P. Deutermann - The Last Man

“Got it,” the man said.

“Do you have the first idea of what I’m talking about?” Ellerstein asked.

“None whatsoever, Professor — but then I never do.”

“The colonel hasn’t said anything about the names Ressner or the American, David Hall? There is no special alert?”

“Look, Professor, I will deliver your message, okay?”

Ellerstein thanked him, and the line went dead. Ellerstein looked at the phone for a moment and then hung up. So much for that great idea. He snorted — all this hugger-mugger about the American. Total nonsense. Now, what would he tell Yehudit? Nothing, he told himself. Coward, an inner voice whispered.

At three o’clock, David suited up again and prepared for his second dive. The operative mean depth was going to be about thirty-five feet, since he had already inspected the bottom of the cavern. From the dive planner, the no-decompression time limit was two hundred and forty-five minutes. Over three hours. Temperature and residual nitrogen were no longer factors because he needed to be out of the cavern by four anyway, dressed and down the mountain before five thirty, when the site closed down for Shabbat.

This time he tied off the underwater flashlight close to the slab hole before submerging. The water felt colder as he swam just under the roof of the cavern to the west side and then descended to thirty-five feet of indicated depth. It still took him fifteen minutes to find the cave opening, only to find that this was not the cave. This passage went into the rock wall about ten feet and simply ended, momentarily wedging his tank before he was able to back out. Damn, he thought. How many caves are there in here? He searched some more and finally found what looked like the cave he had seen on the first dive. The entrance was a narrow circle, which then expanded somewhat once he swam in. Following the purple beam from his headlamp, he used his hands to pull himself along the rock wall, sending up small clouds of muddy water as he inched his way forward. His tank clanked on the rock, and he looked up to see that the top of the cave was narrowing rapidly to an acute apex.

Rolling slowly in place to put his tank beneath him and then continued crawling forward, upside down, feeling the first signs of claustrophobia as he pressed forward, entering a cave inside a cave, and under thirty-five feet of water besides. He banished the distracting thoughts and kept going, inching forward now to keep his gear from being damaged. He realized he was breathing too fast and stopped for a moment to calm down. Then he realized his air bubbles were going ahead of him. Hunh? They should have been going behind him, out along the roof of the narrow chamber and back up to the slab hole.

He craned his neck straight back to see how close he was to the white slab. Make that the purple slab. The rock walls pressed in on all sides, and he imagined that he could feel them moving, slowly constricting like some stone python to capture him in here for all eternity. Focus, dammit! The slab was right ahead of him, shimmering now in the bright light of his headlamp, the colors rippling from white to purple. He reached over his shoulder like a man doing a slow-motion backstroke to touch the slab and hit — nothing.

He stopped cold. Nothing! He inched forward again, deeper into the cleft ahead, and again reached out to touch the slab. His hand passed right through it.

There was no slab.

It was an air-water interface. What had looked like a slab was nothing more than the refraction taking place where air and water met.

He inched forward again and felt sand along his hips, then stuck his head into the air of what looked like a round cave. He wriggled himself all the way into the cave and sat up, only then realizing that he had been swimming uphill inside the tunnel as he oriented himself once again on solid ground. The entrance back out to the main cave was now a black, rippling patch of water in the light of the headlamp. He started to take his mouthpiece out but then stopped. How old was the air in here? Was there even oxygen?

Continuing to breathe on the tank, he began to look around. The cave was not really spherical but more in the shape of an ax-head lying on its back, flat and open at the bottom, closing into a knife edge up some twenty feet above his head. There were two sheer, almost vertical walls. The bottom, on which he sat, was deep, loose sand, rising in a gentle slope like a sandy beach from the watery aperture leading back out to the main cavern. The whole cave was perhaps thirty feet in length and no more than ten feet across at the base. There was a structure of some kind, a table or bench, at the far end, under which lay a bundle of rags. Something metallic glinted dangerously near the rags as he shone the light on them.

He tried to figure out why the cave was dry. The only explanation was that the main cave had been dry at one time and then slowly filled with water over the centuries. Eventually the water would have risen past the lower entrance to the tunnel, sealed by that boulder, after which, leaking past the boulder, it would have begun to compress the air inside the sealed cave. When the water pressure outside equaled the air pressure inside, stasis would have occurred, with the air inside becoming a trapped, pressurized bubble.

He checked his elapsed time: thirty minutes. He had to move fast now, do a quick exploration of this virtual time capsule, and then get back out. He decided to stay on the scuba tank. God only knew what ancient microbes might be trapped in this place. He got up on his hands and knees, stood up, took off his fins, and then walked carefully across the sandy floor toward the structure and the rags. When he got closer, he realized that the bundle of rags contained a badly decomposed skeleton, barely recognizable as human bones, complete with a jawless skull. The bones were no longer attached to one another and were clustered around a huge dagger. He didn’t touch anything but just stood there, looking down at the human remains. From how long ago, he wondered. Was this one of the Zealots? There were small clay pots scattered around the sand floor of the cave, and their blackened tops showed that they had been used as lamps. His light swept the wall, and he realized that it was covered in writing. It looked like it had been done in charcoal or perhaps lampblack. He could not begin to decipher it, but an examination of both walls revealed that they were entirely covered in some kind of Arabic or Hebraic script, to the height that a man could reach on tiptoes.

He looked up at the bench structure. It was made of wood and shaped like a large table. The legs didn’t match: Some were rough-hewn; others appeared to be made of highly polished and richly carved wood. There were rough planks across the top, which was slightly higher than he could see. Ghostly remains of some kind of heavy, decorated cloth draped like spiderwebs down one side. Moving awkwardly in his scuba rig, he walked over to the right side of the cave, where the floor was slightly higher than on the left side. From here, standing on tiptoe, he could just see up onto the top of the structure, and what he saw took his breath away.

The altarlike structure was much deeper than he had thought, its top surface going back into the angle between the two sloping cave walls some four feet. There was a cracked marble slab lying on the planks, and on top of that, lying on its side, was an enormous menorah, the seven-branched candelabrum of Jewish ritual. It looked to be almost five feet from its boxy base to the top of its outflung arms, and close to four feet across. The base was heavily engraved. Two of the seven arms were damaged, bent out of the original plane, but it was still magnificent. The entire artifact appeared to be made of either bronze or even gold, he couldn’t be sure. Next to the menorah were several ivory cylinders, their circular bronze or gold ends heavily engraved. The cylinders were shaped like rolling pins and were some six inches in diameter, with ornate wooden handles sticking out of each end. He was pretty sure these were scroll holders. The scrolls, if they were still there, would be sealed inside. The cylindrical sides were embossed with what looked like gold filigree. To the left of the enormous menorah was a pile of what had probably been vestments of some kind, long since rotted away, with only a few patches of color visible in his light. The only other object on the altar top was a small, very plain bronze bowl or cup, eight inches or so in diameter at the top, which was set off to one side with a small pile of what looked like old coins lying right next to it. The cup did not appear to have any markings whatsoever, contrasting dramatically with the glorious objects around it.