by Larry Niven
“Mary Ann.” His teeth wrestled with an undercooked, mildly seasoned portion of lamb. It resisted for a moment, then his teeth found the grain. “I’m hoping she’s not worried.”
“Sí. I was thinking of Bobbi. I hope she’s well, out of surgery, and not worrying about me. It is not good for las palomitas to worry.”
“Especially when there’s nothing to worry about.”
“Precisely.”
They turned to face each other, and Cadmann managed to hold his bland expression for about five seconds before both gave in to a wave of grim laughter.
“Clear the holes!” Andy shouted, and the hose was pulled from the ground, the pumps and barrels wheeled away toward the rock wall.
A wire was run down the pipes and its end clipped into a detonation switch. Andy came over to sit with Cadmann and Carlos, twenty meters from the hole.
“You ready for this?”
“If you’re going to collapse this whole shore area, the least you can do is give us time to swim for it.”
“Naw. We’ve got at least eight meters of rock under us. We’ve already identified enough outlets to release the pressure. Fireworks no. Earthquakes yes. Ready?”
“As we’ll ever be.”
He switched on his radio. “Two and three?”
“Standing ready.”
“Good news. On zero. Three, two, one—”
Cadmann squinted as Andy said “Zero!” sharply, and twisted the detonator toggle. There was a dull thud that shook the rock beneath them, and a jet of flame-tinged smoke erupted from the hole.
There was a second, more violent tremor, and a tickle of panic shot up Cadmann’s spine. Then silence except for a steady hissing sound and a jet of grayish smoke from the hole. Cadmann sneezed against a horrid chemical smell.
Andy got to his feet. “If it’s down there, it should be very dead,” he said.
Should would get them all killed.
“How long before we can go down to check?”
“How quick can you get wet?”
“Got it. Zack?”
There was no reply, and he raised his voice. “Zack?”
The camp administrator’s voice came in over the radio. “Is that Cadmann bellowing for me, or has one of our elephants gone into rut?”
“We haven’t hatched any elephants yet.”
“Then put Cadmann on.”
The smoke streaming from the ground was taking on a darker color. Got you . . . I hope. “Zack, Cad here. I need those dozen men you promised me.”
“You’ll have them. You’re sure you have to go in, Cad? It’s probably dead.” Zack hesitated. “No, dammit, ‘probably’ isn’t going to help me sleep any better. We’ll Skeeter in the last two from camp. Take about twenty minutes.”
“Twenty minutes,” Carlos mused. “Time for a short nap or a long prayer. Or another bowl of stew. Come on.”
“Aren’t you worried about cramps?”
“Nah. I’ve been through menopause.”
Cadmann stood, shaking the stiffness from his knees. “You’re a very sick man, Carlos. Probably your most endearing trait.”
♦ChaptEr 19♦
grendel’s mother
Beowulf spoke:
“Let your sorrow end! It is better for us all to avenge our friends,
not mourn them forever. I promise you—she shall have no shelter,
no hole to hide, no towering tree,
no deep bottom of a lake where her sins may hide.”
—Beowulf
The water was dark and cool, shallow now and calmer than the rushing currents of the Miskatonic behind them. Cadmann’s head broke the surface and he held his handlamp up. Its beam probed the blackness as he climbed out onto the limestone gallery.
Carlos surged out of the water, and their combined beams gave Cadmann a grasp of the dimensions of the chamber. The roof was only a meter above his head and was dappled with some kind of webbed moss. Something far to the left gave off a faintly purplish luminescence. Although there was no smoke in the air, it had to be rich with nerve poison. He didn’t dare remove his mask.
The chamber was too small to hide anything much larger than a rat; the torchlight splashed bright and hard against the farthest wall. Shallow pools stood beneath embryonic stalactites. A slow, steady drip of water raised echoes everywhere.
The rest of the men were out of the water now, and Cadmann adjusted his throat mike.
“All right. Anyone see anything? Jerry?”
“Not a thing. I think it went deeper back.”
“Agreed.”
A slick, rounded hump of rock was the next barrier. Cadmann clambered to the top and played his torch down into the darkness.
“Andy!”
The engineer responded with a hand-held scanning unit. He clambered up to the top of the rock and perched there. Together they scanned the dark water.
“Nothing for at least twenty meters. Just rock and wet. Do we go for it?”
“You got anything better to do?”
“Not a thing.”
Cadmann, Andy and Carlos hammered pitons into the rock, then attached cables and ropes and climbed cautiously down the side into a lower body of water.
The gloom was absolute, as if no ray of light had penetrated this deeply since the Miskatonic first cut this chamber from the rock.
Tiny blind things moved sluggishly aside as he swam through the murk. Some wriggled like eels, and others scuttled along the bottom of the pool like crabs. They groped through the dark, trying to avoid him, gliding through his torchlight as if totally unaware of it.
No sound but the faint re-breather hiss in his ears, no natural light at all now. Just eleven men and two sterile women swimming silently through the murk. And we’ve all made our deposits in the sperm bank.
The rock walls began to close in from the sides, and Cadmann bumped against first one and then the other as his finned feet flailed for balance before he found the right path.
“Andy,” he croaked into his throat mike. He suddenly remembered the first time he had tried to use a mouthpiece and a throat mike at the same time: he had swallowed about two cups of Barrier Reef brine. “How far did you say these caves extend?”
“I didn’t. All we can do is search for an hour, hope that we can find our target. ‘Target.’ Sounds like I expect it to be standing still, doesn’t it? Anyway, then we make our way back out.” Each of the thirteen members of the team carried two additional re-breather cartridges in their bulky backpacks.
That gave them a total of two hours—but Cadmann had no interest in letting things get down to the last few seconds. Fifty minutes in, fifty out. Twenty-minute margin for error.
If they couldn’t find the corpse, they had to assume that the creature was still alive, and proceed from there. That meant traps, a doubled guard and a continuously activated minefield around the camp. And constant worry until we know it’s dead.
The walls widened out again. Cadmann surfaced cautiously. He held the handlamp up to shine the beam around in the smoke-filled chamber.
There was another mild splash beside him, and Jerry surfaced, spear gun at the ready.
“Peaceful in here.”
“But not silent. Hear that?”
Cadmann was about to ask, What?, then heard the distant gurgle.
The other twelve were up now. Their lamp beams pinked the darkness and smoke, running pale disks across bare cave walls.
“Let’s go with the current for a while.”
Their flippers barely moved as they let the current carry them toward the exit. Half the team watched underwater. The others stayed at the surface, with only their heads and lamps above the oily water. They swam in a V formation, each close enough to see two others. Sometimes the swirling smoke parted to show stalactites lancing down at them like yellowed fangs.
The current grew stronger. Cadmann surfaced. “Louder, I think.”
“Rog,” Andy answered.
“Stay together and head toward
the shore!” Cadmann’s arms and legs lashed powerfully at the water. Most of the others were right behind him. They were holding steady. He heard their regular breathing in his earphones.
Then a sudden anguished cry, and he saw someone disappear over the lip of a falls. Moments later, Cadmann heard the splash.
“Who was that?”
A short pause, and then, “Kokubun, here. Wow! What a ride! Safe—only about a dozen meters. But it’s lonely in here.”
“Could you climb out, Mits?”
“No sweat. Come on down.”
Cadmann considered for a moment. “All right. By twos.”
His men swam toward the lip of the waterfall. A pair of snaggled, broken rocks divided the water flow, like the grinning mouth of a jack-o’-lantern as seen by the glare of the torches. The first two men tumbled down. There was silence for a moment, then laughter. “Piece of cake,” one shouted.
Cadmann played his light behind him through the outer chamber. No disturbance, no movement. The yellowish smoke still swirled, but it was noticeably lighter even in the few minutes he had been there.
“Go by twos.” Finally, only Cadmann and Carlos were left, and together they swam for the lip. The pull of the current was strong, but not impossible to fight near the shoreline. When Cadmann let himself go there was a momentary sensation of weightlessness, then a ramp of water-polished stone to reach up from beneath them, and he slid the rest of the way into the water.
It took all of his discipline to restrain a whoop.
“Well.” He shook his head, grinning under his mask. “That was refreshing. What have we here?”
The smoke was even deeper, and it looked sulphurous. The water was a little warmer than in the antechamber. Their lamp beams ate through the smoke to the blackened ceiling. Patches of steaming scum still floated on the water. It looked like something out of the Inferno.
“If it was in here,” Andy said positively, “it’s dead now.”
“I’ll go with that.” A grainy column of light stabbed out. The chamber was smaller than Cadmann had thought, and it was empty. His flash showed three jaggedly framed black exits.
“Now what, Coach?” Jerry asked.
“It was your soup. What do you think?”
“I think there was more than enough.”
“Yeah. We don’t have any real choices, do we? Divide into three teams and look into each of those exits. How is everyone fixed? Anyone need to change yet?”
There was a quick chorus of negatives, and Cadmann checked his own supply. Still almost a third left on his first cartridge. Good enough.
Jerry headed one team, Carlos another, and Cadmann took the third. There was something about that middle tunnel . . .
“If the tunnels split again, that’s it. Wait at the junction and signal. Under no circumstances divide the team, do you understand? When you’re ten minutes into the second cartridge, turn around and start making your way back. If the radios start giving out, turn around and head back to this chamber. We don’t want any heroes. If you spot the corpse, call for the rest of us. All right. Be safe.”
Jerry and Andy swam with slow, even strokes. The engineer was rather clumsy on the land, but in the water his extra girth was less of a liability. A trail of tiny silvery bubbles escaping from Andy’s re-breather reflected in Jerry’s lamp beam.
Behind them, the other members of their team kept pace.
Something brushed Jerry, and he nervously followed it with the light. It was almost a meter long, and looked more like a snake than a fish.
“I’m surprised to see anything alive down here,” Andy said.
“Water breather,” Jerry answered. “It’s probably blind. Even in the deepest caves on Earth, you can find blind salamanders and insects.”
When this is over, I’m coming back with a net and a sample case, he promised himself.
“Think it’s dead?”
“Sure. We still have to know.”
“Gotcha. I’m checking topside.”
Andy headed up toward the surface, and by Jerry’s light it was as if the man disappeared above the shoulders. “We’re through into another chamber. The air looks clear.”
“Don’t take off your mask. Not all of the fumes are going to be visible.”
“No problem.”
Jerry surfaced next to him, shone his light around in the cave. This chamber was a little larger than the last, but still not more than thirty meters long. He directed his light straight up, and Andy whistled.
Directly above, the ceiling opened in a circular orifice about three meters across. “Will you look at this pothole?”
“What’s that?”
“A dry chimney, in spelunking terms. Vertical channels formed by water flow. Water dried up, so we don’t call it a chimney anymore. Look over there.” To the left were a series of rounded steps, as flat as fish scales, each a half-dozen meters across, like a badly skewed stack of silver dollars or a stage for a Vegas musical.
“Called ‘gours.’ Formed as carbonate is precipitated from turbulent water. Miskatonic must have been higher . . . more likely, it gets higher later in the year. Come on.” Andy waved his light towards a widely arched opening. “I want to take a look back in the shadows. It might have crawled up there to die.”
“Or get well.”
“Come on, Jerry. No confidence in your soup? Hell, that stuff would have killed a dozen monsters.”
Jerry followed Andy’s lead. The side chamber was larger than the main cave they’d been in. Onyx and sparkling rocks glittered in the light of his flash. It was almost peaceful down here, and Jerry brought himself up short: that kind of thinking could easily get them both killed.
Another of the blind fish brushed past him. This one’s eyes were pasty white, staring lifelessly in a broad face. Its mouth was crowded with needlelike teeth, and it nosed in for an experimental nip.
He knocked it away with the tip of his speargun.
“Looks like a dead end,” Andy said. “I’ll check out the far side.” He kicked his bulky frame through the murk with surprising grace.
Andy went up, and up. He said, “Hey—”
And then his entire body just levitated from the water, whipped out as if vacuumed up with a suction pump. Had he climbed out? Or pulled himself out?
“Andy?”
Andy’s body smashed down into the water almost atop Jerry. Just his body: the head was gone. Black clouds jetted from the raggedly torn stump on his neck. They fogged the light. Hordes of blind fish streaked into the cloud, tussling and snapping at each other.
Jerry’s chest froze, and he backpedaled frantically. There would come a lethal moment of water pressure, the single instant of warning before horror swooped out of the cloud of blood. In that instant he might have to trigger the spear gun into its grinning, gaping mouth . . .
Then he was through, into the other chamber. He scrambled backward up over the gours, the grooved stone surface scraping at his hands and legs.
His voice was a squeak into the throat mike. “Danger. Mayday! This is Jerry. I . . . we found it. Andy is dead. Repeat, Andy is dead. Converge on left tunnel at once. Repeat. We have located animal. It is alive and deadly.”
Arnie Donovan and Jill Ralston joined him at the water’s edge. Together the three of them backed to the wall, spear guns at the ready.
Shit. He had seen those things kill before, but this . . . what in the world? Why had it killed Andy? And then thrown the body back almost disdainfully?
Whatever a man might hunt on Earth, there were other men to tell him how to do it. Thinking like the prey is an old game, hundreds of thousands of years old. The first shamans who propitiated the spirits of antelopes might have got it wrong, hundreds of thousands of years back, but the need was there. You cannot hunt what you cannot understand.
With this creature there was nobody to ask.
Carlos popped up in the water, and in a few moments, Kokubun and two others joined them. Then Cadmann appeared, striding huge a
nd implacable from the dark of the river, spear gun at the ready.
“What happened?”
Jerry slowed his trip-hammer breathing. His teeth chattered. “Andy and I went into th-the cave. He surfaced, and that was it. He went straight up. He didn’t even have a chance to scream.”
“Volunteers,” Cadmann said. Carlos raised his hand immediately, and four of the others. “Fine. The rest of you—wait ten seconds and follow us in. Jerry?”
“I’m right behind you.”
Cadmann nodded and slipped into the water.
Jerry was the last in. The water felt slimy to him. Fear constricted his chest, and he couldn’t breathe. The water surface was silver above him.
Andy had gone up, arms and legs thrashing, and back down without his head.
A flash of light ripped the darkness from the water. A moment later, the shockwave hit, and the numbing, thunderous roar of sound.
Jerry surfaced.
“Dear God in heaven . . . ”
The cave was smaller than the one he had just left, with a broad shelf of gours to the left. On it the creature was whirling, spinning like a top with something dark and hideously limp in its mouth. It took Jerry a moment to realize that it was a human leg, ripped from its owner’s body like a twig from a sapling. Andy’s leg; for Andy’s headless corpse had been thrown clear across the cavity and was sliding down from near the ceiling.
The creature froze for an instant. Jerry had just time to make out its squat monitor shape, the spiked tail thrashing restlessly, the gaping mouth lined with daggers. Then with a blur it was among them, churning in a circle, frothing the water with blood.
Human and reptilian screams mingled. One of the spears exploded against the rock wall, one against the ceiling, another in the water with a blinding flash. The monster’s tail whipped twice, then slammed down on a diver’s head, driving it under.
There was horrific crunch, and a man flew from the water, smashing into a heap on the shore.
Cadmann tore out his mouthpiece and screamed at it, “Over here, you bastard! Here!” He whistled as loudly as he could, then put his mouthpiece back fast.
The water whirled as if whipped by a centrifuge. The creature righted itself and jetted straight for Cadmann, too quickly, too damned quickly. Jerry didn’t have time to scream warning, or even blink. The creature had changed paths and was streaking—
