Blind Descent

"Frieda's hurt," McCarty said mildly.

"You can always manage to make yourself necessary, can't you? Is there anything you won't do to make yourself indispensable to women?"

This was answered by silence, and A

"And maybe I wasn't talking about Frieda," Sondra went on when the silence began to lose its power.

McCarty sighed, a theatrical gust that A

"Right." Sondra laughed without joy. "You'd like that, wouldn't you? What? You expect me to go back to being a secretary? Fetching coffee for editors, old fat white men who have less talent in their whole bodies than I've got in my little toe?"

"If you ever got anybody coffee-which I doubt-I suspect they had the good sense not to drink it," Peter snapped. There was anger in his words this time; his pose of world-weary patience was slipping. Sondra must have scented weakness. When she spoke again, she redoubled her attack.

"I'll leave all right. When I'm ready. Maybe sooner than you think. All I need is one good story. When I go I'll take everything but your toothbrush and your little black book. If you lift a finger to stop me, I'll see your license is jerked, doctor."

"I wouldn't push your luck if I were you." The trite comeback was so laden with ice and threat that Sondra fell quiet.

A

"What's it like?" Curt had arrived. He sat in inky darkness, his long legs and heavily booted feet sprawled over their tiny room.

"Squishy," A

"No problem."

He was quiet while A

"Let me go through first," she said. "The crawl space is way too small for you. You're going to get wedged. I don't want to be stuck behind you."

"Will you bring me sandwiches?" he asked. He seemed utterly imperturbable, his voice light and laconic for so bulky a man.

"Nope. Once I'm out of here I'm never going to let anything between me and the sun again. I'll buy a convertible, sleep out of doors."

"I won't get wedged," Curt said. "My father was a rodent. My mother says a rat, but after further research I'm inclined to believe he was a common field mouse. I inherited his bones, mouse bones. Mine can fold in on each other allowing me to pass through apertures too small for mortal men. Once, on a dare, I crawled through the pop-top hole in a Coors can."

"Hah."

Half a beat of silence followed, then he added this note of verisimilitude: "I did have to strip down to my shorts to do it."

Darkness reclaimed them, and that total absence of sound that is peculiar to caves. Not a whisper of air, not a sound of the movement of grasses, birdsong, ru

"You're not of the Mi

"Originally, California."

A groan.

"Northern California."

"That's okay then. Not Mi

"Zeddie?" A

"Doubly co

"How did she do?" A

"She was a vacant-eyed little snipe," Curt said as if this fact were obvious. "All students are vacant-eyed little snipes."

A

"Are you suggesting Brent is a vacant-eyed little snipe?" Curt asked i

A

From Schatz, A

"Frieda's parents lived in Anoka," A

"She used to be a patient of McCarty's," Curt said. "Or maybe it was her mother. I can't remember. I met her on an expedition in Mexico."

"Peter is a GP?" A

"Gynecologist."

"Jesus. Why is that fu

Curt said, "If you're going to talk about stirrups and things, I'm going to leave the room. I'm very shallow. It's one of the things I like most about myself."

"Turtling!" was shouted down the insulating passage behind them. They buckled on their hard hats, dragged Frieda over three more spines, set the Stokes on the floor, then pushed it through the crawl space to the waiting hands of the McCartys.

One more inching of their sixteen-bodied worm, and Frieda was delivered from the cramped passage.

The tu

The pit, A

They made A

Schatz, Dillard, Tillman, and Roxbury were rigging the descent. The others rested and kept out of the way. A