Ended not in a wall but in an opening.
‘Can you see this, Bob?’ she asked, her voice quivering.
‘Looks like we’re coming down to the mouth of this particular river,’ said the American, his words distorted by the static on the little radio. But surely his voice, too, had been quivering just a little.
‘We must go there and take a look.’
‘Only if we’ve got enough line.’
‘You have used less than half the available line,’ came the even more distant voice of Colin Ross. ‘How much more do you need?’
‘It is difficult to judge distance. Not only is there the effect of the water to be considered, there is the lack of any recognisable scale. I do not have any idea how big anything which I can see actually is, therefore I cannot tell how distant it may be.’
‘That isn’t much help, Katya.’
‘It’s the best we can do, Colin. Katya’s right. No way can we judge distance accurately down here. Give us as much line as you can, we’ll keep updating you as we go.’
‘No sign of the missing men?’ asked Richard’s voice reedily over the set in his suit.
‘No,’ answered Bob, his voice deep with sadness. ‘Like it says in that old hymn, Richard, “Time, like an ever rolling stream …” ‘
‘ “ … Bears all its sons away.” ‘
‘That’s the one, old man. They’re long gone, I’m afraid.’
‘Then you should come back at once,’ said Colin, his voice loud and his tone urgent.
‘But no!’ answered Katya Borodin at once. ‘Dr Ross, how can you say this? We must look. How can we not? We must!’
The silence then told how deeply Colin was torn. Had he been down there in that unique position himself, he would not have hesitated for an instant. There would have been no force on earth great enough to pull him back from discovering what lay beyond the debouching of the underground, submarine river. And having Katya and Bob report to him in detail what lay beyond the tunnel, at the heart of the iceberg, might well add significantly to his understanding of the mechanics of its monstrous construction. He was a scientist, an explorer in the minutiae of ice crystals and the tiny forces that made snowflakes form as they did as well as in the enormities of frozen continents and what made glaciers the size of Amazons create icebergs the size of countries. He had spent his life discovering the facts he was now so expert in, no matter what the cost.
And yet the cost was potentially so high. Manhattan had already claimed too many lives, but their loss had not slowed the project and put at risk the hope of the dying millions in Mau. Bob and Katya were different. They were the best in their field. If they died, then the project might well die too and Manhattan would be left to waste itself in the warm water, and Mau would be left to tear itself apart. The responsibility weighed very heavily upon Colin, for the situation was of his making and the project the result of his work. Ultimately, they were all here because of him. Those who were no longer here had died because of him. And any more who were injured or killed would weigh like lead upon his conscience until he died.
He met Richard’s eyes, not asking for advice, but summoning the moral courage to proceed. Richard advised in any case. ‘Go for it,’ he said.
But his voice was drowned by Katya’s sudden exclamation, ‘There’s something moving down there! Bob! Do you see it? There’s something moving just beyond the tunnel mouth!’
Katya was hanging upright in the water, kicking lazily against the current to keep her legs from sweeping on downstream. While waiting for Colin’s decision, she had switched on her torch and shone it around, marvelling at the way its light changed the colours of the ice all around her. Lost in wonder at the new rainbow of blues that the torch beam seemed to trap just above her head, she had played the beam on down the tunnel roof until, with a shock, she saw the light vanish and realised she was shining it straight out through the tunnel mouth. And as her dazzled mind was just beginning to come to terms with that, something flashed across the broad brightness of the beam. Something bright, vivid with movement. Something alive.
She had called out to Bob in her excitement, but it was Colin who answered her. ‘Right,’ he snapped crisply. ‘Give me depth reading and remaining oxygen time before you proceed, please, Katya.’
She looked at her depth meter and was surprised to see that she had descended less than ten metres — the tunnel had given the impression of sloping more steeply down. But she still had lots of oxygen left, especially as she would clearly have no real problems of decompression at this rate.
The realisation that she was so near the surface did nothing to dull the wonderment she felt, but it subconsciously added to her confidence. When Colin said, ‘Take care!’ she took little notice. As soon as her line slackened, she was off, moving purposefully after the pointing finger of light towards the gape of the tunnel mouth. As the beam of light plunged into the shadows beyond, a whirl of movement was revealed and her eyes fastened upon it, dazzled and increasingly mesmerised.
When she reached the tunnel mouth, instead of recognising the fact, stopping and taking stock, she swam on out without a further thought and the body of Jock McGann, dead for six hours now but still spinning wildly in the swirl of the buried whirlpool, collected her in his icy arms as he swept by and jerked her bodily out and away. It felt strangely as if she had been pulled into a particularly energetic dance. The length of his body slammed against hers and the pair of them whirled out of the horizontal position in which she had been swimming into an upright position. There was an instant in which she thought he might miraculously be alive, but then the brightness from her waving torch revealed the gaping sockets of his eyes. His mouth was wide and screaming, as though he could feel the small fish there feasting on his lips and tongue. Overwhelmed with revulsion, she pushed away from him only to shove herself backwards against the side of the cave they were dancing round. She felt a stunning blow against the back of her head and surrendered to the dark.
The woven polyester line stretched taut along the tunnel, then it parted and Katya was gone.
The first Bob knew of it was the disorientating moment when the loose line suddenly became bar-taut, crushing him against the roof. ‘Katya!’ he called into his face-plate microphone, only to be answered by her wail of shock and surprise. Then the line was loose and he knew with a cold certainty what that meant.
‘She’s gone!’ he called up to Colin. ‘Give me enough slack to follow. I’ll make an assessment from the tunnel entrance. Quickly!’
As soon as the line slackened, he fought his way forward, but unlike Katya, he was very careful indeed to note where the tunnel mouth was and he did not let his vision probe beyond it until he was firmly wedged within it.
‘There’s some kind of cave here,’ he gasped. ‘I can’t really see how big it is. I can’t make out the far side. I can see a little of the ice immediately outside and it looks as though the tunnel debouches near the top of a sheer ice wall, but I can’t tell how deep it is. I guess it must be open to the sea, though, because there’s a lot of stuff in here. There’s a kind of slow whirlpool. Everything I can see is swirling around. I can’t see Katya, though. I guess I need to go… My God!’
‘What is it? Bob!’ Colin’s voice was sharp with much more than concern now. He glanced across at Richard who was rapidly preparing to go down into the tunnel.
The American’s voice came back onto the airwaves. ‘It’s OK. I cut my hand, is all. There’s some kind of metal wedged in the ice here. Bit of plate from some old wreck, I guess. Son of a bitch, that’s a sharp edge. Maybe that’s what parted Katya’s line. It’s well enough honed, God knows. Colin, there’s all kind of stuff washing around in here. I still can’t see Katya, though. Wait a minute. Let’s have absolute silence.’ On his command, there was silence on the air. They all held their breath. There was the faintest whisper of respiration. ‘That’s her. She’s still breathing. Must be unconscious, though. I guess I’m going to have to go in. How much line do I have?’