"Greta…" Hart stood. He was struggling for the right balance, afraid of being too bold and startling her into bolting, like a deer in a meadow.
She put a finger to his open lips, quieting him. "Owen, it's better for the work to let things be."
They explored along the water. The main stream was clear and cold: her measurement showed it was 6.3 degrees centigrade. The hot spring tributary, in contrast, was forty degrees, hot to the touch. It was crusted with minerals and a kind of slime. "Owen, look at that," the biologist said with a touch of wonder. "No light and yet something lives, fueled by this underground heat, perhaps. I wish I had my microscope."
She found more slime on rocks downstream from the confluence which warmed the river. And then at the end of the grotto there was a chute and the stream splashed toward darkness below. Her flashlight played across its surface and something undulated in the current like luxuriant hair.
"A plant?" Hart asked.
"Not down here. No sunlight. But a growth of something primitive, an odd algae that gets its energy from something other than photosynthesis, or maybe an animal colony like a sponge or a coral. Maybe what the Norwegians found. Let me get a sample…"
"Better wait until I can rope us up."
But she was already wading ahead and unable to hear him. She reached down to seize the wispy organism, grasping it just as her boots slipped on the slime of the underwater rocks.
"Greta!"
And then with a cry she was gone.
"Are we catching a train? Is that it? Is there a railroad track at the end of this valley that I don't know about? Because that, I suppose, could explain this frantic hurrying, this wheezing for breath that I'm enduring. Perhaps I can understand it if there's an express to Munich. Or if you've spied the lights of a beer hall."
"Shut your mouth, you whining weasel," SS sergeant Gunther Schultz growled at Fritz, with no confidence his order would have any effect. Christ, what a complainer: why had Drexler saddled them with this hobbling slacker? The political liaison had sent them off the ship and into the mysterious dry valley at dawn the previous day, Jürgen sleepless and sour and nagging from who knew what setback. Probably the damned woman, the SS troopers whispered. By late morning the soldiers were over the crater rim and they camped that evening in the valley bottom, cut off from the ship: the field radio didn't work unless they climbed up a side slope to communicate. The soldiers weren't happy. Schmidt had assured them there was no risk but they weren't stupid: they'd carried the bodies out of the Bergen, sweating under their gauze masks. And so, instead of their usual delight at being able to stretch their legs, they were no happier being so far from the ship than Fritz was. "This is a dead place, a death place," one of the soldiers had told Schultz while gazing down the arid frozen valley. "I just want to get back on the boat and go home." But Drexler wanted the island scouted for some clue to the disease, and the assumption was that nothing was to be found on the island's shroud of ice. So they would look here in the depths of the valley, eating wind-blown dust.
Fritz had been a last-minute addition. The political liaison had obviously decided to penalize the sailor for his tiresome sarcasm, calling him a damned communist before assigning him as a "guide" because of his previous trip ashore with the American. Fritz of course knew not a thing about where they were going except that he had no desire to go there. "I've seen that valley from the rim and it has all the charm of a gravel pit," he'd warned them before they left the ship. "A sewage ditch is more inviting."
"Of course if there is no train, then it might be possible to take a rest right here," Fritz now went on. "We are next to a lake here, albeit a frozen one. Have some lunch, order a stein, talk about gardening…"
"Fine," Schultz said in exasperation. "I'm sick of your moaning. You stay with the gear while we push to the end of the valley. We'll be back before dark."
"You're leaving me alone?"
"And good riddance," one of the soldiers said.
"Oh. You know, I've felt safer in a Hamburg back alley."
"If you don't stay here and shut up, you'll never see Hamburg."
The mountaineers trudged on, Schultz looking sourly at the enclosing hills of red pumice. It looked like pictures of another planet, the sergeant thought. The ice of the lake was old, never thawing, and sculpted into uneven frozen waves by sun and scouring winds.
They nursed their water. Dr. Schmidt had warned them not to risk drinking anything that could be a source of disease. Now they saw there were hot springs ahead at the base of the second volcano, the pools steaming placidly in the cold air. The mineral water spilled down a series of terraces stained yellow and ocher, the hot trickles melting a thin wedge of ice at the end of the frozen lake. Upslope a glacier from the second volcano had bulldozed to a halt, its ice and snout of gravel debris hanging over the springs.
Schultz climbed up to the pools to look about. Some had dried, leaving behind a residue of brownish dust carried up from inside the earth. But no sign of prior Norwegians, nor clues to the disaster. A gust of wind caught some of the dust and a plume of grit blew over the squad of mountaineers, forcing them to squint against it.
"Jesus, what a damnable place," the sergeant muttered. "And we haven't found a thing that is useful."
A soldier nodded in wan agreement.
Then he sneezed.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
"Greta!"
Hart had crept as close to the lip of the chute as he dared, wild with despair and hopelessness.
Then in the blackness below he heard it, faint against the roar of the falls. "Owennnnn! Oh my God, Owen! I'm in the water! Please help me!"
Her voice was like an electric shock to his system. "I'm coming!" he shouted hoarsely. "Hang on!"
The pilot scrambled back to the packs, grabbed a line and the lantern, and hurried back, splashing down the middle of the stream. He set the lantern on an overhanging boulder where it would serve as a beacon, tied off the rope, and cast it down the falls. Seizing the rough hemp, he began lowering himself backward, cold water foaming over his thighs. A flashlight tucked downward in his belt offered meager illumination. She'd slipped down the chute as if carried on a log flume.
"Owen, I see you!" she called. "I'm in a pool, a lake!"
The chute grew steeper as he went down, bending until it was vertical. The chimney the water fell down opened into a much vaster space. Hart leaned out. He could see light reflecting on black water and could hear her down there, pleading with him to hurry. His own arms ached from the effort and his heart hammered. Down, down…
He was out of rope.
He hesitated only a moment. There really was no alternative, was there? He would rescue her or he would die trying. Because the alternative was unacceptable.
He let go and plunged.
He was braced for a shock of cold water, the kind that sucks away air and threatens to stop the heart. Instead he hit a black pool that was surprisingly warm. When he surfaced, spitting out water that had a brackish taste, she was on him, sobbing joyfully, clinging to him in a warm dark lake underneath a frozen, fiery mountain.
They were alive.
He kissed her, fiercely, possessively, and she kissed him back this time, as greedy as he. They sank while holding each other in a hug of reunion and then broke apart to struggle up, laughing and coughing.
"Drowning in a volcano and we think it's funny," he sputtered.
She was treading water, the light so dim she was only a silhouette. "It is funny, Owen. I was terrified when I fell, certain I was about to smash onto the rocks. But now you're here and the water is warm. It's like nothing is real anymore."