Sandy, lithe in tight buckskins, was first to approach the rockfall that sealed her father's tomb. "Mom carved this," she murmured, stroking the weathered wooden cross with the legend, Wayland F. Grange 1955-Quantrill remembered the man whose choice had been to let radiation sickness complete its ravages in the small cavern, attended by his daughter and his pregnant wife. Quantrill swept off his Aussie hat and knelt silently at Sandy's left, while Lufo knelt at her right.
Finally, "Thank you," said Sandy, and trudged away from the fallen entrance. She could not at first locate the second entrance. Lufo found it by stumbling at its lip, a sinister trapezoidal hole in brittle spongy limestone, masked by agarita shrubs that grew at the entrance in perfect camouflage.
Lufo had never taken S & R courses, and proposed to go below with only his flashlamp. Quantrill's training made him cautious. "Whoa, com-padre; let's get the rope and harnesses. And you might describe the layout again," he added to Sandy.
While they brought equipment from the 'cycles, she told them of the sloping shaft, the first 'room' with its jumble of fallen stalactites, the passage leading downward, the huge sand-floored room with its mighty treetrunk stalagmites.
"Is it still a live hole?" Quantrill asked. "I mean, does water still drop from the stalactites?"
She supposed it did. Six, or six hundred years were finger-snaps of time in a cavern. "Below the big room — I called it the church — is a pool with a slight current. You can wade in it to the next room. That's where I stored my things."
"Okay. If the cave's still alive, there's less worry about dislodging dried-out formations. Buckle this harness on and let Lufo be your rear guard. I'll take point position," he said, using a jargon Lufo would appreciate.
Their flashlamps revealed signs of animal burrows near the surface. Twenty meters inside the first shaft they encountered a room gleaming with damp pillars and fingerlets of limestone. Fallen stalactites, some as thick as a man's arm, lay among the up thrusting pillars.Quantrill anchored one end of his rope to a stone stump and paid the stuff out as he continued at Sandy's direction. No point in dwelling on the fact that they could be walking over a thin crust with a long fall beneath, but he kept well in the lead.
A bend downward to their right, then a chute flanked by solid pillars like monoliths poured from wax. By now they had passed the realm of natural light and their flashbeams showed no dust in the air. Quantrill climbed down far enough to see a phalanx of gypsum sheets, petrified draperies sparkling in the beams of light, before he heard chittering peeps nearby. Sandy was five meters behind, sliding her harness friction link along the rope. Very softly he said, "What kind of bats are down here?"
"I never tried to catch one," she replied. "There weren't many except at dusk. They came out in clouds then."
"Well, there's bagsful of 'em now," he said, and played his flashbeam toward a dome that arched away past intervening pillars. The dome seemed to ripple, but his mind refused to accept the carpet of fur that covered its surface. The powerful flashbeam swept across the black carpet, a surface that moved and flickered and then, the faint chittering silenced by the disturbing light, began to denude the dome.
A half-acre of bats left their perches on the dome and fled up the chute down which the interlopers climbed.
"Lights out. Don't move," Quantrill hissed. A second later they squatted immobile in total blackness as countless bats hurtled past them in a whisper that became a fluttering roar. Sandy uttered one tiny bleat of fear as the sound of their passage grew, yet not once did they feel a single impact. Instead they detected hundreds of feathery touches, hardly more than breaths, against hair, arms, shoulders. The experience, Quantrill thought, was exactly like squatting in a dry waterfall, a spattering fluid cascade of sound without the moisture. The tiny mammals had to be echolocating adroitly to avoid striking them, their squeaks no longer audible to the humans.
For several minutes the waterfall of leathery wingbeats roared around them; then it began to subside.
Finally Quantrill risked the flashlamp again, directed downward now, and saw ghostly flickers wheeling in the room below, some whispering past them. "Proceeding," he said quietly, and began the descent anew.
The mottled gypsum surfaces were wet but not slick, hand- and footholds frequent. He saw scars in the scaly gyp, probably made by eleven-year-old Sandy who had braved this ten-meter descent with only a chemlamp. He marveled that she could have navigated this grotto lugging anything heavier than a handkerchief. He saw a featureless floor sloping away, gingerly stepped onto damp sand, realized that water had smoothed away Sandy's footprints.
The others followed quickly, their echoes sharing the void with hollow plops of water in some nearby pool. Quantrill, recalling a spelunker's lecture; "Could be pockets of quicksand. Water level can rise after a long hard rain." Occasional vagrant sweeps of flashbeams revealed that the dome was within five meters of the outside world, to judge from black roots that clung to the dome in espalier fashion as though fearing to extend down into the cavern. Quantrill couldn't blame them.
Sandy released her safety line, hurrying past an elbow made by translucent crystalline carbonates, her flashlamp forcing ghostly glows through them. "My corridor was over — oh Lordy," she said as the men reached her. Her lamp beam penetrated the two-meter depth of water to reveal a smoothly worn channel, the water wondrously clear except for tiny eddies at its banks. Distorted by refraction, the mouth of Sandy's corridor glowed faintly — half a meter below the. surface.
They searched long and fruitlessly for some alternative passage, one too high or too subtle for a little girl with a chemlamp. They found two crevices, neither large enough for a human body, and returned at last to the slow-moving water that issued from Sandy's submerged corridor. In a week, Quantrill guessed, the water level might dwindle. Or with October rains it might rise further.
Finally he pursued a line of questioning he would have preferred to ignore. How long was the passage?
Perhaps fifteen meters. Did it slope up? Down? No, almost level. It seemed likely, he said, that rising water had forced the bats up from their usual haunts in lower unexplored reaches of the cavern. Was the roof of her treasure room higher than the present water level? Yes, much higher, with ancient water-swept benches like church pews and strange formations like coral or petrified roots that protruded from the upper walls. Sandy could not remember how high she had placed her few treasures. By now they might have been swept away, lodged somewhere downstream, perhaps at the bottom of some drowned abyss. Quantrill persisted: still there was no reason why a strong swimmer couldn't work upcurrent to emerge in her grotto?
No, said Sandy, "If he were one part fish and nine parts crazy. Neither of you fits that description, I hope."
"I don' swim that good, compadre. Maybe we can come back with scuba gear, otra vez."
Quantrill thought of the delays, the risks, and then of Sanger. "The hell with another time. The water's not too cold, and I'm fresh." He began to strip, establishing a rope-tug code as he reconnected his harness, preparing his body for the trial with long draughts of air, easing himself through fine sand and refusing to shiver as he tested the current. It was stronger than he'd thought.
Sandy watched his preparations in silence. Her first impulse was to invent some barrier, a white lie to turn Quantrill aside from this imponderable risk. But he claimed to be a good swimmer — and as he stood in abbreviated shorts adjusting his harness to tow the safety line, she felt a swelling surge of confidence.
Beside the tall, slim-hipped, slender-legged Lufo, Ted Quantrill seemed small. But the muscles of his legs and back were distinct bundles of cable flowing beneath the skin. His arms and shoulders possessed the terrible whipcord beauty of a light heavyweight boxer in peak condition. For such a physical specimen, she thought, the drowned tunnel might just be navigable.