"It looks dark."
"It's a cave, Greta."
They were standing by the spring. The brief night of late Antarctic summer was ending and the dome of brilliant stars above the crater rim was fading into a ceiling of faint blue. Across the dark caldera the lights of the Schwabenland illuminated its embrace with the crippled Bergen.
Up to this point, Greta had been bold and assertive: collecting exploration gear from hanging lockers, commandeering a row ashore from the night watch on the vague pretext of inspecting the ashes of the pyre, and shouldering a pack for the hike along the beach. She'd said little, determined to get away from the ship while the other officers were still asleep. Now that she and Owen were facing the mouth of the lava tube with its scent of sulfur, he could hear a note of hesitation in her voice. Going underground did that to people. Hell was imagined deep within the earth.
"Thousands of years ago people used caves for shelter," Hart said, trying to be reassuring. "And we'll have plenty of light." He snapped on a flashlight and led the way to where he and Fritz had unearthed the diary. Then a gas lantern was pumped and lit. They blinked in the glow, reassured by its steady hiss. "We'll go slowly. You pick the direction and I'll try to find the way." He gestured to the lengths of bright cloth hanging from his belt. "We'll tie a survey ribbon at every turn and junction. Like Hansel and Gretel leaving bread crumbs."
She smiled at that memory. "All right." He knew that despite her natural uneasiness she'd made up her mind to go in. Just like Drexler, he admitted. Another German who doesn't back off.
Unlike a limestone cavern there was nothing colorful about this volcanic one. The tube was like entering the encrusted circulatory system of a smoldering heart. The basalt was a dull black-red and there were no stalactites. In a few places water dripped.
For the first hundred yards the entry tunnel was fairly level and broad. A few openings branched out to tempt a detour but Hart's flashlight revealed that they ended quickly in collapses of rock. Slabs of basalt had also fallen off the ceiling of the central tunnel, periodically forcing the pair to squeeze around them. The pilot didn't reveal his uneasiness at the possibility of a cave-in but wondered how often eruptions or earthquakes occurred. Giving some reassurance was the occasional boot print. The Norwegians had come this way and nothing had disturbed their mark in the year since.
The tube dead-ended at a chimney, or at least that's what it seemed like to Hart. A large vertical tunnel hundreds of feet high and deep led upward and down into the mountain. He shined his light to where the beam was lost in the gloom, the fissure giving him a slight sense of vertigo.
"Here we are at the elevator shaft," Greta murmured, studying the cleft. "Where's a button to push?"
"This must have been a major lava corridor when the volcano was erupting." When Hart pointed the light downward it illuminated some boulders choking the shaft, dark openings indicating a way around them. There was a welter of boot prints on the shelf. "The Norwegians were as uncertain as we are, Fraulein Biologist. Which way should we go?"
She glanced around, thinking. Greta still had a remote, distracted air of cool professionalism. It was the first time Hart had spent this much time alone with her and yet she wasn't focused on him at all. He accepted this philosophically. He realized that for the moment he was a means to an end, a way to reassert her independence from Jurgen Drexler. Still, he was here and Drexler wasn't. He smiled at the thought of the German's reaction in the morning when the night watch reported the pair had gone ashore together and not come back.
Greta knelt, peering over the edge. "Down, I think. If you can get us back up."
He nodded. "We'll leave one of the lines tied here. I don't know how far these tubes go but most shouldn't be this steep. I hope."
"I want to go down because the waters from that hot spring must ultimately come from deeper in the mountain where the source of heat is. Life needs energy and heat, yes? So I think we should descend."
"Maybe the antidote, if there is one, isn't biological," Hart reasoned. "Could it be something chemical? Minerals in the water?"
"I don't think so. If the bacteria are indigenous to this island they should have adapted over the eons to the local chemistry. Yet who knows? Maybe these two sailors simply missed the initial infection, or had a natural immunity, or didn't develop symptoms until they escaped by boat. This may be a hopeless quest. But what I'm looking for are two forms of life in uneasy coexistence: the disease bacteria, and something toxic to it, evolved in self-defense. A biological stalemate, if you will. Something that can keep that terrible plague in check."
"You're the scientist. Down it is."
He tied a line on an outcropping of rock and let it uncoil into the darkness. Another line, doubled, lowered their packs. "I'm not really a climber, or even much of an amateur cave rat, but I know enough to go slow," he advised. "Move only one hand, or one foot, at a time. And don't hug the rock, it makes your foot want to slip off its hold. Lean out a bit so your body is vertical." He tipped his hand to show her.
"All right." She looked uncertain but determined. "After you."
He went first, guiding her progress with the flashlight. In truth, Hart admitted, she was as good at the descent as he was: not as strong, perhaps, but balanced, lithe. If she was afraid she didn't show it. They climbed down a hundred feet to a point where a boulder had jammed in the tube. She arrived breathless but elated. "Goodness!" She laughed. "I know I can go down, but can I get back up?"
"The way you're going, you'll be carrying me." He led the way down again.
There was a squeeze around the boulder, then a drop of another twenty feet. From there the tube descended at more of an angle, its floor jumbled rock. It was slow, rugged going. The cave continued to warm as they explored deeper and soon they shed all but trousers and shirts. The bitter chill of Antarctica seemed far away.
The floor smoothed but the ceiling continued to get lower. Suddenly Hart paused. He'd felt a tremor. From somewhere there was the distant echo of falling or shifting rock, like the groan of something disturbed.
"What was that?" Her elation had disappeared.
"Earthquake, I think. A small one."
"My God."
"This is dangerous, Greta. I have to warn you of that. We're in a volcano, after all. Do you want to go back?"
There was a silence as she considered. "No. I have to know."
"All right."
He led on. Soon they were stooping, then on all fours. Finally it narrowed ahead to a belly-crawl. "Owen, are we going the right way?"
"I don't know. Wait here." Hart crept ahead, then came back. "I hear water."
"But are we at an end?"
"Not necessarily. There were tight places in the caves in Montana, and then you'd squeeze through and find a big room. Maybe this will be the same. But we can also squeeze and get stuck, or, if we're not careful, pop through to another elevator shaft. So I'm going to tie a rope around my waist and you're going to play out the line- I'll show you how- while I explore with the flashlight. Can you do that?"
"Of course."
He wriggled forward as the ceiling pressed down. His beam of light continued to be lost in the dark vacuum ahead, an encouraging sign. The rough rock began scraping on his pack and so he shrugged that off, leaving it for a moment. A final tight spot… and then his arms and head were jutting into empty space and he could hear the sound of a river echoing off rock walls. He shone the light around. He had found a grotto. The beam danced on flowing water.
"Owen, what do you see?" Her call seemed faint behind him.
"Maybe what we're looking for!"
He climbed out of the tunnel and dragged out his pack, lowering it to the floor below. On his instructions Greta doused her lantern and shoved her gear ahead as he slowly reeled in the rope.
Her head poked through and he grasped her under the arms and pulled. She slithered out and instinctively grasped him as she landed and he held her a moment longer than he needed to, his face in her hair, imagining he could feel the rush of her heart. Then she gently pulled away. "I think we should light the lantern," she said.
The grotto was a rock chamber about two hundred feet long and thirty feet high. It was split by a stream that emerged from a different dark opening and disappeared down a chute at the far end. A jumble of boulders occupied most of the floor but the water had deposited a sandy bar in the middle, dry and soft. A hot spring bubbled nearby and its water joined the main flow. The cave was pleasantly warm. Rocks near the spring radiated like heaters.
"We should eat," Greta said. "I'm famished."
They sat in the lantern's pool of light. Each had brought a blanket in case their stay became extended and they unfolded these now on the sand. There were tins of ham and cheese and a rich brown bread from the Schwabenland's ovens. Owen pulled out a bottle of wine. "I liberated this from Heiden's stock in the galley," he confessed.
She smiled. "It's cozy here. Warm. Almost like a little restaurant. I'm getting used to the dark."
"And do you think we're near what we're looking for?"
"I don't know. I'll look at the water after I eat. It's so strange being down here: they didn't teach us about caves at the university. I have no idea what to expect." She took a swig of the wine; there were no glasses. She used her fingers to dab at the corner of her mouth.
The biologist sat then looking at the sand, lost in thought. She's so pretty, Hart mused, admiring the facial sculpture of highlight and shadow in the gaslight. Some hair had come loose from where she'd bound it in a ponytail and it trailed across her cheeks. So alluring, yet so remote. What drove her to risk penetrating this dark hole?
"Greta," he said, "why are we here?"
"What? To explore- to search for an antidote, of course."
"Yes, but why the sudden urgency? And why the turnabout? You didn't seem to mind making the lab cultures at first. Not at the meeting. But then something happened with Schmidt. Last night you talked about spores. Why are they so important?"
"Oh. Him." She shook her head as if dismissing her other thoughts and took a bite of bread. "Everything has happened very fast, Owen. The Norwegians. The iceberg. This island. The Bergen. It made sense to me to try to find out what happened to those poor men, if for no other reason than to protect ourselves. That's why I agreed to do the cultures. But Schmidt was ahead of me, I think. And Jurgen. They wanted to understand where a disease came from in such a sterile environment. And so he searched the lungs and respiratory tracts for spore coats."
"Which are…?"
"A casing. A bit like a seed coat or an eggshell. Some microbes develop them when displaced from their preferred environment. They're like a cocoon and the organism is in stasis within, waiting for favorable conditions when it can break out and multiply. Schmidt thinks this could explain the infection. The spores were on the island from an unknown source. Somehow the Norwegians got into them and breathed some in. The body's enzymes cracked them open, like a Trojan horse, and they began doubling every twenty to thirty minutes: first two, then four, then eight- in a single day you can have billions. People begin coughing and sneezing. Finally the muscles seize, the nerves burn like fire, the organs dissolve… and you're dead."
"So you're afraid these spores could strike again?"
She nodded. "Yes. That's a possibility. But I'm more worried by Jurgen's talk of creating a lethal new weapon."
"Is that really possible?"
"With most diseases, I'd say possible but not practical. After all, how do you store them? How can you prevent being exposed yourself? The complications are many. But diseases that develop spore coats are ideal. The coating solves many of the problems."
"And neither Schmidt nor Jurgen care about the morality of it all?"
She laughed bitterly. "Schmidt, he's as amoral as they come. Jurgen, he's relentlessly moralistic. And it's a circle, you see- at the two extremes the means to achieve an end come together. He and Schmidt concur."
"He said last night that he loved you."
"Yes. I know he does. He means it."
"And do you love him?"
She smiled, her eyes still downcast. "Ah, we're back to an earlier conversation, I think." Greta considered as if the question had never occurred to her. "No. Well… Yes. I do." There was a note of doubt in her voice. "But not in the same way, perhaps, as… I'm fond of him, when he relaxes. He can be affectionate, you know. I admire him, his sense of purpose- his moralism, if you will. His certainty. He's a strong man. Intelligent. He intrigues me."
"You're talking yourself into it, Greta."
She looked troubled. "I don't know, Owen. He also frightens me sometimes with his intensity. The fight with the whalers. I don't know what I feel or what I'm supposed to feel. This love. It confuses me."
She waited. There was just the sound of the river, the hissing of the lantern.
"Me too." It sounded inadequate, yet he was uncertain what else to say.
She nodded solemnly, swallowing. "And that's good, I think. Easier." Her voice caught a bit. "Because I want to do what we came down here to do. Explore this cave." She briskly thrust the remains of their meal back into the pack and stood up. She was all business again. "So. You come with the lantern while I study this stream."
"Greta…" Hart stood. He was struggling for the right balance, afraid of being too bold and startling her into bolting, like a deer in a meadow.
She put a finger to his open lips, quieting him. "Owen, it's better for the work to let things be."
They explored along the water. The main stream was clear and cold: her measurement showed it was 6.3 degrees centigrade. The hot spring tributary, in contrast, was forty degrees, hot to the touch. It was crusted with minerals and a kind of slime. "Owen, look at that," the biologist said with a touch of wonder. "No light and yet something lives, fueled by this underground heat, perhaps. I wish I had my microscope."
She found more slime on rocks downstream from the confluence which warmed the river. And then at the end of the grotto there was a chute and the stream splashed toward darkness below. Her flashlight played across its surface and something undulated in the current like luxuriant hair.
"A plant?" Hart asked.
"Not down here. No sunlight. But a growth of something primitive, an odd algae that gets its energy from something other than photosynthesis, or maybe an animal colony like a sponge or a coral. Maybe what the Norwegians found. Let me get a sample…"
"Better wait until I can rope us up."
But she was already wading ahead and unable to hear him. She reached down to seize the wispy organism, grasping it just as her boots slipped on the slime of the underwater rocks.
"Greta!"
And then with a cry she was gone.
"Are we catching a train? Is that it? Is there a railroad track at the end of this valley that I don't know about? Because that, I suppose, could explain this frantic hurrying, this wheezing for breath that I'm enduring. Perhaps I can understand it if there's an express to Munich. Or if you've spied the lights of a beer hall."
"Shut your mouth, you whining weasel," SS sergeant Gunther Schultz growled at Fritz, with no confidence his order would have any effect. Christ, what a complainer: why had Drexler saddled them with this hobbling slacker? The political liaison had sent them off the ship and into the mysterious dry valley at dawn the previous day, Jurgen sleepless and sour and nagging from who knew what setback. Probably the damned woman, the SS troopers whispered. By late morning the soldiers were over the crater rim and they camped that evening in the valley bottom, cut off from the ship: the field radio didn't work unless they climbed up a side slope to communicate. The soldiers weren't happy. Schmidt had assured them there was no risk but they weren't stupid: they'd carried the bodies out of the Bergen, sweating under their gauze masks. And so, instead of their usual delight at being able to stretch their legs, they were no happier being so far from the ship than Fritz was. "This is a dead place, a death place," one of the soldiers had told Schultz while gazing down the arid frozen valley. "I just want to get back on the boat and go home." But Drexler wanted the island scouted for some clue to the disease, and the assumption was that nothing was to be found on the island's shroud of ice. So they would look here in the depths of the valley, eating wind-blown dust.
Fritz had been a last-minute addition. The political liaison had obviously decided to penalize the sailor for his tiresome sarcasm, calling him a damned communist before assigning him as a "guide" because of his previous trip ashore with the American. Fritz of course knew not a thing about where they were going except that he had no desire to go there. "I've seen that valley from the rim and it has all the charm of a gravel pit," he'd warned them before they left the ship. "A sewage ditch is more inviting."
"Of course if there is no train, then it might be possible to take a rest right here," Fritz now went on. "We are next to a lake here, albeit a frozen one. Have some lunch, order a stein, talk about gardening…"
"Fine," Schultz said in exasperation. "I'm sick of your moaning. You stay with the gear while we push to the end of the valley. We'll be back before dark."
"You're leaving me alone?"
"And good riddance," one of the soldiers said.
"Oh. You know, I've felt safer in a Hamburg back alley."
"If you don't stay here and shut up, you'll never see Hamburg."
The mountaineers trudged on, Schultz looking sourly at the enclosing hills of red pumice. It looked like pictures of another planet, the sergeant thought. The ice of the lake was old, never thawing, and sculpted into uneven frozen waves by sun and scouring winds.
They nursed their water. Dr. Schmidt had warned them not to risk drinking anything that could be a source of disease. Now they saw there were hot springs ahead at the base of the second volcano, the pools steaming placidly in the cold air. The mineral water spilled down a series of terraces stained yellow and ocher, the hot trickles melting a thin wedge of ice at the end of the frozen lake. Upslope a glacier from the second volcano had bulldozed to a halt, its ice and snout of gravel debris hanging over the springs.
Schultz climbed up to the pools to look about. Some had dried, leaving behind a residue of brownish dust carried up from inside the earth. But no sign of prior Norwegians, nor clues to the disaster. A gust of wind caught some of the dust and a plume of grit blew over the squad of mountaineers, forcing them to squint against it.
"Jesus, what a damnable place," the sergeant muttered. "And we haven't found a thing that is useful."
A soldier nodded in wan agreement.
Then he sneezed.