The sadness in his voice cut through her cloak of self-pity. In more ways than one, the underground was the only true wilderness remaining. The lead where Frieda had been injured had been discovered Tuesday. Thursday of the same week Anna found herself sitting, staring at Holden's beloved cave pearls. She would be the twelfth or thirteenth person ever to walk where they were going, ever to see whatever it was they were going to see. No animal-human or otherwise- had made its home here. No planes flew overhead in any real sense. Helicopters couldn't airlift the lost and injured to safety. The cave was within easy walking distance in miles to restaurants and VCRs, yet the far rooms of Lechuguilla were among the most remote places on the globe. Intellectually, Anna could see the attraction. Viscerally, she still wanted to go home.

"Off-rope," boiled up from the pit at her back. An echo accompanied it, hinting at cavernous s.p.a.ces and irregular walls.

"I know," Anna said irritably. "Me next, you last." Having gone meticulously through the drill: clipped in safety, called "on-rope" to clear the fall zone, threaded the rack and replaced the JUMAR safety on a harness 'biner, she eased over the edge of the falls. The terrain revealed by her lamp provided footing as she gently touched the cliff face on the descent. Then the cliff undercut, and her feet dangled free. She held herself from the wall with her left arm, the right paying out rope from below the rock. In an instant the wall was a memory. She hung suspended in the middle of nowhere, of nothing.

She paid out twenty or more feet of line, then stopped. Perhaps she swung gently, held safe by a few links of metal and nylon, seventy feet above a floor she couldn't see-probably would never see but in the n.i.g.g.ardly sc.r.a.ps afforded by a headlamp. With no up and no down, no walls, no horizon, all sense of motion was lost. Her light pried into darkness but reached no destination. All that existed was the bright yellow-and-blue weave of the line that held her, and the rough russet of her battered leather gloves. An ideal rappel for an acrophobe. Without any shred of visual evidence, the mind refused to grasp the situation fully.

Anna had stopped for a couple of reasons. The first was habit. Whenever possible on a descent she liked to stop partway down and take in the view. It was a time of absolute freedom: freedom from one's fellows, from one's job, even, in a way from the law of gravity. With this absolute freedom came absolute peace. In this instance, since the rope and her own gloved hands failed to fascinate, there was no view to speak of. But even given the peculiarities of the place, a remnant of peace remained.

For the first time in a long while, she was alone. The men, one a hundred feet above, the other nearly as far below, could have been on the face of the moon, such was her momentary isolation.

Time, s.n.a.t.c.hed away by the urgency of Frieda's head wound, was by some alchemy of darkness and suspension, returned for the nonce, and Anna felt able to steal a minute or two to collect what had become a stampede of thought and emotion. Buffeted by personal terrors, hands numb and mind driven inward till it was as choked as the place she had crawled into, she was of no value to anyone. Worse, she was a danger to herself, to others, and to the fragile life of the cave. One of the tales of degradation she'd been told by Lisa as they readied her gear was of an aragonite bush deep in the cave. A delicate structure of pure white growing from the cave floor in intricate crystallized branches with minute "leaves" that glittered like diamonds. On this surreal object of beauty someone had dumped his human waste, shattering the minuscule spires with ordure. This monument to human coa.r.s.eness could never be washed away by rains, dried and whisked off by the wind. The cave had no way of cleansing and renewing itself. Each misstep left a track for all eternity.

Hearing the story, Anna was repulsed as she was meant to be. But, though she would not have admitted it to Lisa or Timmy, she could empathize with the transgressor. When fear and fatigue reached critical ma.s.s, the higher instincts were lost. In their place came a rough anger, a grasping for immediate needs regardless of the consequences, whether that need manifested itself in s.n.a.t.c.hing the last mouthful of water or relieving oneself without taking the time and energy to a.s.sure no damage was done in the process.

It was toward this shameful and dangerous mindset that Anna knew she was headed. While she still had a modic.u.m of control, she had to make one of two choices: go back or get over it. She sincerely hoped that in the extremity of her need, should she call for someone they would come. Frieda had called.

Going back was out of the question.

She took a deep breath and let the claustrophobia build in a vacant center of her skull. Terror gushed from her pores in a sweat that stank of fear. A metallic taste flooded her mouth, and her hands grew so cold and stiff she wondered if the rope would slip though the fingers of her right hand and leave her to plummet to the rocks below. Though she remained upright, she had the overpowering sensation of falling in all directions at once.

When terror had filled every cell of her being, she gripped the rope tightly and pressed her cheek against it. s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g her eyes shut she braced herself against the detritus in her head and willed it to move. Not gone, she told herself, knowing that was too much to hope for. Just stored away in a vault. Later, when she was out of the cave and Frieda was safe, she would give herself permission to go completely insane if that was what was required.

Sharp pain cut between her eyes, and she could almost hear the creaking and snapping as she mentally bulldozed the mountain of neurosis to the back of her mind.

For half a minute more, she dangled with her eyes closed. Her head hurt, but feeling was returning to her hands. The fear was not vanquished. It hung over her, a huge and precariously balanced boulder ready to come crashing down and crush her at the first loud noise or brush of air. Being wired with a panic b.u.t.ton on a hair trigger was not rea.s.suring, but, with luck, it would never be pressed. If it was . . .

I'll burn that bridge when I come to it, she told herself. Until then she could think again; there was room to care for others. She could go on.

Rapidly she began paying out rope, descending to the bottom of Boulder Falls, where Iverson welcomed her with the light from a small battery-powered star.

3.

The h.e.l.lish pace set by Iverson was a G.o.dsend. Traversing the rugged subterranean landscape took all of Anna's concentration and all of her skills. The interior of the planet did not seem governed by the same laws of physics as its exterior. Or perhaps it was just that the route was non-negotiable. One couldn't pick and choose pa.s.ses or climbs; one went where there was no dirt in the way.

Such were the demands of travel that majesty and grandeur were lost. Anna wasn't sorry. Hard physical work was a balm for her soul. Vast slopes of scree were painstakingly descended. Boxcars of stone, upended and angled in a hundred ways, stacked against each other until they formed smaller pa.s.sages of their own. Hands were used like an extra pair of feet for balance. Chunks of stone slid underfoot, and ankle-breaking traps opened between rocks the size and stability of bowling b.a.l.l.s.

Names went by with the black velvet-clad scenery: Colorado Room, seen as a series of slides framed by the limiting scope of headlamps; Glacier Bay, great pale glaciers calving in a sea of night. Windy City, Rim City.

Anna used her body in a way she seldom had since childhood. Though occasionally alarmed at being called out of an early and long retirement, her muscles gloried in the exercise. As she bent and stretched, hopped from boulder to boulder in faltering and moveable light, slid down talus slopes on b.u.t.t and heels, hauled herself up rocks, scrabbling with fingers and toes for purchase, it came home to her how stultifying the dignified world of grown-ups had allowed itself to become. How limiting and unsatisfying to deny our simian ancestry by walking always upright and sitting in chairs, throwing away natural powers for some inherited code of decorum.

Wriggling through a narrow chimney, knees and elbows thrust against the rock, she remembered a story she'd been told by a friend who led canoe trips for Outward Bound in the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota. He'd taken a group of physically disabled people on a two-week trip. It wasn't a luxury vacation. Everybody did what they could, filling in the gaps for one another.

The story that stuck in Anna's mind was of a man who suffered from a crippling case of muscular dystrophy. In his late twenties, he'd been wheelchair bound over half his life. His greatest fear was that his house would catch fire. If he couldn't get to his wheelchair, he would burn to death.

During the trip this man was unable to carry canoes or gear on the many rough portages. But he chose not to be a burden to the others. He discovered an untapped talent. Clad in protective clothes, he crawled and inched and slithered, dragging his legs over fallen logs, across rocky beaches, and through weed-choked ravines.

By the end of his sojourn in the wilderness, his fear of burning to death in his own home was gone. "I can crawl out," he said. "I never thought of it. Shoot, I could crawl the six miles to the fire station if I had to." He'd regained some of his lost mobility.

The guy would have made a heck of a caver.

They'd been traveling ninety minutes, had gone less than three quarters of a mile, and had ventured into the earth four hundred feet, when they came to the North Rift.

The rift was a great crack running northwest to southeast, splitting the known world of the cave as a cleaver might halve a melon. Pointing with his light, Oscar picked out a hand line, threaded his rack, and descended. At the T-shaped junction where pa.s.sage met rift, the cut was only fifteen feet deep. Moments later he was climbing up the far side. A cringing, spine-sc.r.a.ping crawl later they emerged next to a huge fissure. The Rift gone mad.

"Jesus," Anna breathed as she cleared the last tumble of rock. Iverson was seated on a square block of breakdown the size of a refrigerator. The stone was sheared as neatly as if a gargantuan mason had done it with a chisel. Pieces, varying in size, clung to the edge of the precipice. She scratched her way up to sit gingerly beside Oscar, her hands hooked on the back of their limestone couch lest the pull of the deeps should suck her down. "Shouldn't there be a sign here that reads 'Beyond This Point Be Monsters'?"

"Left goes up to the North Rift," Iverson said. "Right is the main route to the rest of the cave. We go right."

The word "impa.s.sable" came to mind. Above, stone vanished into the gloom. Blocks the size of rooms jutted from the walls. Where she and Iverson sat, it was about thirty feet wide, the far side smooth, vertical, offering nothing in the way of an inducement to cross.

"Right?" Anna said.

"Right."

"How?"

Iverson smiled. "There." He painted a curved surface of rock above her with his light. The wall of the rift bulged slightly and bent around in a southwesterly direction. On closer examination, Anna could see where a rope had been strung. The trail-using the term loosely-was suspended along the wall eight or ten feet above where they sat. Pitons, bolts were frowned upon in wild caves. Driving these man-made anchors into living stone left scars. The rope above them made use of a motley a.s.sortment of natural anchors: BFRs, Big f.u.c.king Rocks; jug handles, natural holes in the rock; and stalagmites.

Below, the rift fell away in a rugged canyon. Light served only to beckon forth the shadows and veil secrets. It struck her as odd that all of it-this tremendous gorge, the seeps and falls and spires-could continue to exist in the total absence of light and life. Like the philosophical tree falling in the theoretical forest, with no one to hear, not so much as a gnat or a dung beetle to take note, did it really exist? Apparently it did. "How deep?" she asked.

"Here? Maybe one hundred twenty-five feet or so. It varies, of course. n.o.body's ever really done much exploring down there."

As far as Anna was concerned, that left it wide open as a habitat for impossible creatures from the underworld. It was no mystery why the ancients peopled caves with evil spirits and placed their h.e.l.ls deep within the earth.

"Definitely a No Falling Zone," Iverson said mildly.

Anna turned her light on his face. He was smiling with what looked to her like genuine delight. "You really are a creepy person, you know that, don't you?"

Holden Tillman eased up beside them and swung his legs over the edge. Anna kept all her appendages on solid ground, her legs folded neatly under her, tailor-fashion.

"So," Holden said, uncapping his water bottle and pausing for a long pull. Anna followed suit, checking first to rea.s.sure herself there wasn't a "P" scrawled on the cap.

"Freak-Out Traverse," Holden said, and waved toward the roped cliff face with his water bottle.

"Gee, why do you think they call it that?" Anna asked.

Holden didn't seem to notice the sarcasm. "Interesting story," he said. "See below the rope there? That great, big, old, solid-looking poke-outance, just exactly the right size to wrap your arms around and hang on to for dear life?"

He traced the rock outcrop he described with a golden finger of lamplight. It was the obvious place to make the traverse. Anna had wondered about the trail being set so high above the starting point.

"We got here. Me and a caver named Ron. I, being the gentleman that I am, insisted Ron have the first crack at it. 'Oh, no,' he said. 'After you, my dear Holden.' 'I wouldn't dream of it. After you,' says me. So he goes first. Ron gets to that big, old, friendly rock and spreadeagles himself across it like a love-struck starfish. And that sucker starts to move. The thing is on ball bearings. Hence 'Freak Out Traverse.' I let Ron name it. I'm just naturally generous that way."

Even in the wandering half-light, Anna noted the twinkle in his eyes.

"Everybody rested and rejuvenated?" Iverson asked.

A sheer curtain of panic, like heat rising from the desert, quivered behind Anna's breastbone; panic not at the traverse but at going on instead of turning back. Gideon, the horse she'd ridden on backcountry patrol when she was a ranger at Guadalupe, and she had this discussion at every fork in the trail, Anna insisting they go on, Gideon determined to take every opportunity to go back to the barn.

Rest stops were going to be bad news.

"Ready," she said, and was the first to get to her feet. Movement was good, work even better. She felt herself almost looking forward to Freak-Out. That should take up every shred of her thought processes for a few minutes.

After Freak-Out the going got somewhat easier. Though a good deal of effort went into climbing on, around, and under the blocks, little of it was heart-in-mouth stuff.

Shoving her hands in cracks, her face in the dirt, reaching into darkness, squeezing through the narrow ways, Anna came to appreciate the sterility of the cave environment: no spiders, grubs, scorpions, rattlesnakes, wasps, tarantulas, ants, or centipedes. She burrowed and barged her way through with more or less complete confidence that, as predators went, she was pretty much alone. Given the forced intimacy with blind crevices and dank hidey-holes, this was definitely a plus. This far in there wasn't even any evidence of that benign resident, the cave cricket. For the first three or four hundred yards she had seen a few of the harmless, spectral insects, but cave crickets found their food on the surface or in the twilight zone where the outer world reached within. They seldom wandered more than an easy cricket commute from the terrestrial world.

Partway down the North Rift, half an hour's travel and not quite a hundred yards as the crow flies-should a crow choose such a batlike endeavor-Iverson stopped again, perched this time on a narrow ledge, his lamp extinguished. Lest he startle Anna and make her lose her footing, he announced himself shortly before her light strayed across his aerie. "I'm here," he said softly.

Anna squawked, her heart leaping so forcefully it felt as if it pounded against the rock she embraced. "Don't do that," she said when breath returned and she'd found a stable roosting place.

"Sorry," Iverson said politely. "I guess 'I'm here' are the two scariest words in the English language."

"Nope."

"Uh-oh?" Iverson guessed.

"Floyd Collins," Anna said, and he laughed.

Holden joined them and switched off his lamp. Having no taste for the darkness, Anna let hers burn. "Better be careful," Holden warned. "Oscar's a light leach. He'll drain your batteries faster than a disgruntled Hodag."

Hodags, Anna knew from earlier banter, were known for sucking the energies from cavers' batteries, tying shoelaces together, and swapping the caps on water and pee bottles when annoyed in some fashion. "Leach away," she said. She wasn't turning her light out.

Just beyond the cranny where Oscar had curled his bony frame was a tilted tyrolean traverse. A line was anch.o.r.ed around a boulder on the side of the rift where the three of them sat. It ran over the chasm and up to another anchor, a jug handle on the cliff face five yards above them on the opposite side. Anna had used a tyrolean once on a recreational climb in the Rockies. For some reason they gave her the w.i.l.l.i.e.s where a good vertical ascent failed to. Maybe it was that one had to lie horizontal. Gravity seemed more virulent when one's back was turned to it.

"Who rigged the traverse?" she asked. Her insecurities were showing.

"Me and Holden," Iverson said.

"I sure hope we were sober," Holden added.

"From here on we're in new country," Oscar said, and Anna could hear the quiver of antic.i.p.ation in his voice.

"You've never been to Tinker's h.e.l.l?"

"Nope. Neither of us. Just got to pore over the surveys. Might never have gotten to go either. The chief-Iverson referred to his boss, George Laymon, Chief of Resource Management for Carlsbad Caverns-"has been keeping a tight lid on who goes in here. After the big push in the 1980s they closed the cave to all but scientific research and restoration-"

"And anybody who knew somebody they could lean on," Holden put in, and Anna was reminded of the usually friendly but still existing rivalry between federal land management agencies, in this case the NPS and the Bureau of Land Management. Ostensibly the Park Service was dedicated to total conservation. The BLM espoused a more commercial view, leasing and exploiting some of the resources of public lands.

"Hey, it's who you know," Oscar said equitably.

The closing of Lechuguilla was an old bone of contention. "How do we know where we're going?" Anna asked, bringing the conversation back to a subject nearer her heart.

"If you don't know where you're going, you're liable to end up someplace else," Holden said philosophically. Anna heard telltale crackling as he unwrapped a Jolly Rancher.

"House rules," Iverson told Anna. "You survey as you go: maps, sketches, measurements, the whole enchilada. No scooping booty."

"It happens," Holden said. "Somebody gets excited and boldly goes where no man has gone before. But it's severely frowned upon."

"Do they lay orange tape like we've been following?" Anna asked.

"Them's the rules," Holden said, and she found herself immeasurably relieved, though she knew the tape was laid more for the cave's protection than that of the cavers. If each expedition followed precisely the same trail, never veered from between the lines, a majority of the cave would remain untrammeled. Oscar looked at his watch. "Seven P.M.," he said. "We've been on the go just over two hours. With luck we'll be there by midnight. Everybody holding up okay?"

"Okay," Anna echoed.

"The Wormhole," Iverson said. Clicking on his headlamp, he ran the beam along the traverse to where it was anch.o.r.ed on the far side. Below the jug handle securing the line was an irregularity in the stone about the size and shape of an inverted Chianti bottle. The opening was flush with the wall: no ledge, lip, or handholds; no nooks or crannies to brace boots in.

"You're kidding," Anna said hopefully.

"I'll admit it looks tricky," Iverson said. "You want to go first, Holden?"

"And rob you of the glory? No indeed."

Iverson peeled off his pack and began strapping on ascenders.

The one time Anna had been on a tyrolean traverse it had been a simple horizontal move over a river valley under kind blue skies with the music of frogs to keep her company. They'd not used ascenders, just strung the traverse line through a trolley on the web gear and scuttled across with much the same movements used when shinnying along a rope. Because of the steep tilt of this traverse-close to forty-five degrees-ascenders were needed.

Mechanical ascenders were a relatively simple invention that had revolutionized climbing. A one-way locking cam device about the size of a pack of cigarettes and shaped like a tetrahedron was strapped to the right boot above the instep. An identical device was attached to the left foot but on a tether that, when pulled out to full length, reached the climber's knee. This ascender was tied to a thin bungee cord and hooked over the shoulder. Once this awkward arrangement was complete, the rope to be climbed was hooked through both ascenders and a roller on the climber's chest harness. Thus married to the rope, it was a not-so-simple matter of walking, as up an invisible ladder. Raise the right foot; up comes the Gibbs ascender. Put weight on the right foot; cam locks down on the line. The foot is firm in its stirrup, and the body is propelled upward. This movement tightens the bungee, which in turn pulls the second ascender up along the rope. When the left foot steps down, the cam locks and another "stair" is provided.

Anna had used Gibbs ascenders enough that she was proficient, but she always enjoyed watching a master. The ascenders, so arranged, were called a rope-walker system. On the right climber that appeared literally true. Anna had seen men walk as efficiently up two hundred feet of rope as if they walked up carpeted stairs in their living room.

"Croll," Iverson said as he rigged a third ascender into his seat harness. "Ever used one?"

Anna shook her head.

"Like falling off a log," he a.s.sured her.

Rotten a.n.a.logy, Anna thought, but she didn't say anything.

"Get the packs ready," Iverson said to Holden. "Once I get settled, I'll bring them across with a haul line."

"We'll use the haul line, too," Holden told Anna. "Ever so much more civilized."

As Iverson rigged himself to the traverse, Anna watched with a keen interest. One lesson, then the test. It crossed her mind how much better a student she would have been if in school the options had been learn or die.

Crouching on a thumb of rock as big around as a plate, eighteen inches of it thrust over the chasm, Oscar attached his safety, clipped his Croll into the rope, wrestled his two foot ascenders onto the line, then pushed till his torso and b.u.t.tocks hung like a side of beef a hundred twenty feet above G.o.d knew what.

Anna kept her headlamp trained where he would find it useful, kept the light steady and out of his eyes. It was all she could do. There was no room for a second pair of hands to help him.

Holden was occupied with the business of tying the packs into trouble-free bundles that could easily be hauled across. Along with personal gear were medical supplies requested by Dr. McCarty, among them oxygen. In the case of a head wound it might be the only thing that could keep Frieda's brain tissue from permanent damage.

Iverson finished and snaked an elbow over the line so he could hold his head up. "Check my gear?" he said to Holden.