1
The tip of Griffin’s pick-mattock broke through into space. He whispered,
‘Hold it!’
The pitch-black was only broken by the lime-green beams of the headband LEDs piercing through the suspended dust. He shone the light through the hole but couldn’t make anything out. He did feel, though, the finest of breezes on his face and a new smell the like of which he never smelt before. He had no words to describe it. Fin and Tip lay on their bellies in the darkness behind him. He swung again, breaking away more earth. He scooped the loose dirt with the mattock and pushed it beneath and behind him. As it came back to Fin, she scooped it underneath her, back to Tip, who in turn scooped it underneath her, back into the tight, claustrophobic tunnel.
‘The breathing is getting easier,’ he said. ‘The air seems fresher on the other side of this hole.’
The stale air in the subterranean base had been recycled through the filters for a century. Lately, though, the base was beginning to struggle with broken-down machinery.
As a consequence, the air quality was on a steady decline and things were looking grim.
‘Keep digging, Griff,’ grunted Tip as she pulled on the rope with which she dragged their three backpacks, which were full of supplies, behind her.
The hole became wider as Griffin picked and scraped at its sides. After half an hour, or so, he said,
‘I think I can crawl through now.’
He proceeded to drag his body through the tight opening.
‘This must be what being born feels like,’ he grunted as he struggled to drag himself through. Fin chuckled and said,
‘I was doing just fine without that image, thank you, Griffin.’
Griffin finally pulled his legs through the hole. He found himself lying on about a thirty-degree slope of rocks and dirt in what, based on the echo patterns, seemed to him like a large cavern. He pulled his facemask off his face, breathed in deeply and reported,
‘The air is really good in here.’
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The girls pulled themselves through the opening with less effort, as they were both smaller and leaner. They removed their facemasks. Tip pulled the backpacks through and untied them from the rope. They all put their packs on their backs and sat on the dirt slope. Tip coiled the rope and put it over her shoulder. It was pitch black. The air was so clear that they could not see their headlamp beams at all.
‘Ahhh, this is good air!’ exclaimed Fin taking a deep breath.
‘Like breathing for the first time!’ added Tip.
‘We’re in some kind of chamber,’ said Griffin. ‘Let’s go down this slope, but be careful not to kick up too much dust. We wouldn’t want to spoil this great air.’
Like three black cats, with glowing green lights in the middle of their foreheads, the trio carefully negotiated their descent through the total darkness.
After descending for about fifty feet, they arrived at the base of the slope.
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Griffin, Fin and Tip wore tough, custom-made, well-fitting, Gore-Tex overalls incorporating a hood, which was mainly used for sleeping in. On their feet they wore ultra-tough, ultra-lightweight, L.L. Bean Survivor boots. On their hands they wore tough, tightly-fitting, Crawler Gore-Tex gloves. Hanging around their necks were their Hyperflex facemasks. The facemasks were a one-piece item, the top half being goggles and the bottom half being designed for breathing through a filter. The facemasks were mostly used in dust-contaminated air and were of superior design, being very flexible and form fitting, and not at all restricting. On their heads they wore their headbands, which incorporated the LED cluster on the forehead and the battery all the way around within the headband itself. The efficiency of the light-emitting diode gave their headlamps 2,400
hours of battery life.
They began moving along the flat. Griffin clicked his tongue and listened for the echoes. That was his means of navigation in the black. Beneath his feet, the ground felt sandy in between a plethora of rocky debris.
‘This way, judging by the echo,’ he whispered, ‘and the drift in the air seems to be coming from here as well.’
They shone their green LEDs directly in front of their feet and nimbly navigated over the uneven terrain. As they made progress through their nanoscopic universe, in uneven steps, they noticed that the rocky debris beneath their boots was thinning out.
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There was more sand now. Suddenly Griffin paused. He looked down then rotated his heel in the sand.
‘There’s solid floor an inch under this sand.’ He dragged the inside of his boot through the sand and whispered, ‘And it’s smooth.’
They moved forward, easier now, towards the ‘good air’. Patches began to appear in the sand. Griffin shone his light into one of them and whispered,
‘We appear to be walking on black and white ceramic tiles.’
They were in absolute pitch black and all they could see was what their short-range, LED headlamps could pick up, which, so far, was nothing more than the ground terrain directly in front of their feet.
‘I think we’re in a base. And seeing that the floor is the same as in our base, this must be our base on the other side of the collapse. Let’s have a rest here and have something to eat.’
They pulled off their backpacks and sat on the ground in an inward-facing triangle, illuminating one another. They each took out a Food Bar and unwrapped it.
3
One hundred years before, a vicious earthquake collapsed a long section of one of the arterial tunnels of the subterranean base. The cave-in isolated one sixth of the base from the rest. Had it been any other section, it would have been all right, but it turned out to be section one, the section that contained all the lift wells and the only way to the surface. Five sixths of the base were trapped underground without any hope of ever seeing the surface again.
Confined in the entombed part was Robert Griffin III, aka RG3, who was, at that time, the last President of the United States and had been, prior to his presidency, a quarterback for the Redskins football team.
Captive as he was, one mile underground, he experienced a great deal of difficulty seeing eye-to-eye with the military, but there was little he could do about it. The military had total control of the base. So, he made things as bearable as he could for himself and his family. As he aged, he began to write a journal. He wrote about things like the sky, and wind and the sun and moon and stars … and trees and animals. He wrote about a world above, where there was no ceiling … ‘it goes on forever’. The children listened enraptured as he read them passages from his journal just before sleep time.
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He also wrote about section one, the section involved with the collapse of arterial tunnel one. He wrote that there was no way of knowing if there was anything left of section one. He made a special point of emphasizing two things.
One, he wrote that if section one was intact, within reason, it would be the only possible way to ‘the surface’, one mile above. He described the three main lift wells, which were the only possible link with the ‘world above’.
The second thing he emphasized was that his journal be passed on down from father to son and be read just before sleep time, one member of the family reading it to the rest. He also added that he thought it best for the journal to be kept a secret … ‘within the family’.
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Griffin, who was a fifth-generation direct descendant of RG3, now carried the journal. He longed to see the world above, ‘the world of light’, and he had infected his two best friends, since almost birth, with his dream. He also knew that no one in the base, outside his family and his friends’ father, knew about the world above because that knowledge had died out a couple of generations before, and people had been born, had children, got old and died, and basically existed for their whole lives inside a skyless nanouniverse, believing that that was all there was. In the end, RG3s journal remained the last remnant of an old myth.
‘Read us a page, Griffin.’
‘Both you girls want me to read you a page, eh?’
‘Come on, Griff.’
‘OK then, seeing as you asked so nicely.’
He rummaged in his backpack and retrieved the journal. He opened on his favourite page and began to read slowly. The page was beautifully illuminated in the green light of his LED headlamp.
‘Above is the sky. It goes on forever, this nothingness. And in the sky is a big bright light that shines and lights up everything for as far as the eye can see. It is called the Sun.
‘Below is the world, which is huge and is a floating ball that turns in this nothingness. It is called the Earth. Half the turn is light. This is called day. Half the turn is dark. This is called night. In the night is an equally impressive light, just as big, but pale and without colour. It lights things in a silver light. It changes shape from a circle to a crescent and completely disappears on some nights. It is called the Moon.
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‘Then there are the stars. There are millions of them and they are like tiny twinkling lights, very, very far away in the dark sky. … Have you had enough?’
‘No … read some more.’
‘Read about the lift wells.’
Griffin flipped some pages over and began to read the part about the lift wells.
‘It says here that there are three lift wells. Long, vertical shafts that go up all the way to the surface, it says. There’ll be light at the end of the shafts. The light shines for twelve hours and goes out the other twelve. It says here that the bases of the shafts go down another three levels, so if there’s no lift in the shaft it’s probably down there.’ Griffin quoted the next section word for word. ‘Although I’ve never looked inside the shafts, it is highly probable that each shaft has within it some kind of emergency ladder, in case of lift failure, so people could climb out of there. If there’s a lift jammed half way up the shaft, one would have to climb up around it.’
Griffin thought for a while, then looked up from the journal and said,
‘We might think about looking for those shafts.’ He looked around into the absolute blackness surrounding them, thought for a moment, then finally suggested, ‘I think we should follow the good air. It might lead us to the shafts.’ He looked into their lights and asked, ‘How are the hunger pangs by the way?’
‘I’m good.’
‘Me too.’
They each had a sip from their canteens, rose to their feet, and put on their packs.
Re-energized from their Food Bars, the girls hushed as Griffin clicked his tongue and smelt the air.
‘This way, I think,’ he said, and set off into the ultra black.
5
After a few minutes of careful walking, they came to a fork in the tunnel. Griffin clicked his tongue and listened.
‘This tunnel is dividing into two. There is a left way and a right way.’ He asked the girls, ‘Smell the air and tell me which tunnel.’
Both girls smelt the air and felt for the subtle drift in it.
‘It’s coming from the right tunnel,’ said Fin.
‘I agree,’ Tip agreed.
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‘I think so as well,’ said Griffin. They proceeded to make their way down the center of an invisible, smooth-floored, subterranean passage.
They followed the circles of green light, through the blackness, watching the dust-covered tiles beneath their boots change from white to black to white to black. All of a sudden, in a shock movement, Griffin braked to a reflex stop. He could see in his circle of light that he was tottering on the edge of a black precipice with too much forward momentum. He swung his arms trying to prevent himself from overbalancing and falling over the edge. Just as he felt himself losing his balance, and beginning to fall into a black abyss, he was pulled back by his backpack.
‘Gotcha!’ said Fin.
‘Whiew … that was close,’ he exclaimed as he caught his breath from the shock.
‘Thanks, Fin. You saved my life.’
‘Don’t mention it, Griffonickel.’ She called him Griffonickel on special occasions. It was her more loving name for him. ‘What are friends for?’
They stepped back from the edge.
‘We have to be more careful now,’ he said. ‘This could be one of the lift wells. Let’s see where this edge goes.’
They came to a point a few feet along where the edge stopped and came to a wall.
They tracked the edge in the other direction and came to another wall.
‘That’s about, what … ten feet? This could be a doorway.’
‘Might be a lift well,’ said Tip.
‘Let’s look for the other two,’ said Griffin.
They explored along the wall to the left and right of the opening. They found two more openings on the right side of the one they nearly walked into.
‘It’s the lift wells all right. There are no doors on them.’
‘Maybe they never had doors,’ suggested Fin.
‘Naturally,’ responded Griffin. ‘Why would they have doors?’
‘I wonder where the lifts are?’ queried Tip.
‘Probably at the bottom of the shafts by now,’ replied Griffin. ‘We should rest here and have a nap before we look for a way up. I might read some more about the shafts.’
They sat in the middle of the black-and-white, ceramic-tiled floor in an inward-facing triangle. Griffin flicked through the pages of the journal.
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‘Here it is, the warning about the shafts.’ He read, ‘The same earthquake that collapsed tunnel one, might have done some damage to the shafts. Some of them, maybe all of them, might be occluded and impassable. But there is always a chance that at least one of them stayed intact.’
Pretty soon they were all too tired to even think. They pulled their hoods over their heads, switched off their lights and used the backpacks for pillows. They all slept tightly huddled together, with Griffin in the middle, Fin on his right and Tip on his left, both with their arms around him. It was totally silent and totally black as they slept. At that moment, their universes only manifested as a smooth, solid floor, gravity and each other. That was all that was actually real. The rest was just ideas, memories and imagination. Perhaps that was all that was necessary.
6
‘There’s a ladder! It just disappears up into the darkness,’ exclaimed Griffin as he shone his light on the left wall just inside the opening into the left shaft. They chose that shaft because, clearly, it was the one through which the ‘good air’ was flowing. The other two shafts smelt ‘not as good’ and there was no breeze.
‘That would be the way to go then,’ said Fin.
‘Yeah, but we need to set ourselves up with rope and some biners. We want to be able to take rests on the ladder. Clip on and hang. It’s going to be a long way up … and who is to know if the ladder is intact all the way up. We might have to climb back down.’
‘At least the air will be good,’ said Tip.
‘That is a big plus,’ added Fin.
A thought about their father flashed through the girls’ minds.
Griffin took the rope from Tip and cut three lengths with his knife. He retrieved a small, butane blowtorch from his pack and sealed the ends. He fashioned three slings and fastened a karabiner to each one. The slings passed under their armpits and around their backs with the karabiner in front. With that arrangement they could clip onto the ladder and lean back a little, supported by the sling. This would allow them to rest. They put their backpacks on over their slings, which secured the slings into place, then pushed their facemasks behind their necks. Griffin looked inside the shaft and stepped across onto the ladder. He looked down and saw nothing but black. There was just the rectangle entrance into the shaft, which was being lit by the girls’ LEDs.
‘How does the ladder feel?’ Fin asked.
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‘Solid,’ came the reply. He gingerly climbed up a few rungs. ‘Feels good.’ He continued to climb. Fin stepped out onto the ladder and began to climb. Finally, Tip stepped onto the ladder and looked up. She was amazed at how far up the shaft she could see because of Fin and Griffin’s lights lighting the way ahead of her.
The ladder was about a foot and a half wide with one-inch-diameter, round pipe for the rungs. They were better to hold onto than they were to stand on. Fortunately, the threesome’s excellent, carbon-fiber-reinforced boot soles efficiently spread the load out beneath their feet, thus reducing their fatigue. The rungs were spaced in one-foot intervals.
Griffin looked up. In his light he could only make out about eight rungs ahead. They just disappeared up into the blackness, but they kept coming. The more he climbed, the more rungs appeared. And, ‘the breeze … the sweet breeze, man …’ He spoke in the manner of his father, and his father’s father before him.
7
There are 5280 feet in a mile. There were around about that many rungs on the ladder, which was bolted to the concrete wall on the left side of the left shaft. After about 100 rungs he stopped, clipped onto a rung, looked down and asked,
‘How are you two girls progressing down there?’ He could see their lights just below him.
‘Fine.’
‘No problems here, Griff.’
‘Clip on for a couple of minutes and try out the slings. Mine’s pretty good.’
He was surprised by how much pressure he could take off his feet when he let the sling take his weight. After a few minutes break, he asked,
‘Ready for another hundred?’
‘Lead the way,’ said the girls.
‘There are over 5000 steps, Fin,’ said Tip.
‘Yes, it’s inconceivable.’
‘We can talk about dad on the way up, if you like?’
‘That’s a good idea. We haven’t talked about dad in a while.’
8
Tip and Fin were twin sisters. They were sixteen years old. Griff was seventeen.
They were all born in the base. They grew up living next door to one another because
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their families lived in adjacent cubicles. The girls’ father, Rip, was a survivor. He was an odd-jobs man, a fixer of things, and there weren’t many professions more lucrative, down in the base, as that. Things were forever breaking down around the place. He did the odd job on the side, in secret, and got paid in Food Bars. He saved and stored a couple of drawers full of those Food Bars. In the end he had enough to sustain three people for 2,400 hours. He was thinking about an escape, but not for himself. It was all for his daughters and their best friend, Griffin. Over the years, Griffin confided Rip into the knowledge within his family’s secret journal. They were good friends. Even though Rip knew what was written in the journal, he felt too old to be bothered to do anything about it. ‘I’m contented,’ he insisted. ‘Got everything I want right here. But you kids, you ought to have a go. Take it from me, I ought to know, this base is dying. Everything is breaking down, but it’s the air filters that are going to eventually do us all in. Thirty percent of them are down and beyond repair. The air is going to go bad. I think in the end we’ll all just go to sleep and not wake up.’
‘He is a cheery fellow that father of ours, isn’t he?’ said Fin climbing the ladder.
‘Oh yes, quite cheery,’ replied Tip.
It was Rip who taught the kids caving and climbing skills, and work with rope. They grew up strong, lean and nimble, and he hatched a plan for them. He organized their clothing for the journey, as well as the backpacks, half of each backpack being filled by three months’ worth of Food Bars.
The Bars were rationed out to all the citizens of the base. The limit was two Food Bars per person, per 24 hours. It was deemed sufficient, and it probably was because the Bars were incredible, the latest technology.
A small regiment of deliverymen dropped two Food Bars, for every person in the cubicle, into their officially-sanctioned receptacle. The Bars were rationed out from Central Food Storage. None but the highest ranks in the military knew the true status of ration reserves, but no one seemed to be too concerned about that. There appeared to be supplies aplenty. It was the breaking-down machinery that was the thorn in the side of the ranks.
At the time chosen by Rip, they set off towards arterial tunnel one. Rip’s parting gifts were; a sturdy pick-mattock, a pair of powerful, 120-year-old binoculars, a compass, and to each one he gave a Bundeswehr, Advanced Combat Knife (BW-ACK). ‘This will be an indispensable friend,’ he said to each of them as he gave them the knife. He also gave the
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girls his precious, hand-written copy of the Tao Te Ching, as well as other writings. As he gave them these things, he kissed each one on the cheek and said to them,
‘May God place the stepping stones beneath your feet and cut the way before you as you progress on your journey.’
He saw himself as an archer, with a powerful bow, and humanity was the arrow that he was firing across a gulf of darkness into an unknown beyond, a beyond he had read about in RG3s journal.
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‘I hope dad’s OK back there in the base,’ Fin said as she continued climbing.
‘Yeah, me too,’ said Tip.
‘That’s five hundred rungs,’ said Griff. ‘I’m bushed. Let’s have a rest.’
‘How many more to go?’ Tip asked.
Fin replied cheerfully, ‘Oh, only about four-thousand odd.’
‘Well, that’s less than when we started.’
They all clipped themselves onto a rung and rested.
‘Do you think that we’ll be able to sleep like this?’
‘Depends on how tired we get, Fin,’ replied Griffin. ‘Just make sure you can’t slip out of your sling if you drop off to sleep.’
They switched off their lights and rested, but couldn’t sleep. Pitch black and total silence was everything.
10
About an hour later, they began to climb again. It felt to them like they were climbing an endless ladder to nowhere. It just kept materializing out of the black beyond his light beam. They climbed in bursts of ten minutes, about a hundred rungs, and rested for ten minutes.
‘5280 divided by 300 equals 17.6,’ said Griffin looking at his faintly-glowing wristwatch. ‘We are doing a hundred rungs every twenty minutes. That’s 300 an hour. At the current rate, without any major breaks, we should be able to do the climb in about 18
hours. That’s our best time.’
‘I’m up for it,’ said Fin.
‘Same here,’ added Tip.
They climbed and rested and climbed and rested, for six hours.
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‘You know, we’re extremely fortunate not to have encountered any obstacles,’ said Griffin.
‘Like what?’ asked Fin.
‘Oh, just off the top of my head, parts of the ladder missing.’
‘Don’t even think such thoughts, Griffin.’
‘Yes, think something else.’
‘OK, I think we should have a longer break and try to get some sleep time.’
‘’Who can sleep, Griff, I’m too revved up,’ said Tip, ‘This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done in my life.’
‘I doubt that I can sleep either,’ added Fin.
‘OK … well … we’ll try to rest then.’
They were about one third of the way up the tall, black, concrete shaft.
After their break and a Food Bar each, and a mouthful of water from their canteens, they resumed their climb. They took their second ‘big break’ thirteen hours into the climb.
‘We’ll take the next break in five hours and leave ourselves fresh for the final push.’
‘That’s a good plan, Griffin, but I’m feeling pretty good. This is a pretty comfortable pace for me.’
‘Same here, Griff.’
‘Nice to see you girls are good to go.’
‘I wonder if we’ll see the light like it says in the journal,’ said Fin.
‘Remember, it goes out for twelve hours,’ Tip reminded them.
‘I’ve been wondering about the light as well,’ said Griffin.
They continued to climb into darkness with their glowing LED headlamps lighting the ladder above them in a soft, lime-green glow.
With a theoretical three hundred rungs to go, they stopped for their final rest. They hung in their slings and chomped on their Food Bars.
‘The air’s really getting better,’ said Griffin.
They were having a sip of water when Fin said,
‘Hey, switch the lights off. I want to see something.’
They switched off their headlamps and looked up into the void and waited for their eyes to adjust to the black. Fin had the sharpest eyes.
‘Look, up there, like a faint silver dot, right there in the middle … it’s only faint.’
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As everyone’s eyes adjusted to the total darkness, a faint silver dot of light became plainly visible to all of them. And the ladder was heading straight towards it.
As they climbed in their final push, Fin noted,
‘That light might be the light of what RG3’s journal called the surface.’
‘It might be the light of the dark twelve hours,’ suggested Tip, ‘the silver light that shines in the dark.’
‘I think it’s called the Moon,’ said Fin.
They continued the climb almost resenting their ten-minute breaks. Griffin was well disciplined, though, having been well taught by Rip about fatigue and pacing oneself.
With one hundred rungs to go, the silver light was now a silvery rectangle and Fin could suddenly plainly see a focused, bright-white dot emerge into the silvery rectangle.
It shone with a light the like of which she had never seen before, shining with an intensity she found almost difficult to look at.
‘I think I see a star. Oh my God!’
Immediately they all saw it. It became brighter until it was brighter than all the silver light in the rectangle surrounding it. Griffin stopped climbing and clipped onto a rung. The girls followed suit. At the peak of its brightness, the point of light shone directly down the shaft and subtly lit it all the way down to where they were hanging. They could, for the first time, see the walls of the shaft recede towards the rectangle of silver light. As they gazed at the star, hypnotized by its indescribable beauty, it quickly faded and disappeared from the rectangle. The shaft darkened and there was now just the faint silver rectangle again. They switched on their lights, unclipped, and pulled themselves up to the next rung.
…….
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