Part 44 (2/2)

Although everyone was hungry, they were not famished, and the water was always there to comfort them. Two and three and four times a day, they would bathe away their sweat. They tied strings to their plastic cups and could scoop up a drink without bending or breaking stride. Ali's hair had grown long. She loosed it from its braid and let it hang, lush and clean.

They were pleased with Ike's regime. He did not drive them. If anyone tired, Ike took some of their load. Once when Ike went off to investigate a side canyon, some of them tried lifting his pack, and couldn't budge it. 'What does he have in there?' Chelsea asked. No one dared look, of course. That would have been like tampering with good luck.

When they turned their last light off at night, the beach gleamed with Early Cretaceous phosph.o.r.escence. Ali watched for hours as the sand pulsed against the inky sea, holding back the darkness. She had taken to lying on her back and imagining stars and saying prayers. Anything not to sleep.

Ever since Walker had overseen the ma.s.sacre, sleep meant terrible dreams. Eyeless women pursued her. In the name of the Father.

One night Ike woke her from a nightmare. 'Ali?' he said.

Sand was sticking to her sweat. She was panting. She clung to his hand.

'I'm okay,' she gasped.

'It's not quite that easy,' Ike breathed, 'with you.'

Stay, she almost said. But then what? What was she supposed to do with him now?

'Sleep,' said Ike. 'You let things get to you too much.'

Another week pa.s.sed. They were slowing. Their stomachs rumbled at night.

'How much longer?' they asked Ike.

'We're doing fine,' he heartened them.

'We're so hungry.'

Ike looked at them, judging. 'Not that hungry,' he said mildly, and it was cryptic. How hungry did they have to be? wondered Ali. And what was his relief?

'Where can Cache V be? We must be near.'

'What's the date?' said Ike. He knew they knew the next cylinders were not scheduled to be lowered for another six days. That didn't keep them from trolling hopefully for the cache signals. All of them had tiny cache locators built into their Helios wrist.w.a.tches. First Pia, then Chelsea, used up their watch batteries trying to get some signal. It was magical thinking. No one wanted to talk about what would happen if Walker and his pirates reached the cache before them.

The six days pa.s.sed, and still they didn't find the cache. They were covering only a few miles a day. Ike took on more and more of their weight. Ali found herself struggling with barely fifteen pounds on her back.

Ike recommended they ration themselves. 'Share one packet of MREs with two or three people,' he suggested. 'Or eat just one over a two-day period.' He never took away their food and rationed it for them, though.

They never saw him eat.

'What's he living on?' Chelsea asked Ali.

For twenty-three days Gitner led his castaways with eroding success. It seemed impossible, but in their second week they had somehow misplaced the river. One day it was there. The next it was just gone.

Gitner blamed Ali's day maps. He pulled the rolls of parchment from her leather tube and threw them on the ground. 'Good riddance,' he said. 'Nothing but science fiction.'

With the river gone, they had no more use for their water gear. They abandoned their survival suits in a rubbery pile of neoprene.

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 ma.s.sive, 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 a.s.sembled the radio. The battery level was near the red, but he figured it was good for one loud shout. With enormous exact.i.tude 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 deja 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 a.s.sistance. I repeat, please a.s.sist.'

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.

22 - BAD WIND.

I sit leaning against the cliff while the years go by, till the green gra.s.s 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 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 G.o.d 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.

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