Labyrinth

by Mark T Sullivan

Whitney leaned down, tucked the sheet under Cricket’s chin, and kissed her daughter on the cheek. “See you in the morning,” she said. “Love you.”

  “Love you too, Mom.”

  Whitney paused at the door, looking back at her daughter. Cricket seemed so much a woman these days that it made her ache inside. But seeing her like this, tucked under the sheets, that strand of strawberry-blond hair hanging in her eyes, Cricket could have been three years old and lying in a field of daisies.

  Whitney wandered back down the stairs past a framed photograph of her with Jeannie Yung. She thought how life is sometimes like a cave, a tortured, convoluted succession of byways that takes you down into darker places than can ever be imagined; a nether region where you are forced to search the shadows to find out what you hold real and true; a series of difficult passages to be negotiated with a faith in something greater than yourself so you might once again emerge into sunlight.

  She had at last come to terms with her grief and guilt over Jeannie’s death. But before she slept each evening she thanked her dear departed friend for watching over her family during their long nightmare and recovery.

  Like everyone who had been in the Shaman’s Catacomb, Whitney had been exposed to a brief but intense dose of quark decay and suffered a short sickness. She was still being monitored by government doctors, but these days she was the picture of health, physically and mentally. She had notified the university that she intended to take a temporary leave of absence from her teaching position so she could spend more time with Cricket. Her baby would not be at home much longer and Whitney wanted to spend as much time with her as possible.

  Whitney lingered by the photograph of Jeannie, then crossed the family room toward Tom, who was pecking away at the computer keyboard. On the desk next to him was a card they’d received the day before from Damian and Natalie Finnerty announcing the birth of their baby daughter, whom they had named Lydia in Two-Elk’s memory.

  Whitney smiled, threw her arms around Tom’s neck, and kissed him on the cheek “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “Gets easier every day,” he replied, leaning back in the chair and nuzzling her.

  Whitney kissed him on the cheek again and walked into the kitchen.

  Tom sat there listening to his wife bustle in the cabinets and the refrigerator, musing as he often did these days about the aftermath of all that had occurred inside Labyrinth Cave.

  In the months following Cricket’s rescue, team after team of government researchers under the direction of Dr. Jeffrey Swain had secretly entered Tower Ridge. All of them were dumbfounded by the spectacular alloys imbedded in the slaglike walls of the Shaman’s Catacomb. As Swain had predicted, that lustrous metal the one that looked like moonlight had been shot through it, was later shown to be a composite of three previously unknown elements with atomic weights greater than any measured before on Earth.

  An autopsy of Robert Gregor’s body revealed that he had died of massive blunt force trauma brought on by the fall. The coroner noted bizarre tumor growths in his organs, specifically his heart, kidneys, and liver. She also found dense concentrations of exotic heavy metals in Gregor’s spine and brain, which she theorized had upset his chemical balance and contributed to his madness.

  After much soul searching Swain at last defied the government’s wish to keep the stone secret and went public in an exclusive interview with Helen Greidel. He told the complete and true story surrounding the death of Carson MacPherson and the discovery of room-temperature superconductors. It was time, he said, for him to come clean, give credit where it lay, and to inform the nation of the entire reason why the government was spending so much money to return to the moon.

  In the wake of Swain’s admissions, Robert Gregor, ironically, got his wish: He would be remembered for all time as the discoverer of room-temperature superconductors, quark decay, and full-scale transmutation. In its coverage, Time magazine characterized him as “part-Einstein, part-Frankenstein, a brilliant, troubled and yet tragic figure who embodied the best and worst of modern scientific research.”

  Congress convened hearings in October. The Burkes, Jeffrey Swain, Chester Norton, Jim Angelis, Mark Boulter, and Damian Finnerty were all called to testify. During two weeks of televised hearings that electrified the nation, the entire story came out.

  The media star of the entire event turned out to be Major William S. Lyons, who caused an uproar appearing before the committee in the full-dress blue uniform of a United States Marine officer, complete with sword and white gloves. Lyons revealed that he was put in the Eddyville prison to watch over Gregor at the request of the President and under the direction of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both of whom considered the recovery of moon rock 66095 vital to the future of American technological and economic security.

  Lyons explained that the guards—Wilcox, Jarrett, and Andrews—had all been given substantial bribes to participate in the staged escape. All three men had been wearing bulletproof vests and carrying fake blood capsules in their mouths when Lyons appeared to shoot them. The sheriff who “found” the bodies was also in on the charade.

  At the climax of the hearings, Lyons coolly defended his actions and that of the executive branch against a barrage of intense cross-examinations regarding the intentional release of violent state prisoners, the deaths of LaValle Cox and Andy Swearingen, and his failure on many occasions to fully protect the Burkes.

  “My orders were to get back the stone,” Lyons testified. “Civilian casualties were expected from the outset. Where I could, I acted to help the Burkes. But keeping them safe, frankly, was not my mission.”

  “Did you get the stone?” the distinguished senator from Vermont asked snidely.

  Lyons took a deep breath, then shook his head. “No, Senator, I failed. It’s something I’ll have to live with the rest of my life.”

  Indeed, all the testimony taken at the congressional hearings came down to one thing—even after tens of thousands of man-hours spent searching the lower reaches of Tower Ridge, moon rock 66095 had not been recovered.

  The Artemis Project stalled during the investigations, but news reports the evening before indicated that despite all that had happened, Congress recognized the need to return to the moon to mine superconducting ores on the Descartes Highlands. And to perhaps find a second moon rock that behaved in the extraordinary fashion of 66095.

  Tom looked down at the prosthesis that jutted out the sleeve of his shirt. Since the amputation, he had not been back inside Labyrinth Cave, or any cave whatsoever. Except for trips to Washington, D.C., to testify and to lobby in favor of establishing the nine limestone ridges near Hermes, Kentucky, as a national park he had spent the year in physical rehab. When he wasn’t learning to use his new arm, he stayed at home with Whitney and Cricket.

  In many ways, however, Tom thought, the past year had been the best of his marriage, and indeed of his entire life. Almost every morning since surviving the ordeal, he had taken to waking early, lying in bed next to Whitney, and studying the features of her face the way he once so passionately studied the geology of ridges. How, he always asked himself, had he ever stopped seeing her as the light that lit his way through the darkness?

  And every morning Tom would rise silently and pad down the hall to ease open Cricket’s door and see her sleeping there in the moonlight. Watching her like that consistently reinforced in him a belief in the possibilities of tomorrow and his hard-learned conviction that emotional connection was ultimately of more significance than any scientific discovery.

  Whitney came back into the room carrying two glasses of chilled white wine. She grinned at her husband slyly and said, “You know, I can think of something much more interesting than dwelling in the past…something involving a slinky black negligee I bought for your viewing pleasure a long, long time ago.”

  Tom’s eyebrow shot up. “Is that right?”

  “Come upstairs, say good night to Cricket, and then I’ll show you,” she teased.
<
br />   Together they climbed the stairs. Whitney tickled her husband in the ribs, then slipped into their bedroom. Tom went down the hall and stuck his head in Cricket’s open doorway. “You should turn off the lights now, sweetheart. It’s getting late.”

  Cricket held out her arms and smiled impishly at him. Tom laughed. “Still know how to twist your old man around your little finger, don’t you?”

  “Uh-huh,” Cricket said Tom gave her a hug and kissed her on the forehead.

  “Dad?”

  “Yes, honey.”

  “You think they’ll ever find it—the stone?” Tom glanced out the window at the half moon glowing brightly in the spring sky. “I’ve thought a lot about just that lately and to tell you the truth I sort of hope they don’t.”

  “Really?” Cricket frowned. “Why not?”

  “What it did to Gregor. The suspicions of what it may have done to the astronaut who found it. All the death and wrong that was done in pursuit of it. The way the government acted trying to get it back. I honestly don’t think we’re ready for it.”

  “Yeah,” she said, looking down at the sheets while Tom stood and crossed the room back to the doorway. “Dad?”

  Tom turned. “Yes, sweetheart?”

  “I love you and Mom more than anything.”

  “We feel the same way,” Tom said, clicking off her light “Get some sleep now.”

  The door shut and Cricket listened to her dad’s familiar shuffling footsteps go down the hallway. The door to her parents’ bedroom clicked shut and she heard her mother giggle. She got out of bed, padded to her door, and locked it. Then she went to the computer on her desk, went on-line, and called up her e-mail.

  She found a note from Chester Norton. They had met during the congressional hearings, and despite their five-year age difference she could tell he had something of a crush on her, which she was doing little to discourage. His Uncle had taught him to swim during the past year and he practiced every day in a pool at the university. He’d lost a lot of weight since she’d first met him and looked trimmer and more handsome every time she saw him. And besides her dad, he was the smartest, nicest guy she’d ever met.

  Chester’s note informed her that Dr. Swain was still hard at work on a theoretical explanation of moon rock 66095. He went on to detail some of his uncle’s thinking. Most of it was mathematical and went right over her head. Chester said he and Dr. Swain were planning a trip to Kentucky in the next few weeks and would like to interview her and her parents again about what had happened when the stone destabilized in the Shaman’s Catacomb. Their recollections, he said, might yield clues to its physical properties.

  Reading that, Cricket started chewing the inside of her cheek. She had not told anyone, not even her parents, the entire truth of what had occurred after she collided with Robert Gregor and they had spilled over into the abyss. She’d testified before Congress that she remembered falling, then hitting water, then nothing more until she’d woken in the hospital. Cricket wrote as much in her reply to Chester.

  She sent the e-mail, then went and sat on her bed. She opened her window and peered out into the warm Kentucky night. To her delight, the first fireflies of the year were dancing and flickering outside.

  Seeing the moon glow so spectacularly through the branches and leaves of the oaks, Cricket could not help but think of Gregor and what had really happened after they tumbled into the chasm. She closed her eyes. Some of the memories were murky, but others were so vivid it was as if they’d been welded into her mind.

  Gregor pitched backward into the abyss, clutching the stone to his breast. Cricket flipped after him toward the far wall of the crevice and then, some thirty feet into the fall, a tremendous jolt passed through her hips. For a heartbeat, she dangled from a rock outcropping by a carabiner clipped to her cave pack.

  The outcropping snapped off and she fell again. Her headlamp beam caught the reflection of oily water below her. And then nothing.

  She came to consciousness in Pluto’s River, which was rushing her downstream, batting her off submerged boulders, forcing her through tight spots. And there was an ungodly pain shooting through the entire length of her right leg.

  Then she passed out again and awoke hours later to find herself in the pitch dark, half in, half out of the river. She managed to drag herself out of the water, then rummaged in her pack which was still cinched tight to her waist. She found a battery and installed it. She let the saber of light flash about the cave, then stopped, shocked by the sight of a boot almost directly in front of her. The boot was attached to a leg and then to the misshapen body of Robert Gregor, slumped against one of the boulders.

  His skin showed the jaundice of death, yet he still lived. In his lap lay moon rock 66095, a simple gray rock with a vein of dark crystal running through its center. The scientist’s saucer eyes winced at the light and Cricket turned the headlamp down until it was barely a candle’s glow. She lay there looking at him, saying nothing and for several moments Gregor did the same in return.

  “I hope in the end,” he finally rasped, “you don’t think I’m completely evil. Despite everything, despite all my hard work, I am fragile, too. Human.”

  Cricket did not know how to respond. She did not move closer, but watched Gregor as he labored for breath and cradled the stone the way a mother might a newborn.

  “The stone was my discovery,” Gregor said. “My conquest. My moment in time. The thing that changed me, made me whole and better than others in a way nothing ever had before. MacPherson was going to take the stone away from me, take credit for it I couldn’t let it happen. Will history judge me so awful to want to unlock all of its secrets, to be the first to know everything it was capable of, to be its guardian?”

  “Guess not,” Cricket said.

  “You saw it then,” Gregor croaked. “The power of it?”

  Cricket nodded. “Yes.”

  “Thrill you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Scare you?”

  “Yes.”

  “All great discoveries are like that.” Gregor said. “They force us to completely change our way of thinking. Nothing is more exhilarating or terrifying than that kind of change.”

  He stopped, shuddered, and fought for air. Then he seemed to summon up his last strength and held out the rock toward Cricket. “Yours now,” he said. “Keep it well.”

  There was a rattle in his chest and the life went out of him. The stone rolled from his fingers and landed in the mud.

  Looking out the window at the moon from the comfort of her bedroom, Cricket pictured herself staring at the rock in the mud in front of Gregor’s body.

  Then, as she had almost every night since returning home, she came away from the window, went to her door, and checked once more to ensure it was locked. Satisfied, she moved to her closet, pushed aside an old milk crate filled with magazines, and found two loose floorboards. She took up a flathead screwdriver from the milk crate, fitted it into a crack between the boards, then pried them up. She reached down between the joists and retrieved a burlap bag She went to her bed, opened the bag and turned it upside down. A lead-lined pouch, the kind photographers use to shield their film from x-ray machines in airports, fell out. She opened that and watched in wonder as the stone that had been found on the Descartes Highlands of the moon nearly thirty-six years before rolled out onto her rumpled sheets and blankets.

  Cricket hefted the stone, still amazed that a week after coming home from the hospital, she’d gone out into the garage on crutches and found the bin where her father always stored their caving gear. She’d picked up her pack and, to her astonishment found the stone still inside, buried at the bottom under all her gear.

  No one, not the soldiers, not Dr. Swain, not Chester, not her parents or any of the doctors or government officials who had been swarming Tower Ridge, had ever thought to search her pack when she’d been carried from the cave. They had been concerned only with saving her life. And the longer their attention had passed over
her, the more she had become convinced that the stone was better off hidden.

  The doctors had said she’d been exposed to a serious dose of quark-decay, and there were times when she got nervous at the idea of keeping the moon rock. But she’d checked it with her father’s old Geiger counter at least a hundred times in the past twelve months and gotten no reaction whatsoever. And during the bimonthly tests the doctors put her through, she’d shown no sign of additional quark-decay exposure.

  Without the electronic matrix, moon rock 66095 was totally inert, nothing like the fiery transmitter of rare energy she’d witnessed in the cave. She knew, however, that in the long run she would have to give it to someone better suited to keeping it safe.

  From time to time, Chester Norton would say or write something cryptic to her about moon rock 66095, and she wondered if he and Dr. Swain suspected she had it. But neither he nor his uncle had ever asked her outright and she had never told them. Perhaps she would someday.

  In the meantime, she thought about the massive impact explosion of an asteroid hitting the moon that had somehow created this marvel billions of years ago and wondered whether that was God’s intention. She thought about the many terrible things that had been done in an effort to possess and understand it and wondered whether that was God’s intention, too. Then she thought about Dr. Swain and his mathematical explanation of its workings. She had her own theory about the rock, a theory she had been developing alone almost every night since coming home from the hospital. It had nothing to do with superconductors or quark decay or any of the other scientific terms used to describe the stone.

  Cricket had come to think of the moon rock as a heart, a marvelous, dangerous pump that somehow magnified and speeded energy, the same way our hearts in our chests can speed and channel blood, the same way our hearts in our chests can speed and channel love.

  A heart could recast three beings like Cricket and her parents back into one as easily as the stone could recast base ores into exotic alloys. Denied its presence in their lives, geniuses like Gregor could turn insane and murderous. In pursuit of it, men like Mann, Kelly, and even Lyons could turn their backs on their fellow human beings.