By the end of the third week, people were falling behind, disappearing.
A salt arch they were using as a bridge collapsed, plunging five into the void. Unbelievably, both of the expedition's two physicians suffered compound fractures of their legs. It was Gitner's call to leave them. Physician, heal thyself. It was two days before their echoing pleas faded in the tunnels behind.
As their numbers dwindled, Gitner relied on three advantages: his rifle, his pistol, and the expedition's supply of amphetamines. Sleep was the enemy. He still believed they would find Cache III, and that the comm lines could be repaired. Food ran low. Two murders soon followed. In both cases, a chunk of rock had been used and the victims' packs had been plundered.
At a fork in the tunnel, Gitner overrode the group's vote. Without a clue, he led them straight into a tunnel formation known as a spongework maze, or boneyard. At first they thought little of it. The porous maze was filled with pockets and linked cavities and stone bubbles that spread in every direction, forward and down and up and to the rear. It was like climbing through a massive, petrified sponge.
'Now we're getting somewhere,' Gitner enthused. 'Obviously some gaseous dissolution ate upward from the interior. We can gain some elevation in a hurry now.' They roped up, those still left, and started moving vertically through the pores and oviducts. But they tangled their ropes by following through the wrong hole. Friction braked their progress. Holes tightened, then gaped. Packs had to be handed up and through and across the interstices. It was time-consuming.
'We have to go back,' someone growled up to Gitner. He unroped so they could not pull on him, and kept climbing. The others unroped, too, and some became lost, to which Gitner said, 'Now we're reaching fighting weight.' They could hear voices at night as the lost ones tried to locate the group. Gitner just popped more speed and kept his light on.
Finally, Gitner was left with only one man. 'You screwed up, boss,' he rasped to
Gitner.
Gitner shot him through the top of the head. He listened to the body slither and knock deeper and deeper, then turned and continued up, certain the spongework would lead him out of the underworld into the sun again. Somewhere along the way, he hung his rifle on an outcrop. A little farther on, he left his pistol.
At 0440 on November 15, the spongework stopped. Gitner reached a ceiling.
He pulled his pack around in front of him, and carefully assembled the radio. The battery level was near the red, but he figured it was good for one loud shout. With enormous exactitude he attached the transmission tendrils to various features in the spongework, then sat on a marble strut and cleared his thoughts and throat. He switched the radio on.
'Mayday, mayday,' he said, and a vague sense of déjà vu tickled at the back of his mind. 'This is Professor Wayne Gitner of the University of Pennsylvania, a member of the Helios Sub-Pacific Expedition. My party is dead. I am now alone and require assistance. I repeat, please assist.'
The battery died. He laid the set aside and took up his hammer and began clawing away at the ceiling. A memory that wouldn't quite take shape kept nagging at him. He just hit harder.
In mid-swing, he stopped and lowered the hammer. Six months earlier, he had listened to his own voice enunciating the very distress signal he had just sent. He had circled to his own beginning.
For some, that might have meant a fresh start. For a man like Gitner, it meant the end.
I sit leaning against the cliff while the years go by, till the green grass grows between my feet and the red dust settles on my head, and the men of the world, thinking me dead, come with offerings... to lay by my corpse.
– HAN SHAN, Cold Mountain, c. 640 CE
22
BAD WIND
The Dolomite Alps
The scholars had been building toward this day since their first night together. For seventeen months, their journeys – Thomas's capriccios – had cast them across the globe like a throw of dice. At last they stood together again, or sat, for de l'Orme's castle perched high atop a limestone precipice, and it took very little exertion to get out of breath.
For once, Mustafah's emphysema gave him the advantage: he had an oxygen set, and could merely crank the airflow higher. Foley and Vera were sharing an Italian aspirin powder for their headaches. Parsifal, the astronaut, was making a bluff show of his athletic nature, but looked a bit green, especially as de l'Orme took them on a tour of the curving battlements overlooking the stepped crags and far plains.
'Don't like neighbors?' Gault asked. His Parkinson's had stabilized. Couched in a large wheelchair, he looked like a Pinocchio manipulated by naughty children.
'Isn't it wonderful?' said de l'Orme. 'Every morning I wake and thank God for paranoia.' He had already explained the castle's origins: a German Crusader had gone mad outside the walls of Jerusalem, and was exiled atop these rocks.
It was rather small for a castle. Built in a perfect circle on the very edge of the cliff, it almost resembled a lighthouse. They finished their tour. January was sitting where they'd left her, depleted by malaria, facing south to the sun with Thomas. Down below, lining the dead-end road, were their hired cars. Their drivers and several nurses were enjoying a picnic among the early flowers.
'Let's go inside,' said de l'Orme. 'At these heights, the sun feels very warm. But the slightest cloud can send the temperature plunging. And there's a storm coming.'
Thick logs blazing on the iron grate barely took away the room's chill. The dining hall was stark, walls bare, not even a tapestry or a boar's head. De l'Orme had no need for decorations.
They sat around a table, and a servant came in with bowls of thick, hot soup. There were no forks, just spoons for the soup and knives to cut the fruit and cheese and prosciutto. The servant poured wine and then retreated, closing the doors behind him. De l'Orme proposed a toast to their generous hearts and even more generous appetites. He was the host, but it was not really his party. Thomas had called this meeting, though no one knew why. Thomas had been brooding ever since arriving. They got on with the meal.
The food revived them. For an hour they enjoyed the company of their comrades. Most had been strangers at the outset, and their paths had intersected only rarely since Thomas had scattered them to the winds in New York City. But they had come to share a common purpose so strongly that they might as well have been brothers and sisters. They were excited by one another's tales, glad for one another's safety. January recounted her last hour with Desmond Lynch in the Phnom Penh airport. He had been heading to Rangoon, then south, in search of a Karen warlord who claimed to have met with Satan. Since then, no one had heard a word from him.