall. The pale scientist’s arm was crooked across his forehead. He was oriented toward her, but she could not tell if his eyes were open or not. She reached into the space between them and did what her father had told her to do, re-rigging her rack to his. They were one now on the rope.
She knew if they stayed much longer in that position the water, ripping at the seams of their dry suits, would rob them of precious body heat, even as the webs of nylon about their thighs acted as tourniquets, cutting off their blood supply, killing them both. Then she remembered what her dad had said. She needed to kick free of the waterfall and try to get hold of that webbed ladder somewhere behind her.
“Can you hear me?” she yelled at Gregor.
He nodded weakly.
“Can you help me get us swinging?”
Gregor nodded again.
“Okay, here we go. On three. One, two, three!”
They missed their timing on their first attempt and succeeded only in spinning themselves around inside the cascade. On their second try she and Gregor rocked together and swung deeper into the water. On the third try, Cricket felt her boots meet the cave wall. She squatted and kicked off.
They swung backward through the waterfall and came free of it for an instant. Cricket took a deep breath just before they plunged back into the roaring cascade. She extended her feet, anticipating contact with the cave wall, squatted, and kicked again. Gregor did the same, and with his added thrust they flew much farther out the other side of the plume. Cricket managed to twist her head to throw her light to the wall to seek out the purple nylon climbing ladder. Just as they began to swing back toward the subterranean cascade, she located it.
“One more time!” Cricket yelled.
They spl
ashed back into the ripping water, boots and knees raised. Cricket tensed as they met the rock, then kicked off it with every ounce of her remaining energy. They broke free of the waterfall again. She arched her back, her left hand seeking the nylon ladder. It seemed an eternity, that crossing of space, waiting until her fingers were in range. She felt the rope reach the apex of its swing, then let loose a scream of frustration as her fingers missed the ladder and clawed wildly at the air, just as Mann’s had done the day before while falling to his doom.
But Gregor’s longer arm shot out and snagged one of the rungs.
They hung there gasping for several seconds before Cricket had the presence of mind to open the carabiner on her cow’s-tail safety line and clip herself to the nylon ladder. Then she grabbed Gregor’s safety line and did the same thing. She got him to step into the nylon ladder, then followed him, taking all their weight off the rope.
She heard her dad whoop with joy above her, then yell, “You’ve done the tough part, Crick. Now re-rig the racks and take him down slow.”
“Take me down s-s-slow,” Gregor said. He was drunk with the cold.
For an instant, Cricket fantasized about unclipping his safety line and watching him tumble into the abyss. Then she remembered Kelly and the gun.
“If you want to live, you’re going to do exactly what I say,” she said.
“You have the knowledge,” Gregor replied. “I don’t.”
It took Cricket ten minutes to get her rappel rack properly loaded on the rope and then Gregor’s harness attached to her own. She disconnected the carabiners holding them to the wall anchor and they began to drop down the rope facing each other. Gregor was so grossly waxen up close like this that Cricket swore she could see the blue of his veins under his skin. The whites of his eyes were a root system of blasted red capillaries.
“You despise me, d-don’t you?”
Cricket did not reply
“Doesn’t matter,” Gregor said. “For great science, you must sacrifice everything. What people think of you, what they expect of you. Everything.”
His head rolled to one side. Cricket just kept working the rope through the rappel rack. She wanted to get to the bottom of the shaft and away from him as fast as she could. His breath was horrible, as if he were being eaten away from the inside and this was the smell of that deterioration.
“All the great minds are ha-hated in their day,” Gregor said, chattering as well as stammering now. “Copernicus. Galileo. Oppenheimer. The revolutionary minds are the most threatening, they’re the ones the world tries to smash. But my due will come soon. History will judge me. Then nothing else will matter.”
“I just want to go home and be with my mom,” she said.
At that, Gregor blinked, and his focus became unscrewed, as if he were looking through Cricket and off into a great distance. He didn’t say anything for almost a minute. When he did, it was with the hardest stammer Cricket had heard from him yet.
“M-my mother was a fragile person,” he said. “Always tottering at the edge of life. She died one night in this cabin we lived in with my granddad. I was eight. No—no one else there. Granddad was in the county j-jail. I knew I should go tell someone. But I knew they’d take her away from me. Granddad always said they’ll ta-take away the things you love. They did eventually. Social worker came. Found me. Found my mother. They buried her in a pauper’s grave.”
He chuckled bitterly. “So you see, a loving home life is a myth. The only secure thing in life is knowledge. Only armor in life is knowledge. Protects you. Tran-transforms you. The only thing they can’t steal from you.”
His head lolled, then rocked back, and he lost consciousness.
Now a light shone up from below. Cricket looked away from Gregor and, despite her exhaustion, kept them descending at a steady pace. Lyons waited where the rope ended beside a wide aquamarine pool that emptied into a stream running north. The big prison guard stepped up, caught her by the waist, and lowered her the last few feet. “You saved his life. You’re an amazing girl, Cricket.”
She stared at Lyons with utter hatred. “I hope he gets pneumonia and dies for what he’s done to us. For what you’ve done to us.”
Then she struggled free of the harness, her entire body trembling with fatigue and chill. She staggered and collapsed against the wall of the shaft. Her arms, shoulders, and hips felt like they’d been struck with bats. Her teeth chattered. Lyons came after her and reached out his hand.
“Get away from me,” she said. “I’ll take care of myself until my dad comes.”
The guard stared at her for a moment, then turned and went back to Gregor. He stripped the comatose man to his waist and applied to his torso heat packs that activated upon contact with air.
Cricket had never been so tired and cold in her life. She had to sleep, if only for a few minutes. But she knew she had to get warm. She got out a heat pack of her own from her knapsack and stuffed it down the front of her suit. Then she rolled to her side, using her knapsack for a pillow, drowsily aware that the rope from above was already wiggling.
5:45 P.M.
KING’S CASTLE BREAKDOWN
MUNK’S RIDGE
LABYRINTH CAVE
Whitney clawed at the earthquake debris, burrowing her way into the choked passage rock by rock. Her knees and shoulders ached. The tips of her fingers felt hammer struck from all the digging, but she did not stop. In the past hour and a half she’d managed to penetrate four feet into the collapse. By her reckoning, she had to be less than eight feet from breaking through to the other side and King’s Castle Cavern.
She squinted into dust as thick as coastal fog and fought against a loose boulder. Finnerty squeezed in beside her, a handkerchief up over his mouth. Together they reached up and tugged at the rock. After nearly five minutes of hard work, it came free. But more wreckage slid down to replace it, shooting additional dust into the air. In seconds they were coughing so hard, they had to back out of the tunnel.
“We’ll take turns working in there,” Finnerty said.
“This is a waste of time,” Two-Elk complained. “Mrs. Burke was right, boss—they’re probably all dead. If they’re alive, they’ve reached the supply dump and gone.”
Whitney jumped to her feet before Finnerty could reply, shaking with rage. “Don’t you dare say that. Don’t you dare. We’ve gone through too much the last year for it to all be over now. Life’s cruel, but it’s not inhuman. I can’t believe it’s inhuman. My husband and daughter are alive. And we’re going to beat them to that dump and rescue them. Do you understand? Do you!”
Two-Elk shrank back, stunned. “Okay, Mrs. Burke, calm down,” she said. “I’m sorry. I understand.”
They worked like a firemen’s bucket brigade, passing the tailings back out of the tunnel, then throwing them off the cliff, where they clattered down the underground mountain before splashing into the lake some eight hundred feet below.
Whitney tried to keep her attention on clearing the passage. But troubling thoughts kept intruding. What if Two-Elk was right? What if they were dead? She shook her head, unwilling to let that idea fester. The cave could not do it to her twice.
Finnerty backed out from the collapse. He removed his helmet and wiped his sleeve across his brow, smearing the chalky grit that caked his face. His eyes were bleary and his hands trembled with fatigue. “Got a problem,” he said. “You better take a look”
It was the first time that Whitney had heard anything but a resolute attitude from the marshal and she crawled to the head of the excavation with nervous anticipation. She cocked her head to shine her light on the rubble pile that still blocked the passage and understood Finnerty’s concern at once: During the earthquake two enormous chunks of rock, each nearly a half ton, had become dislodged from the cave ceiling. The giant boulders rested against each other, supported and balanced atop three blocks the size and shape of microwave ovens. The middle block was badly fissured.
“See it?” Finnerty asked when she�
��d backed out
Whitney nodded. “You could pull the pieces of that middle block and both boulders might come down. Or the two big boulders could push against each other and leave us a way forward beneath them.”
“Or we could just forget this and could go back the way we came,” Two-Elk offered quietly, looking at her disfigured hand.
“And we might find that way collapsed, too,” Finnerty snapped.
“I’m not listening to negativity,” Whitney said.
“I’ll go try,” the marshal said.
“No,” Whitney said. “This is my family. If anyone’s taking the chance, it’s me.”
Before Finnerty could stop her, she ducked into the tunnel and scrambled forward to where she could run her fingers down the deep lines that fractured the middle stone, felt her throat go dry, then crammed her fingers into the cracks and yanked. Nothing budged. She picked up a rock about the size of a goose egg, gave the block a rap, and saw a piece of it move ever so slightly. She hesitated, then reached into the fissure and yanked again. A good-sized piece of the block came free. She handed it back to Finnerty. And then another. And then a third. But as she began to work at the fourth piece, the two slabs over her head began to moan and grind against each other.
7:30 P.M.
NASA ENCAMPMENT
JENKINS RIDGE
LABYRINTH CAVE
Swain lay on his back, attaching a power cable to one of three black boxes Chester had arranged on metal stands set in an equilateral-triangle formation. Fish-eye lenses stuck out the end of each box, aimed toward a fourth box suspended on wire about four feet above a white rectangular board lying flat on the ground to the physicist’s right. A crystal-grade prism about seven inches long brought up from the university lab, hung out of the bottom of the suspended fourth box.
Swain finished the task, then sat up and looked at his chunky young nephew, busy at the computer terminal. There was no denying it. In the past few hours, Chester had grown, become more mature and sure of himself. As much as Swain hated to admit it, he had been very little help in designing this holographic system. It had been Chester’s concept from the start and he had put the device together in what would have taken days for men twice his age and experience.
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