In the early twenty-first century, a young German caver by the name of Armin Tyson explored a long, deeply descending passage. After many kilometres this opened out to a cavern of curved and banded curtains, flowstones like melted wax, ten-metre stalagmites rising out of rimstone pools and — most amazing of all — a cavern with an underground lake almost a kilometre across and, it would later turn out, two hundred metres deep.
Vashislav Shtyrkov, of Moscow State University, heard of this lake by chance from a speleo-fanatic student. Himself physically incapable of squeezing through the discovery passage, now known as ‘the Wormhole’, he sent the student to Slovakia with Geiger counters. The student reported back that the radon, uranium and carbon-14 levels in this deep hole were satisfyingly low. The lake was wonderfully inaccessible to the public, and the opportunity was too good to miss.
There was just one problem: the Russians had no money.
The British, however, had. Charlie Gibson was soon enticed from the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory’s Yorkshire mine experiment by the prospect of leading a new dark matter team. He fronted the paperwork necessary for the British funding.
At a cocktail party in Warsaw, Shtyrkov also approached Svetlana Popov, a Russian woman at Cracow University with a rising reputation as a careful experimentalist. On the basis of a conversation over lemonade and canapés, she agreed to join Shtyrkov’s little team: dark matter was a powerful lure, the quest for it hard to resist.
The newly discovered lake was part of the Tatras National Park but Shtyrkov, as he liked to say, had friends in high places. Nevertheless strict conditions were imposed for the use of the lake as a laboratory. Diversion of an underground stream, nicknamed ‘the Styx’, was permitted. A narrow shaft could be sunk. Everything — scaffolding, chairs, cables, electromagnets, computers — had to be brought up and down this shaft. Desks were assembled underground. Doors were welded on site out of steel panels. Svetlana knew every piece of wire in the cavern.
From then on, it was a question of maintaining and improving the apparatus, and waiting. Waiting for a dark matter particle to zip through the lake, trailing light, on its endless cosmic journey.
Tyson’s Wormhole was the way out.
Tyson and his team had used ropes, bobbins, gunlocks, Gibbs ascenders.
Between them, Freya and Petrie had a screwdriver.
The driver maintained a sullen silence and chain-smoked along a twisting, narrow road. Petrie, having retched his stomach contents out a few hours previously, began to long for an early death. That the wish might be close to fulfilment was something he couldn’t quite take in.
Visions of Hanning kept recurring: an axe splitting the man’s skull like a log; blood and grey matter squirting up; face becoming a non-face, something hideous and nonhuman; the cadaver sliding, trembling violently, under the table. It added to his sense of unreality, of detachment from the real world. Freya smiled thinly at him from time to time but he was too miserable for conversation.
Svetlana’s sketch had been too dangerous to carry and he tried to go over it in his head.
‘First the Styx, then the Madonna. First opening left, along the phreatic tube. A high vertical chimney to the grotto with the white flowstone; first left again and a long narrow crawl to a boulder chamber. Over this to a broad sloping highway, like a motorway with a rocky roof, marching steadily and steeply up for a kilometre. Then the dreaded sump, a long underwater tunnel which Tyson’s team had traversed with aqualungs and which you probably won’t survive. Use the guide rope left in place by Tyson’s team. Finally, if by a miracle you aren’t lost or drowned to this point, you arrive at Piccadilly Station. Take the fourth entrance round from the big orange stalactite; you will find walkways and lights and human society. Slip in with a tourist group and leave the mountain. What follows then is up to God and you.’
After an hour a sizeable town, or at least rows of Identikit high-rise flats, appeared ahead of them. They joined a motorway, its surface wet but clear of snow. The jeep speeded up, turned north. The Malé Karpaty receded to the horizon. The driver maintained his silence and kept up his chain-smoking. Now and then he would hum something tuneless, strumming nicotine-stained fingers on the steering wheel. Petrie wondered about heaving the wretch out of the jeep, taking off with the lorry in pursuit, finding a helicopter in the wilds, flying to an airport and jumping on a plane to Rio de Janeiro. He laughed and Freya gave him a look.
After another hour the lorry behind them tooted and the driver pulled over to a small roadside restaurant. A young officer opened the jeep door and guided Petrie by the arm to a table. Freya was led to a separate table. A dozen soldiers spread themselves noisily around and Petrie ate what was put in front of him without knowing or caring what it was.
It was late afternoon, with the traffic getting dense, when the jeep began to run alongside sterner mountains. A white fluffy cloud in the distance turned out to belong to a chemical works. They passed by mysterious assemblies of fat pipes, and big cylinders painted blue or yellow, and tall chimney stacks, all enclosed within wire-topped concrete fencing and not a human being in sight. Petrie thought it could be run by aliens and nobody would ever know.
At last, just past a large lake, the driver left the motorway, took a side-road, turned off at a roundabout. Almost immediately they found themselves on a narrow road, covered with compacted snow, heading towards massive peaks. The ski-laden cars were here in force, streaming away from the mountains with snow chains on their wheels and snow on their roofs.
Petrie began to tense. He sensed that Freya, next to him, was the same.
To their astonishment, the driver finally spoke. ‘Nizke Tatry.’
Petrie said, ‘Drop dead.’
They drove into a car park deep with snow. There was a little row of wooden shops with postcard stands at their entrances, and windows filled with tourist junk. They stepped out and stretched. A path from the car park led over a wooden bridge and disappeared into a conifer forest hugging the mountainside. A chain barred the way over the bridge, and next to it there was a notice. Petrie guessed the path was closed because of avalanche risk.
The army truck was just turning into the car park and Petrie momentarily wondered about running into the trees. He caught Freya’s glance; she was clearly thinking the same. But then the truck had stopped and soldiers were jumping out and the moment had passed.
An officer was shouting orders. Then he pointed at Freya and Petrie and snapped something, waving his hand towards the path. They followed him along it. The soldier unhooked the chain and they passed over a stream of icy water and then they were climbing a steep, slippery path, soldiers strung out behind them on the trail. They had rifles, a fact which excluded any prospect of running away through the trees.
Stick with the Russian’s plan.
A steel door. The officer had a key. A push from behind, from some teenage soldier enjoying a sense of power. A dark atrium, the indefinable smell of old air, and steps going down to blackness. Lights flickered and came on, and there was the yellow cage, just as the others had described.
The steel door clanged shut. More orders, and the scientists were hustled down the stone steps. Two soldiers squeezed into the cage. With rifles and combat gear, it was almost impossibly tight. There was some chatter and then someone pressed the red button and they dropped from sight as if through a hangman’s trapdoor. The overhead drum whined smoothly and the braided metal cable vibrated tautly. Freya and Petrie stood close and shivered.