James Tabor - The Deep Zone

“We don’t know.” Hallie’s voice was reverent, tinged with awe. “But it does. Has for eons, apparently.”

“I could stand here and look at it for hours.” Cahner sounded mesmerized. “It’s like staring into a fire.”

“I know. There’s a feel to it, too, Al. Are you getting that?”

“Yes, a little. It’s like warmth.”

They dropped their packs. Still operating in the light given off by the moonmilk colony, Hallie retrieved an Envirotainer, an aluminum cylinder eighteen inches long and six inches in diameter. Inside were four test-tube-sized stainless steel containers. In the Envirotainer’s base was a battery-powered EMU—environment maintenance unit. Moonmilk, she had learned the hard way, had a very narrow range of survivability: plus or minus about four degrees in temperature, plus or minus 5 percent in humidity. It had zero tolerance for light, natural or artificial. Not that any of those things were surprising, given that it had evolved in an environment where the conditions were hyperstable and absolutely dark.

“Now comes the hard part.” Hallie set the four containers on the cave floor beneath the moonmilk colony. As she did so, the biomass’s colors changed subtly, a hint of pink flowing in.

“My God. Look at that.” Cahner stopped moving.

“I know. Amazing, isn’t it?”

“Changes colors. Like an octopus.”

“Probably more like chameleons.” Hallie had investigated the color shifting. “Cephalopods use muscles to control their color changes. Moonmilk doesn’t have muscles, so it must be cell signaling, which is how chameleons do it. They can change color in response to temperature fluctuations. Mood. Stress. So this is probably chromatophores responding to hormone releases.”

She put on a high-filtration, isolation surgical mask with a 0.1 micron barrier capability. She donned sterile, elbow-length surgical gloves and removed from sterile packaging a Bard-Parker No. 60 straight-blade scalpel and a stainless steel dissection scoop. She turned to Cahner.

“Okay, here’s where it gets tricky. Once we separate a sample, we have about ten seconds to isolate it in the Envirotainer capsule before it loses viability. I need you to position the containers while I deposit samples. Put on a mask and gloves first.”

Cahner did as he was told. Then he picked up one of the sample-collection cylinders, unscrewed the top, and held it for Hallie. With the scalpel, she made an incision in the biomass slightly smaller than the cylinder. Using the dissection scoop, she excavated beneath and behind the incisions and gently worked the sample free. For the first few seconds, it glowed and pulsed in consonance with the primary biomass. Then its luminescence began to dim and the color pulses slowed. It gave off a peculiar scent that reminded Hallie of crushed grapes.

“Quick, now,” she whispered, more to herself than Cahner, who was standing there with the cylinder ready. She deposited the sample.

“Secure it!”

The words came out more sharply than she’d intended, but Cahner seemed not to notice. He put the cap in place, screwed it down tightly, inserted the cylinder into the Envirotainer. “Good job,” she said. “That one ought to be fine. Let’s do another.”

They obtained two more samples and sealed them into the Envirotainer. They were working on the last one when the scalpel slipped in Hallie’s fingers. The stainless steel handle had a scored surface for better purchase, but it had been designed for use in the controlled conditions of a surgical theater, not the bottom of a supercave. The handle had become wet and slick with biomatter as Hallie worked. She was making a vertical incision in the body of the moonmilk, her left hand holding the mass steady as the blade passed through. Though visually it appeared to resemble brain matter, the moonmilk’s tissue was tougher. Cutting it, even with the surgical-grade scalpel, was more like cutting through the skin of a grapefruit, requiring considerable, steady pressure. Before she could stop it, the scalpel blade slipped and jumped sideways, slicing a deep gash that ran through the web between her thumb and forefinger and halfway across her palm.

She screamed, dropped the scalpel, grabbed her left wrist. The pain hit instantly, like someone laying a red-hot blade on her palm, running all the way up her elbow into her shoulder and neck. She was off balance anyway, and the explosion of pain caused her to stumble, shoving her bleeding hand into the body of moonmilk. When she pulled her hand free it was smeared with blue-green matter, which mixed with the blood flowing heavily from her wound. The pain flared, as though someone had poured pure alcohol into the gash.

Cahner was already tearing through the contents of his pack for the first aid kit. Hallie pulled the surgical gloves off, held her left hand up, and squeezed her left wrist fiercely with her right, compressing the ulnar and radial arteries—the deep ones that suicidal wrist slitters had to cut to be successful. Those both lay deep, however, and blood kept welling from the wound, running down her forearm, dripping and pooling on the cave floor at her feet.

“Al!”

“I’m looking, Hallie! Hang on!” He was buried in his pack up to the shoulders, digging its contents out, socks and toilet paper and MREs flying out behind him. Hallie was watching, and then suddenly she was sitting down, feeling dizzy, nauseous.

“Got it!” Cahner ripped the paper wrapping from a sterile compress and hurried to kneel beside Hallie, dressing in one hand, poly bottle canteen in the other. “You hold your wrist, keep that pressure on, and I’ll flush this cut out.”

She held on, gasping from the pain when Al sloshed water over the wound. It wasn’t sterile, but it might wash out fragments of rock and moonmilk. He emptied his canteen onto her hand, then put the compress on her palm and cinched its gauze straps tight.

She yelped.

“I’m sorry , Hallie!” He sounded horrified.

“No worries.” She forced herself to relax, breathe deeply. “It has to be tight.”

When he was finished, Hallie sat, letting her head clear. Cahner knelt, one hand on her shoulder. “That is a nasty cut. What else should I do?”

“I don’t think anything, right now. It’ll need stitches for sure when we get out, but the bandage should hold it together until we do.”

“Climbing isn’t going to be fun with that.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Does it hurt like hell?”

“It did. But not so much, now.”

“Probably mild shock. You were looking wobbly there.”

“Better now.” She started to stand up, but Cahner pushed her gently back down.

“You just stay there for a few minutes. We’ll rest a bit and have something to drink and a bite to eat.”

“We need to get more moonmilk,” she said.

“What we need now is to get you fixed up.” Cahner took off his mask, and removed his rubber gloves. They ate energy bars, drank what remained of Hallie’s water, and napped for two hours on the cave floor. Then it was time to start the long trip out.

LENORA STILWELL WAS DREAMING OF A TIME AT A SMALL island in the Gulf, called Delfín. Spanish for “dolphin.” She and Doug and Danny were swimming out past the low, white curl of surf, slicing through blue ocean strewn with sun glitter, when a group of bottlenose dolphins came toward them, making silvery arcs in the air with their leaps. They stopped, treaded water, watched the dolphins on a feeding run, chasing schools of mackerel, which, herded to the surface, made it swirl and bubble like water boiling in a vast pot. Then she looked around and Doug and Danny were gone and someone was calling her name, someone she could hear but could not see, and she could not keep her head above the water.