Blind Descent-pigeion 6 by Nevada Barr Page B

through a jumbled corridor devoid of decorations and uniformly dirt-colored. The passage emerged halfway between the floor and the ceiling of Tinker's, spilling onto a high balcony guarded by a natural parapet of stone. Oscar was astraddle this wall drinking water when Anna came into Tinker's Hell.
      Every muscle in her body melted with fatigue. Aches and pains would come with rest. For the moment she felt only warm and liquid, her mind as pliant as her limbs. With a poorly concealed grunt of exhaustion, she dumped her pack and dragged herself up beside him.
      Sixty feet below, in the immense room, was a scene of rampant destruction. Breakdown littered the floor; blocks of limestone, some the size of houses, lay one on top of the other like the building blocks of a spoiled giant flung across his nursery. Amid this majestic rubble were cones and pillars of gold and burnt umber, stalactites and stalagmites that had been growing for countless ages and now lay broken and scattered.
      "Jesus," Anna said. "Earthquake?"
      "Who knows? I've never seen anything like it. But the breaks are old, old, old. Whatever happened, happened a long time ago."
      Holden joined them, his light weaving in with theirs as they looked at the magnificent ruin.
      "Yup," Holden said after a few minutes' study. "It looks like a bomb hit a tinker's cart. Have you spotted the camp yet?"
      From his pack Iverson dug a secondary light source, a powerful six cell flashlight, and played the beam over the jagged floor. Near the end of the great room, on a flat place tucked up near the left-hand wall, his light picked out the litter of humanity. Looking pathetically small and fragile in the confusion of elemental stone, six people lay in sleeping bags. The wrinkled forms were soft and shapeless, like larvae on a deserted patch of beach. The necessities of human existence- packs, stoves, water, and food-were piled neatly at one end of the clearing. The group had been there four days, one since Frieda was hurt. The camp appeared clean and well organized.
      "Another twenty minutes and vacation's over," Iverson said.
      They donned packs and started the tedious climb down to the cavern floor. This time Holden Tillman led.
      Underground operations had officially commenced.
     
     By the time they neared the camp, Anna was so tired she was stumbling. It was as if her brain, recognizing that the end was in sight, had quit holding her muscles together. The only workable mode of travel across Tinker's Hell was boulder-hopping. At each leap, she found herself keeping her center of gravity closer to the ground. When Dr. Peter McCarty came from the camp to meet them, she was traveling on all fours, the wolfman reverting to type.
      McCarty and Tillman exchanged greetings, and introductions were muttered. Anna dredged up a nod. A handshake was beyond her. She was even too far gone to protest when McCarty took her pack to carry it the last ten yards. At that point she doubted she'd have put up much of a fight if he'd offered to carry her.
      Even with the stamp of the cave on him and five days from a showerhead, Peter McCarty was a handsome man. Not matinee-idol pretty-Anna would have found that off-putting-but with enough flaws to keep his face interesting. His lips were chiseled but a little too thin, his jaw strong but with a crude boxiness at the angle of the bones. His voice was light but pleasant, with an adenoidal quality to it as if he suffered from a slight head cold. His curling brown hair was thinning at the hairline. Anna guessed his age to be forty, or near enough-it didn't matter.
      He and Holden fell into a close, whispered conversation, needing to share information but not wanting to disturb the sleepers. They'd forgotten to douse their helmet lights, and feeling mildly righteous, Anna switched hers off and leached from them as she staggered in last and folded onto the floor. She was too tired even to sleep without being told to and sat