"Off-rope," boiled up from the pit at her back. An echo accompanied it, hinting at cavernous spaces and irregular walls.

"I know," Anna said irritably. "Me next, you last." Having gone meticulously through the drill: clipped in safety, called "on-rope" to clear the fall zone, threaded the rack and replaced the JUMAR safety on a harness 'biner, she eased over the edge of the falls. The terrain revealed by her lamp provided footing as she gently touched the cliff face on the descent. Then the cliff undercut, and her feet dangled free. She held herself from the wall with her left arm, the right paying out rope from below the rock. In an instant the wall was a memory. She hung suspended in the middle of nowhere, of nothing.

She paid out twenty or more feet of line, then stopped. Perhaps she swung gently, held safe by a few links of metal and nylon, seventy feet above a floor she couldn't see-probably would never see but in the niggardly scraps afforded by a headlamp. With no up and no down, no walls, no horizon, all sense of motion was lost. Her light pried into darkness but reached no destination. All that existed was the bright yellow-and-blue weave of the line that held her, and the rough russet of her battered leather gloves. An ideal rappel for an acrophobe. Without any shred of visual evidence, the mind refused to grasp the situation fully.

Anna had stopped for a couple of reasons. The first was habit. Whenever possible on a descent she liked to stop partway down and take in the view. It was a time of absolute freedom: freedom from one's fellows, from one's job, even, in a way from the law of gravity. With this absolute freedom came absolute peace. In this instance, since the rope and her own gloved hands failed to fascinate, there was no view to speak of. But even given the peculiarities of the place, a remnant of peace remained.

For the first time in a long while, she was alone. The men, one a hundred feet above, the other nearly as far below, could have been on the face of the moon, such was her momentary isolation.

Time, snatched away by the urgency of Frieda's head wound, was by some alchemy of darkness and suspension, returned for the nonce, and Anna felt able to steal a minute or two to collect what had become a stampede of thought and emotion. Buffeted by personal terrors, hands numb and mind driven inward till it was as choked as the place she had crawled into, she was of no value to anyone. Worse, she was a danger to herself, to others, and to the fragile life of the cave. One of the tales of degradation she'd been told by Lisa as they readied her gear was of an aragonite bush deep in the cave. A delicate structure of pure white growing from the cave floor in intricate crystallized branches with minute "leaves" that glittered like diamonds. On this surreal object of beauty someone had dumped his human waste, shattering the minuscule spires with ordure. This monument to human coarseness could never be washed away by rains, dried and whisked off by the wind. The cave had no way of cleansing and renewing itself. Each misstep left a track for all eternity.

Hearing the story, Anna was repulsed as she was meant to be. But, though she would not have admitted it to Lisa or Timmy, she could empathize with the transgressor. When fear and fatigue reached critical mass, the higher instincts were lost. In their place came a rough anger, a grasping for immediate needs regardless of the consequences, whether that need manifested itself in snatching the last mouthful of water or relieving oneself without taking the time and energy to assure no damage was done in the process.

It was toward this shameful and dangerous mindset that Anna knew she was headed. While she still had a modicum of control, she had to make one of two choices: go back or get over it. She sincerely hoped that in the extremity of her need, should she call for someone they would come. Frieda had called.

Going back was out of the question.

She took a deep breath and let the claustrophobia build in a vacant center of her skull. Terror gushed from her pores in a sweat that stank of fear. A metallic taste flooded her mouth, and her hands grew so cold and stiff she wondered if the rope would slip though the fingers of her right hand and leave her to plummet to the rocks below. Though she remained upright, she had the overpowering sensation of falling in all directions at once.

When terror had filled every cell of her being, she gripped the rope tightly and pressed her cheek against it. Screwing her eyes shut she braced herself against the detritus in her head and willed it to move. Not gone, she told herself, knowing that was too much to hope for. Just stored away in a vault. Later, when she was out of the cave and Frieda was safe, she would give herself permission to go completely insane if that was what was required.

Sharp pain cut between her eyes, and she could almost hear the creaking and snapping as she mentally bulldozed the mountain of neurosis to the back of her mind.

For half a minute more, she dangled with her eyes closed. Her head hurt, but feeling was returning to her hands. The fear was not vanquished. It hung over her, a huge and precariously balanced boulder ready to come crashing down and crush her at the first loud noise or brush of air. Being wired with a panic button on a hair trigger was not reassuring, but, with luck, it would never be pressed. If it was…

I'll burn that bridge when I come to it, she told herself. Until then she could think again; there was room to care for others. She could go on.

Rapidly she began paying out rope, descending to the bottom of Boulder Falls, where Iverson welcomed her with the light from a small battery-powered star.

The hellish pace set by Iverson was a godsend. Traversing the rugged subterranean landscape took all of Anna's concentration and all of her skills. The interior of the planet did not seem governed by the same laws of physics as its exterior. Or perhaps it was just that the route was non-negotiable. One couldn't pick and choose passes or climbs; one went where there was no dirt in the way.

Such were the demands of travel that majesty and grandeur were lost. Anna wasn't sorry. Hard physical work was a balm for her soul. Vast slopes of scree were painstakingly descended. Boxcars of stone, upended and angled in a hundred ways, stacked against each other until they formed smaller passages of their own. Hands were used like an extra pair of feet for balance. Chunks of stone slid underfoot, and ankle-breaking traps opened between rocks the size and stability of bowling balls.

Names went by with the black velvet-clad scenery: Colorado Room, seen as a series of slides framed by the limiting scope of headlamps; Glacier Bay, great pale glaciers calving in a sea of night. Windy City, Rim City.

Anna used her body in a way she seldom had since childhood. Though occasionally alarmed at being called out of an early and long retirement, her muscles gloried in the exercise. As she bent and stretched, hopped from boulder to boulder in faltering and moveable light, slid down talus slopes on butt and heels, hauled herself up rocks, scrabbling with fingers and toes for purchase, it came home to her how stultifying the dignified world of grown-ups had allowed itself to become. How limiting and unsatisfying to deny our simian ancestry by walking always upright and sitting in chairs, throwing away natural powers for some inherited code of decorum.

Wriggling through a narrow chimney, knees and elbows thrust against the rock, she remembered a story she'd been told by a friend who led canoe trips for Outward Bound in the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota. He'd taken a group of physically disabled people on a two-week trip. It wasn't a luxury vacation. Everybody did what they could, filling in the gaps for one another.