Blind Descent

When the catheter was in place, McCarty pulled an oversized handkerchief from his hip pocket and shook out the square of cotton. A baseball was printed in the middle, the words "I do believe in the Twins, I do!" stenciled in a semicircle around it. "Not exactly sterile," he said, "but clean and unbesnotted." Draping it carefully over Frieda's lap, he secured it with safety pins to preserve her dignity.

Their patient was settled, as comfortable as they could make her. McCarty began gathering up his supplies, and A

McCarty glanced over his shoulder. The move was not precisely furtive; maybe he was only judging the time left till they moved Frieda out. A

Either A

"Nobody knows for sure," he said. "Possibly not even Frieda. The brain has a way of protecting us from memories that are too painful to be relived."

"Did anyone see it happen?"

"Nope. We'd split up to explore possible leads out of Tinker's. Most of us were fairly close to camp. Brent thought he had a going lead in the upper quadrant. There." McCarty picked up his hard hat, switched on the lamp and used it to point out a crack seventy or eighty feet up the back wall. "He and Curt climbed to that ledge. Brent went inside. Curt waited on the ledge, sketching. Sondra was photographing a broken formation. Zeddie and I had been pushing a lead behind that mountain of breakdown." Again he used the light to point. The vastness of the chamber swallowed the beam before it reached its objective.

"So you were with Zeddie. Who found Frieda?"

"No. It got kind of squirrelly. Our lead petered out. Zeddie was headed back to camp and I was going to collect Sondra when I heard a yell-high, like a bird or a stepped-on cat. There was no way to tell where it came from, but it sounded enough like a cry for help that I think everybody pretty much started trying to get to wherever they thought it was. We ran around like the proverbial headless chickens. Then we all started shouting at each other, so if Frieda called a second time there was no way to sort it out from the general hubbub.

"Zeddie was the one who found her. She'd known where Frieda was going. Neither of them thought the lead had much promise, it wasn't blowing to speak of, but if you don't check them all out, you know the one you skipped leads to the bottom of the world and the next guy is going to find it.

"Frieda was in a crawl space, vertical, mostly breakdown-unstable stuff. Zeddie had gone down twenty feet and could just see Frieda's head. A rock the size of a basketball but pointy on one end had lodged between Frieda and the side of the passage. The weight rested on her shoulder, wedging her in.

"Zeddie got down as far as she could, squatted over Frieda, and lifted the rock straight up. Talk about clean and jerk! Zeddie's no slouch in the weight-lifting department. She pushed it up over her head. Curt and I got hold of it and brought it the rest of the way. It was a good forty pounds. Frieda's lucky it didn't crush her skull or break her collarbone."

"Curt was there when you got there?"

"No. Wait. Yes. He was trying to get Zeddie to let him go after the rock."

"So Zeddie pulled Frieda out?"

"No. That was a group effort. I doubt even the amazing Zeddie could lift a hundred and forty pounds of dead weight straight up. She got out, and I went down and got a cervical collar on Frieda. We tried to be careful, but you know how it is. For all the protection we could give her spinal column we might as well have hooked a tow chain under her armpits and yanked her out with a backhoe.

"It was lucky she was unconscious. We didn't know her leg was broken till we had her out where I could get a look. The pain would have been horrific."

"Frieda never said what happened? Wasn't she conscious at first?"

"Her level of consciousness wasn't stable. She knew who we were but not where she was or what had happened. As near as we could guess, she was climbing down and loosened some rocks as she went by. When she was below them, they broke loose. The first one hit her right leg at the knee and sheared off the top of the tibia. That must have been when she called for help. Then the second rock hit her in the head.

"Guesswork, but informed guesswork," he said with a laugh. "That's a doctor's bread and butter."

Having finished with the story and clearing up the medical paraphernalia, he stood, unfolding with the ease of a dancer. "When we get you tucked up snug in the Stokes," he said to Frieda, "I'll get you on an IV to keep your fluids up."

A

Since A

Frieda moved and made a noise in her throat. A

5

Things happened fast and so smoothly that A

A

Because of the radical ups and downs of the rubble-strewn path to Tinker's exit, the standard method of carrying a litter would have subjected Frieda to a bumpy ride. So Holden strung the sixteen people out along the path, and the stretcher was passed between two lines of cavers, eight on a side, moving Frieda from hand to hand in the fashion of a bucket brigade. As the stretcher left a caver's hands, he or she scrambled ahead, keeping the line always unbroken, always moving forward. In an effort to make her journey as uneventful as possible, the stretcher bearers would stand between stones and pass the Stokes overhead rather than lower Frieda and pull her up again, squat on their haunches on the high ground and keep the Stokes moving levelly a foot or so above the rock.