TWENTY-TWO
THEY EACH HAD TWO ELECTRIC RESERVE lights. With brand-new batteries, each one of those would give about three hours of light. But the batteries were not brand-new, and Stone had no way of knowing how much juice any of them had left. They did have three other electric lights each, but those were diving lights and could not be used for anything but their return trip through the sumps. Finally, they had one spare carbide lamp with a week’s worth of fuel and an intact lighter.
If they went several days deeper into the cave and anything happened to that last carbide lamp, they would not have enough light to regain Camp 6 and still make the dive through both sumps. They would be stranded out there beyond all help in the absolute dark, where they would die in one of three ways. They might die slowly and horribly from starvation. Injury might incapacitate one or both of them, in which case they would still die slowly and horribly, just with more pain. Finally, with no hope of escape, they might opt for quicker but more brutal deaths by taking their own lives—if they could figure out a way to do that in the dark.
“I’m sorry. I screwed up,” am Ende said miserably. “I didn’t do it on purpose.” She was mortified. The first drop had been a fluke, but she knew that the second had resulted from bad decision making. If she had paused to weigh carefully the possible loss of their second carbide lamp against the use of a few minutes’ battery power, she would have opted to use the batteries and safeguard the carbide lamp.
Stone was angry now. He sat beside her, icily silent. It was hard not to lash out, but then he heard Marion Smith’s voice in his head, laconically shrugging off that near-fatal canteen drop in Fantastic.
“It happens,” he said to am Ende. The tension evaporated.
But their crisis did not. If anything happened to that last carbide lamp, everything they had sacrificed up to now would be for naught. Stone thought, Barb’s lamp is lost. Mine is unsalvageable. We can’t go on with one carbide lamp. No choice. We find her lamp or we retreat.
How to find her lamp? They could not reach it. They had no hammer drill or explosives to break up obstructing boulders. They could not tunnel under the rock pile, because it was far too deep at this point. They had no tools long enough to retrieve the delicately balanced lamp. They could not even jury-rig a replacement, Apollo 13–style, because they did not have the parts.
“We’re gonna have to move some rock,” Stone announced.
It was the only option, but at first blush a poor one. This entire pile of boulders—the whole cave, in fact—was composed of limestone, which weighs 163 pounds per cubic foot. A block no bigger than a desktop computer tower weighed almost two hundred pounds. A boulder the size of a washing machine weighed more than one thousand pounds. Most of the boulders in this pile were that big or bigger.
If Stone ever needed a Doc Savage solution, this was the time. One of the great benefits of engineering was that it had trained him to focus on options rather than obstacles and to think in terms of systems. Now his challenge was to create a system that allowed both him and am Ende to apply the maximum achievable force simultaneously and with optimum efficiency.
It happened almost automatically. He quickly decided that a push-pull combination would be most effective. He would be the puller, and he devised a connection that allowed him to apply all of his two hundred pounds in the most dynamic way. He tied a loop in a length of tough, orange nylon webbing and used it to “lasso” the topmost boulder.
Am Ende would be the pusher. She braced her back against an adjacent boulder and pressed her feet against the one wearing Bill’s sling. This position engaged her body’s strongest muscles—abs, glutes, quads. At his signal, he pulled and she pushed with her long, powerful legs. The boulder rocked, hesitated, passed its tipping point, and crashed down into darkness. They worked for a long time, moving boulders that were within Stone’s leg-and-lasso system’s capacity. That left the lamp still several feet beyond his reach.
He had thought this far and was ready. Knotting together odds and ends of parachute cord, he fashioned a “fishing line.” He had no hook, and the lamp’s position made it impossible to snare it with a loop, so he tied a small knot at the end of his line.
Maybe I can wedge it somewhere or snag a corner, he thought. He lay down on the rocks again, with his face pressed into a new crack, flashlight in his left hand, “fishing line” in his right. Keeping his flashlight’s spot focused on the lamp with one hand, he “unreeled” the line with the fingers of his other hand. There were several places on the lamp where the knot might catch, if only he could position it properly. But he had to be exquisitely careful to avoid nudging the lamp off its precarious perch and losing it for good.
He worked for forty-five minutes in that contorted position, reeling and unreeling, swinging the line delicately back and forth, striving to gain purchase. His muscles burned, and he sweated like a laborer despite the cave’s chill. Am Ende could only sit helplessly off to one side in the dark, suffering agonies of guilt. More time passed. Both began to despair.
Stone knew there was nothing to do but keep trying. He had finally zeroed in on what he thought was the best spot to snag, a tiny slot between the bottom of the lamp’s circular chrome reflector and the top of its cylindrical brass case. That space was just smaller than the knot. If he could get the knot behind the slot, he might be able to pull up ever so gently and lift the lamp within reach. If the line had been rigid, a stick, say, he could have pushed the knot back behind the slot fairly easily. But a rope won’t push. He could make the placement only by a perfect little swing of the line and knot.
Finally, after hundreds of failed tries, he managed to nudge the knot behind the slot. He gathered in the line as though it were spider silk, knowing that if he dropped the lamp, all was lost. Slowly, slowly it approached his reaching fingers. And then he had it.
He jumped up and held the lamp high over his head. Am Ende let out a shout of relief and joy. She tried to hug him, but he was still angry, not quite ready for hugs and high fives. He waved her off. “Tell you what,” he said, in his best deadpan, Marion Smith voice. “Let’s tether these things to our helmets from now on.”
They celebrated that night with a big feast of freeze-dried beef Stroganoff. By that time, Stone’s anger had cooled and his ardor had warmed. Their celebration included some postprandial activity which guaranteed that even if the cave did not set a record for depth, they’d established one of their own in Camp 6.