“Five meals a day!” Eleph exclaimed. “Madam, we haven’t enough for three, let alone—”
“Small ones, Eleph,” she said. “Eat often, and you eat less. You never get really hungry, so never have to compensate. And your system processes the small amounts efficiently. Especially when you’re exercising.”
Gaspar caught on. “We’ll split one package between the five of us, each time. Five times a day, two and a half days—and—”
“Almost,” she said. “I believe we need more than that; one quarter of a package at a time should be about right. So we shall quarter them, making sixty four quarters in all. We shall eat twenty five quarters a day, for two and a half days, or a total of sixty two and a half quarters. That’s nonsense, of course; no one will eat half a quarter. But the point is, we shall have a slight reserve, which we can dispense as necessary. If one of us is required to do heavy work—” she glanced at Gaspar—“he will get an extra ration. We can not safely assume that the way will be completely without challenge.”
“That’s for sure!” Gaspar agreed. “We’ll have to climb the continental shelf to reach the Yucatan peninsula, and that in itself will be a formidable task. If there are any obstructions—”
“Precisely,” she agreed seriously. “We need that emergency reserve. We all have some fatty reserves; we can put out some energy without killing ourselves. But if we go too slow, we can starve before getting there. Now let me brush you up on riding technique. First, posture. Eleph, you ride like an old woman—and even old women don’t do that, if they want to get anywhere. I ought to know.”
She went on to give them all the information she had given Don before, while she adjusted saddles and handlebars and checked each bicycle quickly for problems. Eleph and Gaspar were shaking their heads dubiously, but Don knew she was right.
“We must make two hundred miles a day,” she continued. “Roughly fourteen miles per hour, average. That may not sound like much, and it isn’t—for me. It’ll kill you, in this terrain. But not quite as dead as hunger will. At least you know what the deep sea is like, and won’t stop to gawk at the fish.” She smiled briefly. “Are you ready?”
Of course they weren’t, but there was no choice.
They rode, paced by Pacifa. Gaspar led, followed by Eleph, then Melanie and Don. Pacifa changed positions, riding parallel to each of the others in turn, making sure they were all right. Her stamina was amazing; she really did have far better ability than any of the others, in this regard.
On the level it wasn’t bad; the hunched posture did seem to diminish the watery resistance. But then they crossed low hills rising out of the abyssal sediment, and Don quickly felt his leg muscles stiffen. As time passed, it got worse. From knee to crotch, the great front muscles tightened into dull pain. His breath came fast and sweat ran down his forehead despite the minimum setting on the converter. He shifted from fifth to fourth, and then to third; this eased the immediate strain but increased his rate of pedaling. Just as much energy was being drawn from his body, but in a different manner, and his cadence was being sacrificed.
He saw that Melanie was having similar trouble. Fortunately she had good legs, and she was keeping the pace. She had a small advantage because her bald head presented less resistance to the current-wind.
Don concentrated on the techniques Pacifa had described, leaning forward to put his weight over the pedals instead of into his posterior, utilizing his torso as well as his legs, and ankling. The higher saddle no longer felt strange. He saw the others doing the same, looking worse off than he felt. That was gratifying. As the grueling pace robbed his leg muscles of their capacity, these other actions did come to fill the power vacuum, and he gained a second wind that was much more durable than the first. He was moving!
But when they clocked 120 miles and stopped for the fourth meal of the day and Don stepped off his bike, his knees buckled and he sprawled ignominiously on the ground. There was no gumption left. Gaspar and Eleph were no better off. Melanie was standing as if both knees were in casts, afraid to bend them at all.
Pacifa remained distressingly spry. “Eat hearty, folk,” she said as she divided a package of fish-flavored glop. “We’ll be doing some riding, soon.”
Don ate, and she was right: it was enough, for his hunger was as small as his fatigue was large.
They struck the continental slope of the Yucatan Peninsula of Central America. In the space of ten miles they climbed a thousand fathoms, and were still deeper than they had been in the straits of Florida. A rise of one part in ten was a killer. When it became steeper than that, they dismounted and trudged, leaning on their machines for support. No fourteen miles per hour here!
The terrible climb went on and on, dragging at the last vestiges of bodily strength. Here even Pacifa suffered, for she was a cyclist, not a hiker. But no one would give up, and when at last the land leveled into the continental shelf, about six hundred fathoms deep, four of them dropped without eating into the troubled collapse of exhaustion. Only Pacifa remained on her feet.
They had not made their mileage quota, but they were well over the hump.
“Here, Gaspar, I’ll give you some ease,” Pacifa said. She sat and took one of his legs and kneaded the muscle. He sighed with dawning bliss.
“That looks good,” Melanie said. “Trade?”
Don sat up and took one of her legs. He watched what Pacifa was doing and tried to do the same to Melanie. She smiled rapturously. His arms were merely tired, not knotted; he was working with the part of his body that had some reserve energy. But even in his fatigue, he noticed how nice her legs were. At any other time, he would not be able to handle them like this without getting seriously distracted. Did hair really matter? He could feel his doubt growing. A wig could emulate hair, but what could emulate flesh like this?
But soon she insisted on taking her turn and doing his legs. Her hands were marvelously healing. It was a wonderful feeling which had nothing to do with sex; his legs started to relax. If he had been bringing this feeling to her, he had been doing right. Did her thoughts drift as his had?
“One thing really impressed me about taking birth control pills,” Melanie said as she kneaded. It was her way: to embark on some remote subject that nevertheless related in some manner to whatever was going on in the foreground. It seemed that her thoughts did drift. “They impaired my ability to follow abstract arguments. I had been working my way through Henri Bergson’s book Time and Free Will. I don’t know how the pills did it, but the results were too obvious. The most direct was indirect: how much more readily I could follow the arguments after I stopped taking the pills. That kind of thing always brings to my mind the specter of chemical control. A subtle, insidious thing. Control of the higher faculties. Maybe it was all due to a mild induced anemia or some such, but whatever it was, it was most effective. It robbed me of my spark, or inner drive or whatever, which was about all I had going for me.”
Don’s leg muscles were relaxing, but his mind was not. Melanie was supposed to be a shy single girl. Why was she taking birth control pills?
Why, indeed! Was he hopelessly naive? She had wanted social interaction, and if she didn’t remove her wig, a short-term relationship was feasible. Sex could be quite short-term.
“I consider myself more a complete determinist than Bergson is,” she continued. “But my final conclusions about free will are very close to his. To me it has always seemed as if all these arguments are aspects of an inner drive that is trying to assert itself. A drive toward higher abstraction. Something I consider to be characteristically human.”
Don wondered what kind of a drive accounted for talking about birth control pills while massaging a male companion’s legs. He also wondered irrelevantly why she had shown him and the others her bald state. The one could almost be taken as an oblique sexual come-on, while the other was the opposite. He had never heard of Bergson and had not thought much about free will.
“Human beings greatly desire to be free,” Mel
anie continued. “But freedom as experienced by the self is not the absence of prior determining experiences, but rather the opportunity to act in accordance with one’s innermost drives. So that if one assumes that physical determinism is all-pervasive—that the combination of one’s past history and one’s physical reality completely determines one’s choices—even then there is no absence of freedom. Because no matter how completely one’s choices have been predetermined, there always remains complete inner freedom. I can make any possible choice as long as I am willing to suffer the consequences of my actions. If a person says ‘I can’t do that’ about anything it is physically possible for him to do, he is saying in effect ‘I am unwilling to suffer the consequences of that action.’”
Don wondered morosely whether she thought that taking birth control pills was an evasion of the consequences of her actions. Here she was talking about freedom, but all he could think of was what she was planning to do with that freedom. Why had she been thinking about those pills, right now?
Then it came together. Melanie was chained by her circumstance: any man who saw her bald would be turned off. So whatever she might have done while on the pills was not relevant, because it could not last. Now she was being open about her liability, and taking the consequence. But apart from that, she was a human being, and a lonely one, like him.
He sat up. “I-I’m going to exert m-my free will,” he said. “And take the consequence.” Then he caught her shoulders, drew her in, and kissed her. He had been massaging her legs, right up to the buttocks, and the buttocks too, but that had been a necessary courtesy without special significance. This was personal, and therefore more intimate.
She neither returned the kiss nor withdrew. She seemed not quite surprised. “I shall have to think about this,” she said. Then she lay down beside him, taking his hand.
Whatever consequence there was was not apparent. Except that it had shut her up. Perhaps that was just as well. He had done what he had done, but he had perhaps surprised himself more than her. In the darkness her baldness had not been apparent. Could he have done it in daylight? Or was he merely testing the waters, as it were, to see whether a romance between them was possible?
If only that hair—
Don had forgotten, in the deep-sea interim, how much life teemed in the shallows. He woke to find fish nibbling at him curiously, or trying to, supposing that they had free will in this matter. Starfish were easing through his territory.
But a good distance remained across the wide continental shelf, and Pacifa gave them no time to lie about. She allocated two and a half full food packages, making up for the missed meal. “We’ll make it,” she said.
Don’s muscles seemed to have coagulated during the night, despite the massage. Every motion was agony. Melanie looked drawn. Suddenly her decision made sense: to make no commitment when she was dead tired. He wasn’t sure whether he had offered any commitment. The kiss had somehow seemed appropriate after the pseudointimacy of their handling of each other’s legs. But it might have been a mistake. Certainly it seemed remote, now.
He climbed aboard his bicycle and bore down on the pedals, and lo! the machine moved. Melanie started off similarly, somewhat unsteadily. The other men were no better off. Grimly they followed the ever-sprightly Pacifa across the sandy slopes, working the adhesions out of their sinews.
They had overestimated the total distance by about a hundred miles. The result was that they were slightly ahead of schedule despite the slow climb. But their slowly growing optimism was abruptly squelched.
Less than a hundred miles from the depot—they all maintained the firm fiction that there was a depot—they encountered a crevasse. It was not the scope of the Grand Canyon, but it was quite enough to halt the five cyclists.
They verified the depth only by tying a package of tools to a rope and letting it down until it bumped. The near wall dropped into a plain below. How broad it was they could not know; Gaspar tried for a whistle-echo, but came to no conclusion.
“What,” Eleph demanded severely, “is a canyon doing under the sea?”
“Mocking us,” Melanie said dully.
Pacifa smiled through her frustration. She was tired too, and the extra muscles the males carried were beginning to tell in their favor. Melanie had the advantage of youth. “Obviously there is a river on land. It continues as a freshwater current for some distance over the shelf, cutting away the ground.”
“No such luck,” Don said. “Fresh water is less dense than salt water, so it would tend to float. It takes a land river to cut a canyon. No doubt it was a land river, in the ice age when so much water was taken up by the glaciers that the sea level dropped several hundred feet. This canyon must have been carved then, then covered up when the sea level rose again.”
“I thought Gaspar was the geologist,” Pacifa said.
“Well, I run into such things archaeologically,” Don said. “Many of the old civilizations were shoreline cultures, and some were buried by the slowly rising waters. In fact, civilization itself had a hard go of it until about 3000 B.C., when the ocean level finally stabilized. How could you maintain an advanced cultural exchange when your leading seaports kept sinking under water? It was no coincidence that the Minoans and Egyptians developed only when—”
“I hate to interrupt,” Gaspar said, “but we’re talking beside the point. We have to get across this detail of the landscape, and a detour may be too long. Our food is almost gone. Any ideas?”
“What about the map?” Pacifa asked. “Let’s assess our handicap. There may be a better place to cross.”
“Our general map doesn’t show it. Probably there was a detailed map at the first depot, but—” He shrugged.
“Better not gamble, then,” she said. “We’ll rope it.” She unlimbered the long cord. “Now we have a logistical problem. We can get people down, and we can get bicycles down, but both together is tough.”
“Not at all,” Eleph said. “The problem is physical, not logistical. Merely rig a pulley and use one mounted rider as counterweight for another.”
“Pulley? Good idea if we had one!”
“Remove the tires from one bicycle. String the cord through the rims.”
Pacifa nodded. “Eleph, I hate to admit it, but you do have something resembling a brain on you. We can even hitch a loop to the pedals to serve as a brake. But how do we get that bike down afterwards—and how do we get it up the other side, to haul us up?”
“One problem at a time, woman,” he said curtly. “We need a suitable location.”
“And we’ll have to select a bike,” she agreed. “Let’s see. The multiple-speeders are better constructed, but they all have hand brakes. We need a coaster brake, and good heavy construction.”
Gaspar had anticipated her. He was already unloading his machine.
Eleph, meanwhile, scouted the canyon, riding perilously close to the stony brink. “This will do,” he called. “An outcropping. We can suspend the bicycle over this, and rig a trip-wire to drop it down afterwards.”
“Is that safe?” Melanie asked, gazing at the brink with dismay.
“Safe enough,” Eleph replied.
Don had thought of Eleph as a grouchy desk scientist, but now the man was displaying considerable practical finesse. This challenge was evidently bringing out the best in him.
They rigged it. Gaspar’s stripped bike was tied to the rock spur by the safety rope, and the rear wheel hung down below. The cord fitted neatly within the bare rim, both ends dropping down into the depths.
Pacifa, the lightest member of their party, went down first, complete with her bicycle. Gaspar and Don paid out the line according to Eleph’s terse instructions. Eleph straddled the bike with his foot on one pedal, using the coaster brake to prevent slippage. The whole procedure looked awkward and dangerous, and it was—but it worked. In a surprisingly short time Pacifa reached bottom and the line went slack.
“No trouble,” she called after a few minutes. “Smooth and flat.
Far wall’s two hundred feet off. Little squid, crayfish, sponges, and maybe a sea monster or two. Send down the rest.”
Eleph was the next. He and his bicycle were tied to the upper loop, while Pacifa herself, below, served as the counterweight. As Eleph went down, she came up. Braking was hardly necessary, as there was only a twenty pound differential. Don had not realized that Eleph was so light, but part of it could be a difference in the bicycles and other gear.
Then it was Melanie’s turn. Pacifa served as the counterweight again, because it had to be lighter than the one who was descending. As it was, it was close; Melanie had the fuller flesh of youth, but nothing more. In her case, it was her heavier bicycle that made the difference.
After that Don went down. He mounted his bike and hung on as he dangled over the seeming abyss, slowly rotating. He tilted to the right, and automatically turned his front wheel to compensate, though this was useless in the circumstance. His second reaction was to haul on the suspending rope, and this righted him promptly.
Down he went—and up came Pacifa from the murk, burdened with extra items to increase the mass of the counterweight. “Fancy meeting you here!” she called with a cheery wave as she passed. “If you jump off and let me drop, I’ll never speak to you again.”
Macabre humor. In a moment she disappeared above.
The descent slowed as he neared bottom. Melanie was waiting for him. Don knew that Pacifa had come into sight above, giving warning, so that Gaspar had applied the brake.
Then he touched down. His line did not go slack, for Pacifa’s counterweight maintained tension. “Okay!” he called.