James Tabor - The Deep Zone

He smiled and patted Casey on the shoulder, his heavy rubber-gloved hand thumping on Casey’s biosuit. Clumsy, but Casey got the idea.

“I gotta go make some calls, Lew. Find me when something more happens.”

“Damn right. Now go on, give the powers that be some good news. Turn around and I’ll disconnect you.”

Barnard started to leave, then stopped. “One more thing. Who did it?”

Casey looked embarrassed.

“I thought so. Nice going, Dr. Casey. Keep it up and you may make a scientist yet.”

THEY TRAVELED FOR TWELVE HOURS AFTER HALLIE AND Bowman secured Haight’s body. No two steps were alike. There were crashing waterfalls, glistening slopes slick as tilted ice, vertical faces, rubble fields, wormhole crawls. At the shorter drops, they rappelled on their only rope, a ninety-meter PMI Classic that Bowman was carrying. Where the vertical distance was too great, they donned their Gecko Gear and down-climbed. In other places the cave floor dipped below the surface of lakes so vast their lights could find no shores, and these had to be waded or swum, Bowman going first, rigging a line where he could, and the others hauling themselves along the line to join him. There were long passages where the space between the cave’s floor and its ceiling was so small that they could move forward only by taking off their packs and shoving them in front or pulling them behind. They had to pass through acres of boulder gardens, sections where, over the course of eons, huge fragments of ceiling had broken off and fallen. The trick here, as it had been earlier in the entrance chamber, was to avoid dropping between the rocks. But walking along their wet tops, which were never flat but always jagged or rounded, took immense concentration and was physically exhausting.

By three P.M. the next day, even Bowman was beginning to falter. He halted them at the only potential site for a camp, and it was a poor one. The floor sloped downward and there was no one place big enough for all of them to deploy their sleeping bags together. There was one spot where the four of them could stand. It was about eight feet square, walled by giant breakdown rubble. A narrow slot between two of these boulders gave exit, and from there each found a place on the boulder-littered floor with room for a sleeping bag. Now Hallie and the others were standing in the little clearing, spooning MRE chicken and dumplings out of foil pouches.

“This is very bad.” Arguello listlessly stirred his glop. “Muy malo.”

At first, Hallie thought he was talking about the food, but those last two words signaled something else. Not very bad. Very evil . Food was not evil.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the thing that happened to Dr. Haight. To Ron.”

“He had an accident.”

Arguello looked up, careful to avoid shining his light in her eyes. “You think so?”

“Don’t you?”

“There is evil in this cave, and I can feel it.”

Cahner spoke first.

“What does it feel like, Rafael?” He was looking at Arguello intently. The light was on Arguello’s chest, but Hallie could see the seriousness of his expression.

“Excuse me?”

“You said that you could feel evil in the cave. I was asking what that felt like.”

“Oh, yes. I see now. It feels like nausea, but not only in the stomach. Everywhere. A sick and weak feeling. Like maybe the flu. But worse.”

“You believe the cave is evil.” There was no hint of mockery or sarcasm in Cahner’s question.

“ No . Not the cave. But there is evil in the cave. There is a difference.”

“There is danger in the cave,” said Cahner. “Danger’s not good or evil. It’s just danger. In the mountains we talk about objective dangers, things like weather and avalanches over which we have no control. Same in a cave. Isn’t that right, Hallie?”

Arguello spoke before Hallie could. “I am thinking about the two men who were lost in here, during your other expedition. What happened to them? Why did they not return?”

“As I said, we never found out.”

“That is a great pity.” She waited for Arguello to go on, but he said nothing more.

“We all need some rest.” Bowman, more gently than Hallie would have expected, was telling them it was bedtime. “We haven’t gone as far as I’d planned, but given the circumstances, I think it would be dangerous to keep moving. Let’s plan to sleep for four hours, and then head out again.”

“You will have no argument from me,” said Arguello. “I can surely use the rest.”

“Sleeping in caves is such fun,” Cahner sighed.

Bowman waved an arm. “Welcome to the Cueva de Luz Hilton, my friends. I hope you find the accommodations to your liking.”

Hallie’s spot was a hundred feet from where they had eaten. Back there, she took from her pack an airtight red capsule about the size of a flashlight. She unscrewed the container’s top and removed its contents, a super-compressed, waterproof sleeping bag with an integral bottom pad. On contact with air it began to expand like a dry sponge absorbing water. Unlike a sponge, it kept on growing as though it were being inflated, which, in fact, was exactly what was happening as the nanopolymer filling’s affinity for nitrogen molecules drew them in. In less than two minutes, the thing had grown to resemble a conventional, puffy mummy bag.

She took off her boots and set them just to the left of her bag. She stripped off her filthy caving suit, folded it, and put it on top of the boots. Wearing her damp but clean red polypro long underwear, she slipped into her bag. But for a long time she lay awake, staring at false light images. It never failed. The times when she needed to sleep most were inevitably the times when she could not sleep at all. She lay there, watching the fireworks that the dark tricked her eyes into producing, feeling more impatient as the seconds passed—which, of course, made it even harder to fall asleep. Before long, she heard snoring from the direction of Cahner’s sleeping spot. Then Arguello, whose snoring was slower and more deeply pitched than Cahner’s. She waited, expecting to hear Bowman next, but did not.

One reason she could not sleep was that her mind kept returning to Haight’s death, seeing the young man’s body, which lay, unburied, under the green plastic groundsheet. By now, she knew, it would be stiffened by rigor mortis. Tomorrow decomposition would set in, if it had not already. Another thing holding sleep at bay was her own body’s soreness. She knew from experience that no matter how good her conditioning was when she came into a cave like this, it would still take several days to get acclimated.

But there was a third reason why she could not sleep. She waited half an hour, listening to Cahner and Arguello snoring, waiting for them to work their way down into REMs. Finally, she slipped out of her bag and, navigating from her mental snapshot, started moving.

Hallie moved through the dark softly, smoothly, going by sense of touch and memory, looking not so much like a blind person groping through unfamiliar rooms as a dancer in slow motion. After two minutes she caught a trace of scent, a minute later picked up the sound of soft breathing. She kept moving forward, working her way between boulders, until, without warning, a hand clamped her ankle.

“Hallie.” Bowman’s voice, whispering.

“You heard me coming. But how’d you know it was me?”

“Scent. You’re quiet, though. I’ll give you that.”

“Don’t you ever sleep?”

“Not much. You?” He released her ankle.

“Now and then. But I wasn’t having any luck.”

“Cahner and Arguello don’t seem to be having trouble.”