I was looking at the wide cavern we had entered, and I didn’t know what to say anyhow.
Audrey said, “That’s what your folks thought, I’ll bet.”
“No, they didn’t. They would have laughed at the idea. I’ve cut up a great many cadavers. Close to a hundred, I suppose. Believe me, the thing that made them human has gone.”
I was looking around the ice cavern. “We’ve never been in this one before.”
That sent Peggy’s flashlight exploring; its beam was lost in the immensity.
“My goodness, but it’s huge!” That was Audrey.
“It is huge, and there’s a sort of scree of broken ice ahead.” I held up my light stick so the two women could see what I had seen. “It will be hard to get down that slope without falling, and it may be impossible to climb back up. Do we want to go down it?”
Peggy said yes and Audrey no.
“Then here’s what we’ll do. I’ll go down. If I fall, you’ll see me. Don’t go after me. Tell Dr. Fevre when you find him. He may be able to help me if I’m still alive down at the bottom.”
Audrey said, “I wish you wouldn’t, Ern.”
“Let’s assume I get down safely. If I do, I’ll try to get back up. If I can’t, you two had better turn back.” I handed my box to Audrey. “I’ll go looking for a way out. As big as this cave is, there may be a dozen.”
Maybe I ought to have waited to hear what they would say, but I didn’t. I just stuck my light stick in an arm pocket that seemed to have been meant for pens or pencils, walked forward, and started down. The truth is that I was afraid I’d lose my nerve if I didn’t. The caves and the cold had been draining away my guts—at least, that’s what it felt like.
My guess is that the scree was pieces broken from a really huge ice curtain that fell; anyway, it was made up of jagged flat plates about twice as thick as my thumb. Some were almost as small as coarse gravel, some were as big as a tabletop. Most were somewhere in between. Climbing down would not have been hard if they had been stuck together, and some were. Most were loose. Hard ice—and everything in those caves was frozen hard—is not as slick as ice near the melting point. Water lubes ice, and soft ice melts a little under your weight. The slight friction of this hard ice let me keep my feet, but I nearly fell a dozen times.
Keeping my balance meant waving my arms a lot, and there were two or three places where I had to turn around and crawl down, holding on wherever I could. My fingers were always cold in those ice caves, and they got so cold when I was scrambling down the scree that I had to stop to warm them in my pockets. The cold made my hands weak, too, so weak that I lost my grip a couple of times and started sliding. The scree was long but not very steep—a little steeper and I might have died. By the time I got to the bottom I knew two things for sure.
The first was that I could climb back up if I wanted to, but it was going to be harder than climbing down.
And the second was that I didn’t want to.
I had not gone more than a hundred steps or so when I came to another scree. It was steeper than the first one, but a lot shorter, too. I figured I would not have much trouble with it going down or getting up, so I started climbing down pretty confidently. That was when disaster struck.
My light stick fell out of my arm pocket, started rolling and bouncing down the scree, and went out.
I don’t know how long I scrambled around in the dark, groping that ice. It was probably only ten minutes or so, but it felt like an hour. Finally I sat down to rest for a minute, halfway determined to start back up blind when I was through resting. I knew which way I had come, or thought I did; and I felt sure I would see Audrey’s light, or Peggy’s flashlight beam, a long time before I found them.
Then somebody was shaking my shoulder. I opened my eyes, and the light was close to blinding.
“Well, I found you anyway,” Chandra said. “I think I’d rather find you than her.”
“I’m overjoyed to be found by you,” I told her, “and with your light stick we ought to be able to find mine pretty easily.”
“Where is it?” Chandra was being careful, holding on with both hands; her light stick hung around her neck.
“Right here somewhere.” I had begun looking already. “I had it in a pocket, but it fell out.”
“If it went out, it’s probably broken.”
“Do they break that easily?” I was still looking.
“Sometimes.”
“Then it may not be.” I was dead set on looking.
“Where’s the lady?” Chandra paused. “Audrey. The one you sleep next to. Where’s Audrey?”
I pointed up the scree and saw my light stick at once. A short scramble got me close enough to grab it.
“Is it busted?”
I twisted it and it lit up beautifully.
Chandra hesitated. “I’ll tell my father she’s up there.”
“So will I,” I said.
We both did, but I am getting ahead of myself. At the far end of that huge ice cavern was something that seemed so completely out of place that I thought I was seeing things. It was a house.
11
JINGLE BELLS
No, not a cute little cottage with a smoking chimney and some kind of climbing rose blooming pink and white on the front wall; but a house just the same. It was about twenty paces wide, and exactly half as high as it was wide. Maybe it was fifty or sixty paces long, maybe a couple of hundred. I never did find that out.
It was built of blocks of ice. Big square blocks formed the front wall, and trapezoidal ones a nice round arch over that. They fitted so closely you couldn’t always see where one ended and the next began.
Chandra had stopped for a minute to let me look. When I had checked out the construction, she said, “This is one of my father’s labs. He’s got a generator in there and everything.”
I nodded to show I understood. I was still too stunned to talk. Then Chandra opened the door, and it was warm inside. Warm and bright. Angels would not—the angels (I’ll tell you about them in a minute) did not—have surprised me more.
Adah Fevre was inside, sitting on a little folding chair that had her fur coat draped back over it. Sven was standing behind her, stiff and erect as ever.
Farther back in that long room Dr. Fevre stood between the angels, two radiant blondes. He had turned his light stick off, or maybe just put it back in his pocket, because the light came from ceiling fixtures. I got the feeling that Adah had been talking a blue streak when the door opened and had shut up right away. I’m not sure of that, but that’s how it felt. She was leaning forward on the edge of her chair, looking like she was about to spring out and kill somebody; definitely at the top of her cycle. It seemed like she might lose control any minute.
There are times to let other people talk, and times to step up and take charge if you can. This was one of the take-charge-if-you-can kind. I took a deep breath. “You two strolled off and left Audrey and me lost in this God forsaken maze of ice caves. I say you two because I’m not blaming Chandra—she’s just a kid. But you”—I leveled my finger at Dr. Fevre—“were the guy who knew his way around, the guy Audrey and I were counting on to guide us.”