The sight was not very reassuring. We flew on to the Drachenholen, the great cave system in the Hohe Kalkstein four hundred kilometers farther east.
I had begun exploring the caves with students years before, one of a number of long-term projects, and the university had kept their location unadvertised. But if I had begun exploring them, the emphasis was on the word "begun." They were not high priority and if they were full of interest for a biologist (one student party claimed to have found footprints of a tripedal creature in one well-concealed cave), so was the rest of the planet.
Thanks to Wunderland's gravity, they dwarfed the Carlsbad Caverns on Earth. And thanks to the many Wunderland life-forms that flew and brought protein into them, they had far richer ecosystems. In a society without modern chemistry, their vast guano deposits would have made rich mines. As it was, they were mainly mined with deep-radar beams, X-rays and collecting-spoons for fossils and theses. Cave ecosystems on Earth were among the oldest and, if Man left them alone, the most stable on the planet: caves in Australia and the Caribbean islands had similar insectile life-forms, apparently unchanged since both had been part of the ancient supercontinent.
The Wunderland cave ecosystems were old too, I knew, and variegated, but the knowledge gleaned from my small scratchings was tiny. There were largish carnivores in there, including the biggest, which we called morlocks, quasi-humanoid in shape. As far as I knew they did not venture onto the surface or far into the twilit zones near the cave mouths, though they had eyes, large, unpleasant eyes. Still, the university expeditions had been careful. In the twilit zone of the Grossdrache we had established a secure accommodation module along with what should be tamperproof stores of food and other supplies. We had an outfit of guns in the air-car, personal strakkakers clamped to the doors and a couple of heavier ones mounted on the body. Other things, too: experimental sonics, a bullet projector that was a more powerful version of the monastery's collecting guns, a couple of ratchet knives. All products of the new factories.
The mouth of Grossdrache was partly hidden at the end of a long winding canyon but big enough for us to fly into. I had once thought of putting a gate on it, but decided that it would attract too much attention. Within, it opened into a grand ballroom before dividing and running off into various darknesses. The module, deep in this ballroom twilight, was camouflaged, partly for aesthetic reasons and partly to hide it from any rather stupid hiker or camper who might penetrate this far. I had the doors' combinations but had removed them from the University's computers. A key seemed safer.
The annex module, also camouflaged as a group of large boulders, was big enough to hold the car. I was glad to see a colony of crepuscular-nocturnal batlike creatures (some classicist had called them "mynocks" in tribute to the old Star Wars films) had established a colony on the roof of the storage module and among the columns of artificial stalactites that hid some of its fittings. Unlike their fictional namesakes they could do no harm to us or the installation. They rose in a squawking cloud as we landed, but soon they settled again. They were messy creatures but excellent protein suppliers for the cave foodchain and had stained the roof and sides of the module with their droppings in the most natural manner. There was no reason for an inquisitive human not to think the whole complex a scattering of rocks. Already a drift of guano and dead Mynocks had built up on the ground beside the module, and segmented vermiform things, red and white-banded in our light, were industriously moving this material a link up the chain.
Apart from the chattering mynocks and rustling worms, the cave was still and silent but we kept our weapons ready as we crossed to the accommodation module. The trenches we had dug when collecting fossils were undisturbed.
Everything inside seemed to be in good order. The module had originally been built for space-an asteroid mining project that never went through-with space-standard backup and recycling systems that would have been unnecessary except that they cut out pollution in this delicate ecosystem. When I turned on the main desk I found the kitchen, storage bins, computers, lab tables, bunks, bathroom, and laundry all checked out. It was the best base and hideout I could think of.
"How long do we stay here?" Dimity asked.
"I don't know yet. You stay here until the situation stabilizes."
"I understand. But alone? I'm not sure that I'd like that."
"Not alone yet. But I can't think of a safer place for the moment. There are hundreds of feet of rock on five and a half sides of us, and these walls were designed to be proof against meteors and vacuum. I don't mean we have to live inside here long. This is just the retreat."
"Retreat?"
"An idea I got from the abbot. Somewhere to go when it's a good idea to get away from the world for a while."
We dialed some food.
"What's going on at Munchen?"
We dialed the news channel. Someone was denying there had been further rioting. She looked drawn and nervous, and twice people crossed in front of the studio camera. Then the transmission failed briefly. "What's going on in space?"
There was nothing coming from Tiamat, the Serpent Swarm, or any of the satellites in low orbit. The other ground-based channels had a recorded chess tournament, a junior-school model of continental drift theory, a singer, a head talking on dolphin legal concepts, an ancient documentary on Beam's first zoological expedition to Castledare, an exhibition of Neue Dresden China, a Rotary-Masonic luncheon. This wasn't ordinary television.
"It looks as if things really are starting to break up," Dimity said. The screen flashed with a lightning logo and an audio alarm blared. We knew what that was. An emergency override announcement, usually for the evacuation of some area threatened by a meteor strike.
Karl van Roberts had been arrested. Police were searching for Gretchen Kleinvogel. Emergency powers were being extended.
I keyed into one of the university's own low-orbit satellites, used mainly for ground surveying. (Its deep radar had helped discover the shallower part of this cave-system.) Munchen was easy to find, and with higher resolution I could see fires burning. So it was on again. This looked worse than before. I had done the right thing getting Dimity away, I told myself. Then I saw other things. The brilliant, flaring green of lasers firing through a clouded atmosphere. I punched the keyboard frantically, trying to get better focus. The satellite's cameras had unlimited focal length. As the picture shimmered I caught the flash of explosions somewhere off-camera. The transmission stopped, and the screen went utterly blank. It was as if the satellite wasn't there anymore.
A local fault? I didn't think so. I fiddled with the keyboard for some time, without result. Then a local alert on the desk flashed and beeped.
I clicked to the modules' own security camera, mounted in the cave roof directly above us, which gave us a view of the whole ballroom.
A cloud of mynocks. A red telltale flashed. Something large moved quickly out of the picture into the darkness of the tunnels. I tracked it with nitesite but it was gone. Replaying the film showed nothing distinct.
"I don't know what it was," I told Dimity. "Something attracted by our movements, I guess. One of the bigger cave animals."
"A predator." A statement, not a question. Cave food-chains have little vegetable matter in them apart from fungus, and few vegetarians, and in any case it is predators that are attracted to movement. The darkness and walls of rock about us had felt like safety, but I remembered with a creepy feeling in my spine the words of an ancient Earth tale, Rogue Male, again by the underground master Household, that I had studied in the Classic Literature course: "Darkness is safety only on condition that all one's enemies are human."