There was a squeeze around the boulder, then a drop of another twenty feet. From there the tube descended at more of an angle, its floor jumbled rock. It was slow, rugged going. The cave continued to warm as they explored deeper and soon they shed all but trousers and shirts. The bitter chill of Antarctica seemed far away.
The floor smoothed but the ceiling continued to get lower. Suddenly Hart paused. He'd felt a tremor. From somewhere there was the distant echo of falling or shifting rock, like the groan of something disturbed.
"What was that?" Her elation had disappeared.
"Earthquake, I think. A small one."
"My God."
"This is dangerous, Greta. I have to warn you of that. We're in a volcano, after all. Do you want to go back?"
There was a silence as she considered. "No. I have to know."
"All right."
He led on. Soon they were stooping, then on all fours. Finally it narrowed ahead to a belly-crawl. "Owen, are we going the right way?"
"I don't know. Wait here." Hart crept ahead, then came back. "I hear water."
"But are we at an end?"
"Not necessarily. There were tight places in the caves in Montana, and then you'd squeeze through and find a big room. Maybe this will be the same. But we can also squeeze and get stuck, or, if we're not careful, pop through to another elevator shaft. So I'm going to tie a rope around my waist and you're going to play out the line— I'll show you how— while I explore with the flashlight. Can you do that?"
"Of course."
He wriggled forward as the ceiling pressed down. His beam of light continued to be lost in the dark vacuum ahead, an encouraging sign. The rough rock began scraping on his pack and so he shrugged that off, leaving it for a moment. A final tight spot… and then his arms and head were jutting into empty space and he could hear the sound of a river echoing off rock walls. He shone the light around. He had found a grotto. The beam danced on flowing water.
"Owen, what do you see?" Her call seemed faint behind him.
"Maybe what we're looking for!"
He climbed out of the tunnel and dragged out his pack, lowering it to the floor below. On his instructions Greta doused her lantern and shoved her gear ahead as he slowly reeled in the rope.
Her head poked through and he grasped her under the arms and pulled. She slithered out and instinctively grasped him as she landed and he held her a moment longer than he needed to, his face in her hair, imagining he could feel the rush of her heart. Then she gently pulled away. "I think we should light the lantern," she said.
The grotto was a rock chamber about two hundred feet long and thirty feet high. It was split by a stream that emerged from a different dark opening and disappeared down a chute at the far end. A jumble of boulders occupied most of the floor but the water had deposited a sandy bar in the middle, dry and soft. A hot spring bubbled nearby and its water joined the main flow. The cave was pleasantly warm. Rocks near the spring radiated like heaters.
"We should eat," Greta said. "I'm famished."
They sat in the lantern's pool of light. Each had brought a blanket in case their stay became extended and they unfolded these now on the sand. There were tins of ham and cheese and a rich brown bread from the Schwabenland's ovens. Owen pulled out a bottle of wine. "I liberated this from Heiden's stock in the galley," he confessed.
She smiled. "It's cozy here. Warm. Almost like a little restaurant. I'm getting used to the dark."
"And do you think we're near what we're looking for?"
"I don't know. I'll look at the water after I eat. It's so strange being down here: they didn't teach us about caves at the university. I have no idea what to expect." She took a swig of the wine; there were no glasses. She used her fingers to dab at the corner of her mouth.
The biologist sat then looking at the sand, lost in thought. She's so pretty, Hart mused, admiring the facial sculpture of highlight and shadow in the gaslight. Some hair had come loose from where she'd bound it in a ponytail and it trailed across her cheeks. So alluring, yet so remote. What drove her to risk penetrating this dark hole?
"Greta," he said, "why are we here?"
"What? To explore— to search for an antidote, of course."
"Yes, but why the sudden urgency? And why the turnabout? You didn't seem to mind making the lab cultures at first. Not at the meeting. But then something happened with Schmidt. Last night you talked about spores. Why are they so important?"
"Oh. Him." She shook her head as if dismissing her other thoughts and took a bite of bread. "Everything has happened very fast, Owen. The Norwegians. The iceberg. This island. The Bergen. It made sense to me to try to find out what happened to those poor men, if for no other reason than to protect ourselves. That's why I agreed to do the cultures. But Schmidt was ahead of me, I think. And Jürgen. They wanted to understand where a disease came from in such a sterile environment. And so he searched the lungs and respiratory tracts for spore coats."
"Which are…?"
"A casing. A bit like a seed coat or an eggshell. Some microbes develop them when displaced from their preferred environment. They're like a cocoon and the organism is in stasis within, waiting for favorable conditions when it can break out and multiply. Schmidt thinks this could explain the infection. The spores were on the island from an unknown source. Somehow the Norwegians got into them and breathed some in. The body's enzymes cracked them open, like a Trojan horse, and they began doubling every twenty to thirty minutes: first two, then four, then eight— in a single day you can have billions. People begin coughing and sneezing. Finally the muscles seize, the nerves burn like fire, the organs dissolve… and you're dead."
"So you're afraid these spores could strike again?"
She nodded. "Yes. That's a possibility. But I'm more worried by Jürgen's talk of creating a lethal new weapon."
"Is that really possible?"
"With most diseases, I'd say possible but not practical. After all, how do you store them? How can you prevent being exposed yourself? The complications are many. But diseases that develop spore coats are ideal. The coating solves many of the problems."
"And neither Schmidt nor Jürgen care about the morality of it all?"
She laughed bitterly. "Schmidt, he's as amoral as they come. Jürgen, he's relentlessly moralistic. And it's a circle, you see— at the two extremes the means to achieve an end come together. He and Schmidt concur."
"He said last night that he loved you."
"Yes. I know he does. He means it."
"And do you love him?"
She smiled, her eyes still downcast. "Ah, we're back to an earlier conversation, I think." Greta considered as if the question had never occurred to her. "No. Well… Yes. I do." There was a note of doubt in her voice. "But not in the same way, perhaps, as… I'm fond of him, when he relaxes. He can be affectionate, you know. I admire him, his sense of purpose— his moralism, if you will. His certainty. He's a strong man. Intelligent. He intrigues me."
"You're talking yourself into it, Greta."
She looked troubled. "I don't know, Owen. He also frightens me sometimes with his intensity. The fight with the whalers. I don't know what I feel or what I'm supposed to feel. This love. It confuses me."
She waited. There was just the sound of the river, the hissing of the lantern.
"Me too." It sounded inadequate, yet he was uncertain what else to say.
She nodded solemnly, swallowing. "And that's good, I think. Easier." Her voice caught a bit. "Because I want to do what we came down here to do. Explore this cave." She briskly thrust the remains of their meal back into the pack and stood up. She was all business again. "So. You come with the lantern while I study this stream."