Blind Descent-pigeion 6 (9 page)

  "And good morning to you," McCarty said as Anna joined him. With his good looks and instant attentiveness, she could guess part of his wife's problem. The man was a natural flirt. Or a habitual one. She doubted he meant anything by it; the response had just become ingrained into his patterns. Squatting on Frieda's other side, she trained her headlamp not on the doctor's face but on his hands.

  "Frieda," he said, "Anna and I are going to fit you up with a catheter so you don't have to go traipsing off to the loo. It will be a wee bit uncomfortable for just a minute." His voice was reassuringly conversational. Anna would have liked to have absolute faith in the man, but it was a luxury Frieda couldn't afford.

  Together they cut away the injured woman's trousers. They were lined with soiled toilet tissue, a homemade diaper the doctor had taken care to provide till his equipment arrived. At each step in the procedure, Peter explained what he was doing, dividing his remarks between Anna and the unconscious Frieda. His hands were ungraceful-looking, the nails chewed down to the quick, but his movements were sure and gentle.

  When the catheter was in place, McCarty pulled an oversized handkerchief from his hip pocket and shook out the square of cotton. A baseball was printed in the middle, the words "I do believe in the Twins, I do!" stenciled in a semicircle around it. "Not exactly sterile," he said, "but clean and unbesnotted." Draping it carefully over Frieda's lap, he secured it with safety pins to preserve her dignity.

  Their patient was settled, as comfortable as they could make her. McCarty began gathering up his supplies, and Anna asked him how the accident had happened. Her light was on his face now to see if muscles might betray something voice had been schooled not to. Watching for lies was a professional habit and, though Anna was a fairly decent practitioner of the art, she had learned not to count on it overmuch. Some liars were just too good, some honest people just naturally twitchy. Still, it was a place to begin.

  McCarty glanced over his shoulder. The move was not precisely furtive; maybe he was only judging the time left till they moved Frieda out. Anna had noted that quick, unfocused glance before. It was the one crack in his armor of charm. Though seemingly attentive, one sensed he checked to see if anyone more interesting was in the room before committing his time.

  Either Anna won, or she'd imagined the game; McCarty turned back to her.

  "Nobody knows for sure," he said. "Possibly not even Frieda. The brain has a way of protecting us from memories that are too painful to be relived."

  "Did anyone see it happen?"

  "Nope. We'd split up to explore possible leads out of Tinker's. Most of us were fairly close to camp. Brent thought he had a going lead in the upper quadrant. There." McCarty picked up his hard hat, switched on the lamp and used it to point out a crack seventy or eighty feet up the back wall. "He and Curt climbed to that ledge. Brent went inside. Curt waited on the ledge, sketching. Sondra was photographing a broken formation. Zeddie and I had been pushing a lead behind that mountain of breakdown." Again he used the light to point. The vastness of the chamber swallowed the beam before it reached its objective.

  "So you were with Zeddie. Who found Frieda?"

  "No. It got kind of squirrelly. Our lead petered out. Zeddie was headed back to camp and I was going to collect Sondra when I heard a yell-high, like a bird or a stepped-on cat. There was no way to tell where it came from, but it sounded enough like a cry for help that I think everybody pretty much started trying to get to wherever they thought it was. We ran around like the proverbial headless chickens. Then we all started shouting at each other, so if Frieda called a second time there was no way to sort it out from the general hubbub.

  "Zeddie was the one who found her. She'd known where Frieda was going. Neither of them thought the lead had much promise, it wasn't blowing to speak of, but if you don't check them all out, you know the one you skipped leads to the bottom of the world and the next guy is going to find it.

  "Frieda was in a crawl space, vertical, mostly breakdown-unstable stuff. Zeddie had gone down twenty feet and could just see Frieda's head. A rock the size of a basketball but pointy on one end had lodged between Frieda and the side of the passage. The weight rested on her shoulder, wedging her in.

  "Zeddie got down as far as she could, squatted over Frieda, and lifted the rock straight up. Talk about clean and jerk! Zeddie's no slouch in the weight-lifting department. She pushed it up over her head. Curt and I got hold of it and brought it the rest of the way. It was a good forty pounds. Frieda's lucky it didn't crush her skull or break her collarbone."

  "Curt was there when you got there?"

  "No. Wait. Yes. He was trying to get Zeddie to let him go after the rock."

  "So Zeddie pulled Frieda out?"

  "No. That was a group effort. I doubt even the amazing Zeddie could lift a hundred and forty pounds of dead weight straight up. She got out, and I went down and got a cervical collar on Frieda. We tried to be careful, but you know how it is. For all the protection we could give her spinal column we might as well have hooked a tow chain under her armpits and yanked her out with a backhoe.

  "It was lucky she was unconscious. We didn't know her leg was broken till we had her out where I could get a look. The pain would have been horrific."

  "Frieda never said what happened? Wasn't she conscious at first?"

  "Her level of consciousness wasn't stable. She knew who we were but not where she was or what had happened. As near as we could guess, she was climbing down and loosened some rocks as she went by. When she was below them, they broke loose. The first one hit her right leg at the knee and sheared off the top of the tibia. That must have been when she called for help. Then the second rock hit her in the head.

  "Guesswork, but informed guesswork," he said with a laugh. "That's a doctor's bread and butter."

  Having finished with the story and clearing up the medical paraphernalia, he stood, unfolding with the ease of a dancer. "When we get you tucked up snug in the Stokes," he said to Frieda, "I'll get you on an IV to keep your fluids up."

  Anna didn't know whether Frieda had gotten Peter's message, but she had to keep talking. There was no way of telling what got through to Frieda, but all possible lines must be used to tether her to this world when temptation urged her to wander into the next.

  Since Anna hadn't bothered unpacking so much as a change of socks the night before, she had nothing to do for the moment. Sitting near Frieda's head, she took her friend's hand between her own. "I know, I know, I'd never dare take such a liberty if you were awake," she said as she pressed her friend's fingers. "But, hey, there's not much you can do about it, is there? And I don't know if it comforts you, but it sure soothes the hell out of me. This cave stuff is for the birds. Bats." For a moment she sat quietly, playing Frieda's inert fingers against her palm. "Think about this," she said after a time, talking as much to herself as to her friend. "According to the good doctor, everybody was by themselves, near you, all shrouded in darkness when the rocks fell. Except maybe Brent and Curt. They were together, but I'm not clear exactly how together. This of course narrows things down not one whit. Cogitate upon it and then wake up and tell me all."

  Frieda moved and made a noise in her throat. Anna held her breath and waited, but Frieda never opened her eyes.

 5

Things happened fast and so smoothly that Anna's estimate of Holden Tillman-already high-went up a notch or two. His quiet authority overlaid strict self-discipline. In another man it might have been abrasive, but Tillman created the illusion that he had time for everyone, an ear for every concern. In addition to a gentle, self-effacing humor, his manner provided the lubricant that allowed a disparate collection of people to operate with singleness of purpose.

  Anna and Peter packaged Frieda Dierkz. She was strapped snugly in the Stokes, her hands crossed on her chest and lashed in place with soft bandages. A helmet with a Plexiglas face shield was fitted over her head and a stirrup beneath her left foot so, should she become able at some point, she could keep the weight off her injured leg when the litter was tilted. The oxygen bottle was secured between her knees.

  Because of the radical ups and downs of the rubble-strewn path to Tinker's exit, the standard method of carrying a litter would have subjected Frieda to a bumpy ride. So Holden strung the sixteen people out along the path, and the stretcher was passed between two lines of cavers, eight on a side, moving Frieda from hand to hand in the fashion of a bucket brigade. As the stretcher left a caver's hands, he or she scrambled ahead, keeping the line always unbroken, always moving forward. In an effort to make her journey as uneventful as possible, the stretcher bearers would stand between stones and pass the Stokes overhead rather than lower Frieda and pull her up again, squat on their haunches on the high ground and keep the Stokes moving levelly a foot or so above the rock.

  The men were as motley a group as one could hope to assemble behind any one cause. One had a gray-shot beard and hair that tangled like Charley Manson's in his heyday. Another resembled an undergraduate from a conservative midwestern seminary. Various points masculine in between were represented. Most worked shirtless. In the cave's humidity, exertion brought body heat up. Sweat glistened on bare backs between streaks of dirt. Bound by convention even this far below Emily Post's basement, the women sweated beside them in tee-shirts and running bras. Lisa was there, her Rapunzel braids looped up under her hard hat, along with two other women Anna had not seen before.

  Like a column of ants passing a grasshopper up the line, they moved the injured woman across the ruptured floor of the cavern. Running, climbing, waiting, lifting, and running again, Anna worked all the kinks and aches of the previous day out of her muscles. Later there would be hell to pay, but for the present it was good to be moving.

  She'd thought more bodies in the limited space would exacerbate her claustrophobia. In the tighter crawls she believed it still would, but in the vast dark of Tinker's Hell, the crowd made things feel less alien, less likely to close down in an inky tidal wave and blot out the fact that humans had ever dared venture there.

  A sense of purpose brought with it a rush of high spirits that those who had been stranded with Frieda sorely needed. Though the injured woman was seldom far from the minds of her rescuers, there wasn't an aura of grim determination but laughter and hard work and sharing. As Anna took a long pull on a water bottle offered by a stubby caver from Kentucky, she thought how good it was for people to be heroes, how much joy and confidence had been lost when the American public turned the care of themselves and their neighbors over to the impersonal rescuers of government agencies: police, fire fighters, paramedics, park rangers.

  Heroism had become almost taboo. Citizens were discouraged from mixing in "official" business. When the occasional soldier came forward and stopped a robbery or captured a would-be rapist, the next day's papers would be full of bureaucrats decrying the hotheaded interference and painting a somber picture of what-ifs in an attempt to dissuade any further outbreaks of vigilante kindness.

  A time or two Anna had been guilty of it herself. There were reasons: civil suits, idiots doing more harm than good, well-meaning people hurting themselves in their enthusiasm. But much of the time the help was turned away simply because it was too much fun playing hero. Nobody wanted to share the glory.

  Buoyed up on this beneficent rapture, Anna was of two minds. The good and kind Anna, who had learned to open doors for nuns, wanted to spread this wellspring of self-worth among the peoples of the earth. The real Anna figured the general public would just bollix it up, and let her good intentions wash down her throat with the tepid canteen water.

  The carry to the end of Tinker's took just over an hour. In the terrestrial world the sun would be rising. The rescuers were fresh, morale high, and no significant obstacles stood in the way. At the base of the climb to the balcony from which Anna had first seen the cavern, Holden called a stop. It was a near-vertical ascent scabbed by breakdown that created a more difficult haul to rig than a clean cliff face would have presented. There were nine hauls of varying difficulty to be rigged between Tinker's and the Rift. Holden and Oscar would rig those they came to. Teams from the surface would be doing the same. Working like the builders of the first transcontinental railroad, the teams would meet somewhere in the middle.

  The Stokes with its precious cargo was set well away from the fall zone, where stray feet and stones might compromise the patient's safety. Sondra made a halfhearted offer to stay with Frieda, but it was clear she itched to be in the center of things. Anna was glad to excuse her. Tucked back on a slab of breakdown, sheltered beneath a protective overhang of limestone, she looked after her patient and left the next round of heroics to those on better terms with the underworld. She adjusted the Stokes to make sure the head wasn't lower than the foot and the whole contraption was in no danger of moving of its own volition. She took Frieda's pulse, checked her IV and catheter. Her skin was cooler to the touch than it had been the previous night, and she seemed to be resting easier, sleeping rather than comatose.

  The climb to Tinker's entrance was alive with light and color. Under the dreary dun of the planet's skin, yellow helmets, aqua tee-shirts, and red and orange ropes shone with startling clarity. Line and personnel were snaking up the slope with a grace that, sequestered from the chatter and grunts, was balletic in its grace.