Single Combat (36 page)

For several minutes the waterfall of leathery wingbeats roared around them; then it began to subside. Finally Quantrill risked the flashlamp again, directed downward now, and saw ghostly flickers wheeling in the room below, some whispering past them. "Proceeding," he said quietly, and began the descent anew.

The mottled gypsum surfaces were wet but not slick, hand- and footholds frequent. He saw scars in the scaly gyp, probably made by eleven-year-old Sandy who had braved this ten-meter descent with only a chemlamp. He marveled that she could have navigated this grotto lugging anything heavier than a handkerchief. He saw a featureless floor sloping away, gingerly stepped onto damp sand, realized that water had smoothed away Sandy's footprints.

The others followed quickly, their echoes sharing the void with hollow plops of water in some nearby pool. Quantrill, recalling a spelunker's lecture; "Could be pockets of quicksand. Water level can rise after a long hard rain." Occasional vagrant sweeps of flashbeams revealed that the dome was within five meters of the outside world, to judge from black roots that clung to the dome in espalier fashion as though fearing to extend down into the cavern. Quantrill couldn't blame them.

Sandy released her safety line, hurrying past an elbow made by translucent crystalline carbonates, her flashlamp forcing ghostly glows through them. "My corridor was over—oh Lordy," she said as the men reached her. Her lamp beam penetrated the two-meter depth of water to reveal a smoothly worn channel, the water wondrously clear except for tiny eddies at its banks. Distorted by refraction, the mouth of Sandy's corridor glowed faintly—half a meter below the. surface.

They searched long and fruitlessly for some alternative passage, one too high or too subtle for a little girl with a chemlamp. They found two crevices, neither large enough for a human body, and returned at last to the slow-moving water that issued from Sandy's submerged corridor. In a week, Quantrill guessed, the water level might dwindle. Or with October rains it might rise further.

Finally he pursued a line of questioning he would have preferred to ignore. How long was the passage? Perhaps fifteen meters. Did it slope up? Down? No, almost level. It seemed likely, he said, that rising water had forced the bats up from their usual haunts in lower unexplored reaches of the cavern. Was the roof of her treasure room higher than the present water level? Yes, much higher, with ancient water-swept benches like church pews and strange formations like coral or petrified roots that protruded from the upper walls. Sandy could not remember how high she had placed her few treasures. By now they might have been swept away, lodged somewhere downstream, perhaps at the bottom of some drowned abyss. Quantrill persisted: still there was no reason why a strong swimmer couldn't work upcurrent to emerge in her grotto?

No, said Sandy, "If he were one part fish and nine parts crazy. Neither of you fits that description, I hope."

"I don' swim that good, compadre. Maybe we can come back with scuba gear, otra vez."

Quantrill thought of the delays, the risks, and then of Sanger. "The hell with another time. The water's not too cold, and I'm fresh." He began to strip, establishing a rope-tug code as he reconnected his harness, preparing his body for the trial with long draughts of air, easing himself through fine sand and refusing to shiver as he tested the current. It was stronger than he'd thought.

Sandy watched his preparations in silence. Her first impulse was to invent some barrier, a white lie to turn Quantrill aside from this imponderable risk. But he claimed to be a good swimmer—and as he stood in abbreviated shorts adjusting his harness to tow the safety line, she felt a swelling surge of confidence. Beside the tall, slim-hipped, slender-legged Lufo, Ted Quantrill seemed small. But the muscles of his legs and back were distinct bundles of cable flowing beneath the skin. His arms and shoulders possessed the terrible whipcord beauty of a light heavyweight boxer in peak condition. For such a physical specimen, she thought, the drowned tunnel might just be navigable.

As Quantrill clamped the flashlamp handle in his teeth, he heard Sandy's, "Enjoy your tea-party, Ted." He nodded without understanding, inhaled again, kicked away toward the hole.

For the first five meters it seemed a cinch, though his elbows scraped painfully against the narrow sides of the tunnel. He hugged the bottom, peering ahead and upward to study the undulating roof in hopes that Sandy had exaggerated the distance.

If anything, she had underestimated. He felt tension on his harness and a flash of anger at Lufo for paying out the line too slowly; rolled slightly, banged his head; nearly lost the flashlamp. Then he was kicking hard again, using his hands for purchase where he could, telling himself he had plenty of time.

After a half-minute struggling against the current he saw a transverse rim of rock ahead with a milky reflective gleam beyond, pulled himself past it, realized he was in a deep pool, so deep that it was for all practical purposes bottomless. But the tunnel roof arched up here, and he saw surface eddies above him, and he rolled onto his side, feeling for the roof. There was none. He forced himself to rise carefully; saw in the sweep of the lamp that he was now in another room; fought the current as he grappled for handholds. In another few seconds he sat on a cold bench of stone, pulling in more line as Lufo paid it out, moving his head to play the flash lamp around.

He hauled in the line quickly, jerked twice, felt two jerks in answer; jerked twice again. Faintly, as though from a great distance, he heard a male shout and a lighter female rejoinder. There was an air passage somewhere, he thought—but a labyrinthine one. No sense in his shouting back—certainly not when it might bring a mountain down on his head.

Quantrill anchored his line around the bole of a stone pillar and made a careful assessment with his lamp, pinned between worry and awe; worry that Sandy's treasures could never be found, awe at the ineffable beauty around him.

Across the pool, a great cream-white formation emulated a pipe organ rising from liquid blackness. Nearer stood a pinkish gleaming array of translucent stalactites hanging from lips of gypsum in imitation of gigantic Spanish combs. And nearer still, above benchlike tiers smoothed by many floods, an incredible forest of coral-like helictites glowed in flesh tones, thrusting out in all directions in evident unconcern for gravity.

Then, somehow most bizarre of all: a stippled mound like a formation of gleaming orange snow with a child's plastic tea set nestled among its undulations. Quantrill laughed aloud, remembering that he had swapped a lapel dosimeter for those toys in Sonora; remembering also Sandy's ecstasy as she'd pressed them to her breast, six years before. Now he understood her remark about a tea party.

He found a moldy paper tablet and pencils of the old type, a curling polaroid—of himself in profile, for God's sake, aged fifteen!—and then, near a hollow filled with small-caliber ammunition, a finless canister the diameter of a cantaloupe. His heart leaped in recognition; Sandy had correctly identified it.

His footing was treacherous, the little nuke rust-stained; and he could not unsnap the small ribbon chute. A frayed cable-end trailed a meter long from an electrical pop-disconnect, and Quantrill wondered if there could possibly be any live power cells inside. Would it be damaged by brief immersion in water? He would have to chance it.

He pulled on the polymer line near the pool's surface, felt it taut, made three quick tugs, heard another shout. Now Lufo knew their goal was very near.

Quantrill folded the nylon ribbon chute into a bundle, thrust it within his body harness, cradled the heavy canister in his arms as he lowered himself into the water and took deep breaths to suffuse his tissues with oxygen. With the current and the heavy canister he would not need to attach his safety line, or so he imagined; and so he made his catastrophic error. He sank down to the lip of stone, saw the drowned tunnel in the light of the flashlamp, and started back. Headfirst.

Without encumbrances he would have had both hands free, might have slowed his progress, might have noticed the stone nubs like stubby fingers that his free harness ring engaged when he rolled side ways halfway down the tunnel. The ring was at his left side but in twisting to free himself he only managed to wrench his harness so that he could not reach the ring. The current was cold, cold, and too swift, and in his struggles he felt the ribbon chute slipping from his harness.

He fought, then. And lost the flashlamp, watched it laze away from him tumbling, flooding his world with hard light and bitter cold black as he elapsed twenty kilos of nuclear weapon to him against the pitiless pull of the current on the now-billowing ribbon chute.

He did not panic, not yet, not when he knew there was a hope that whatever held him might give, or that he might be able to unsnap the harness. But he could not do it while hugging that canister, no matter how incalculable its importance. When he tried to draw his knees up to capture and hold the canister so that he might free his hands, he underestimated the pull of the current. And then the canister slithered away, perhaps to be seen by the others or perhaps not, and now Quantrill was tearing away his fingernails as he fought to find harness disconnects; then to rip away the harness webbing; and when both failed, finally to find purchase for his feet so that he might somehow burst the bonds that held him. The last thing he knew was after he tried to breathe, after his disastrous coughing spasm, after his efforts to clamp his hands over his mouth and nose. That last thing was a paradoxical sense of tingling warmth, and of lassitude.

Lufo knew, the instant he saw the swirling beacon of light come sliding from the tunnel, that Quantrill was in trouble. But Lufo was no aquatic mammal, and watched the flashlamp's progress on the clear bottom of the watercourse until it fell from their sight behind a stone undercrop downstream.

There was no need to say anything to Sandy who keened with worry, playing her own lamp upstream as she braced herself knee-deep in water. "It's the parachute," she squealed then, spying the ribbon pattern that nearly filled the channel, rotating slowly underwater as it approached. "Lufo, here he comes!"

Lufo splashed into the shallow verge of the pool, cursed as his lunge fell short, then grasped a nylon strip and scrambled to safety. Sandy held her lamp beam on the suspension lines, saw the canister slide into view; knew a hideous glacial paralysis when Ted Quantrill did not come with it.

Lufo hauled the chute out and pulled on the lines, hand over hand, until he saw the canister slide out of the water. He could not believe that their luck had held so long; that everything Sandy claimed was true. And then he remembered that their luck was not
all
holding.

"Lufo, oh Lufo, he's not signaling and he's not coming and
oh, God, Lufo
," she screamed. The echo ululated down pitch-black corridors and set

Lufo's teeth on edge. Bubbles frothed at the tunnel's exit. Quantrill's breath.

Lufo did not commit his insanity until he saw that Sandy was preparing to dive. Then he flung her back, took a deep breath, grasped the anchored safety line and dropped feet-first into the water without his lamp, fully clothed, the hand-line his only guide.

He found that his best pace was face-up, hauling himself blindly hand-over-hand in terrifying blackness along the ceiling of the drowned tunnel, groping ahead to be sure he did not knock his brains out against a protrusion. He could swear he had traversed half a hundred meters when his flailing boot kicked something fleshy, and then both questing feet told him of an inert human body just behind and below him, and for a fraction of a second after releasing that handline he felt stark terror. Lufo did not swim.

Quantrill hung limp in his harness, and by the time Lufo found the pinioned harness ring he was nearing panic himself and knew that Quantrill had drowned.

But his gringa, Sandy,—really never his but wait!, perhaps his after all now,—would never leave until they recovered the body. Lufo at last found the harness latches, stripped the inert form from the webbing in brute frenzy, then felt himself rolling backward in the current with Quantrill's body and found that he did, indeed know how to swim as the light of Sandy's lamp grew stronger.

He burst to the surface gasping, eyes wide; felt Quantrill brush his thigh, reached a hand back and caught one ankle. A moment later Sandy and Lufo pulled Ted Quantrill’s blood-streaked body from the water. As she grasped Quantrill under the arms to pull him further away, Lufo could only sit and gasp, "Sorry—he was—hung up. Too late."

But Sandy worked furiously over the body. "Two or three minutes aren't that long," she said, and hauled Quantrill's legs up a gypsum slope, rolling him onto his back. "Come help," she cried in frustration.

Together they placed Quantrill's body so that Sandy could press on his ribcage while Lufo held his head to one side. They could hear a muffled liquid slosh as Sandy applied sudden pressure, and then, so startling Lufo that he almost released Quantrill's head, an abrupt flow of water, at least half a liter of it, from the open mouth. But he was not breathing.

Sandy continued to force the ribcage bellows. Perhaps another cupful of water trickled out. "Now , you," she panted, and gestured for Lufo to take her place.

Lufo's ministrations brought forth another trickle. Then, pulling Quantrill's chin forward, pinching his nostrils shut, Sandy Grange placed her mouth over his for the first time.

No response. She made Lufo stop, took another breath, force-exhaled again into Quantrill's throat. This time she heard a plopping burble, let more water trickle from the throat, exhaled again into his mouth. Finally she felt the stilled lungs inflate; let him exhale, force-fed him again. And again, and again. She could hear Lufo repeating the only prayer he remembered: Hail, Mary.

Presently the body coughed, gasped, coughed again, and Sandy fed life to her first love for another two minutes before she was sure his breathing was steady and strong. Then she wept.