Dad said, "Geezis."
Weird said, "Oh, wow!"
Stinky said, "Daddy, is that a real hole?"
And I said a word that got me a dirty look from all three of them.
It was the biggest empty space I'd ever seen in my life. It was eerie. At the bottom, there were some buildings and even a couple of scooters and jeeps. That's how you could tell how big it was. Weird started reading aloud from the souvenir pamphlet, "The Barringer crater is named for the American engineer, Daniel M. Barringer, who theorized in 1905 that it was caused by the impact of a meteor. The meteor struck the Earth almost head on, 25,000 years before the birth of Christ; it was mostly nickel and iron, 30 meters (100 feet) in diameter—actually, that makes it an asteroid—and weighed 63,000 metric tons. It was traveling 8-16 kilometers, or 5-10 miles, per second. The blast was the equivalent of a 35-megaton nuclear warhead. Most of the asteroid was vaporized, but approximately 30 tons of fragments have been collected. The minerals coesite and stishovite, which can only be formed under very high pressure, have been discovered here.
"The crater is 1.2 kilometers in diameter—that's about three-quarters of a mile. It's 180 meters deep, surrounded by a rim rising 50 meters above the surrounding plain. This wall we're on is 160 feet high. So that makes it 760 feet to the bottom."
I said, "I bet you could put the Empire State Building inside it and it wouldn't show."
"No," said Weird, still reading. "The Empire State Building is 450 meters high—1475 feet. The top half would still be visible."
"You know what I like about you, Douglas?" I said.
"No, what?"
"Nothing."
"Hey, it says so right here, Chigger—" He waved the pamphlet at me. I slapped it away.
"All right. Knock it off, you two," Dad said. We both turned away from each other, annoyed.
The four of us were all alone on that crater wall. If there was anyone else around, we didn't see them. Not even at the bottom of the crater. All around us everything was very hot and very silent and very dark all the way down. There was no wind. It was like being frozen in time. The whole bottom of the crater was one big shadow. And it looked haunted. It made me queasy.
"Look," said Weird, pointing. "There's a path. I'll bet it goes all the way down."
"Where?"
"There." He pointed. It spiraled around and down. The crater walls were too steep to get to the bottom any other way. Stinky started being Stinky almost immediately. "Can we go down there, huh? Huh?" He didn't wait for an answer. He just started running along the path.
Dad hollered, "No, wait—" but Stinky didn't stop. So Dad poked me and said, "Go, get him."
"Uh—" I didn't want to say that the height of the crater and the steepness of the wall scared me. "If I chase him, he'll just keep running. If we just stand here, he'll give up and come back—"
"And what if he slips and falls?" said Dad. "Go get him."
I looked to Weird for support, but he just pushed me forward. "Go on, Chigger."
"You too!" I demanded.
"Both of you, go after him! Now!" said Dad. Weird pushed me again, and I was off. Behind me, I heard Dad say, "You too, Douglas!" I could hear him following behind me, but it didn't sound like he was making much of an effort. Apparently he thought this was just a kid thing, not worthy of serious geek attention.
The path was narrow and steep and scary. It was like running down the side of a wall. I tried not to look off to my left, where there was nothing at all except a lot of nothing at all. Maybe it was all that time living in a tube-town, I just didn't like big open spaces—and this was the biggest and openest I'd ever seen. So I didn't look. And if I didn't see it, then it wasn't there. I hoped.
"Stinky, you stop right there!" I called after him, but he giggled and shouted back, "You can't catch me. You can't catch me." He kept running and laughing, like it was all a game. And to tell the truth, it was almost kinda fun running down and around the crater wall. It was all downhill, so it was easy running. You let yourself go loose and then you just keep falling forward and let your feet lump down in front of you. If only there wasn't that big hole there—I slowed down automatically—
"Come on, Chigger!" Weird said impatiently. He gangled past me.
I looked back. Dad was following after us, but he wasn't running, just walking fast.
And then Stinky slipped at the first switchback and skidded off the path, which would have been warning enough to any rational person that running down the side of a hole big enough to have its own area code was not a good idea—but Stinky didn't have good ideas. He picked himself up, shouted, "You're a big doo-doo head, and you can't catch me," and headed toward the next switchback.
"Bobby! Stop it! If you slip, you'll roll all the way down. You could get killed—!" But he didn't pay any more attention to me than I paid to Dad. He just kept shouting and taunting.
I wondered if I could cut him off, but that would have meant taking the short-and-fast way down, and I really didn't want to do that. So I slowed down for the turn, tried not to look, and kept after the little bastard. Behind me, I could hear Dad shouting, "Go get him, Charles!" as if it was my fault he'd run down here.
Eventually Weird caught up with Stinky, and so did I. Weird grabbed Stinky's arm and they skidded along the path for a bit, and for a moment I thought they were going to lose it and just go on down the side, but then their feet caught and they stopped. And then Weird started yelling at Stinky about how dangerous it was to run down the side of a steep hill. "You almost slipped! What do you think you were doing? You'd have rolled and bounced all the way down to the bottom. You'd have been killed!"
"Yeah!" I said. "And then we'd not only have to walk down to get you, we'd have to carry you back up." Weird gave me his weird look. "Well, we would."
Stinky didn't say anything, he just did that nasty hate-stare that he's so good at, and we all stood around for a minute not talking, just catching our breath, waiting for Dad to get to us. We hadn't gotten very far down the side of the crater. Most of it was still below us, but we'd come a long way anyway, at least half a klick, maybe more.
It wasn't until Dad showed up that Stinky started talking again. "I wasn't gonna fall it isn't fair I wanna go to the bottom Dad make him let me go let go of me!" And then he did wriggle free and started running down the path again. And Weird and I had to go after him again. With Dad walking behind. This time Stinky was running away just to be nasty. "You can't catch me, neener, neener, neener!"
I was so angry, I started after him—which was exactly what he wanted. Only, I wasn't going to yell at him like Weird. I was going to gut-punch him like he deserved. No matter what Dad said. Weird came running after the both of us.
The path went back and forth down the side of the crater in a series of switchbacks. The first one turned so sharply, it was hard to stop and turn back the other way. If you're going to fall, that's where it's most likely to happen. And that's where he did slip—
Stinky was shouting and looking back, not watching where he was going, and he stumbled over a bump and bounced face forward and slid down the slope—and for a moment, that queasy feeling in my gut turned into a flash of black fear that he was going to slide all the way down—but then he stopped sliding in a patter of loose dirt and gravel and just hung there on the steep side of the crater wall, caught on a tiny bush. "Don't move!" I screamed. "Don't move!" And I knew even as I said it, that he would do exactly the opposite, because that was the kind of stupid little monster he was.