BOUNDARY(154)

To their surprise, the handle moved grudgingly about ten degrees before it stopped. "Maybe that's got it!"



The door, however, would not open. A.J. inserted Fairy Dust around the rim and determined that some sort of bolts were retracted.



"But something else is blocking the entrance and keeping the door from swinging open. We'll have to push it in."



That called for reconfiguring the ripper into a device more like a short, fuel-cell-powered battering ram. After about twenty minutes, the ripper started pounding regularly on the door.



"You do realize that we are to Arean archaeology what Indiana Jones would have been in real life," Rich commented dryly. "You watch, Helen—future generations of our colleagues will call us looting barbarians."



Helen smiled. "Yes, I can see it now. 'Helen the Hun' and 'Skibow the Scalper.'"



She shrugged, a bit uncomfortably. "It rubs me the wrong way, too, being honest. But . . . what can we do? On Earth we have the luxury of unlimited air when we want to get into an ancient ruin."



"True enough," Madeline said. "Even digging in Antarctica was a picnic compared to this."



A.J. would never leave well enough alone. "Why were you digging in Antarctica? Never mind, never mind. Still a deep, dark secret."



"Well, the name is, but that's just to protect the family from publicity. Not the fact. I was trying to find a corpse. It was all very anticlimactic, in the end. I was called in because the guy who disappeared knew a lot of classified information. But there turned out to be no foreign skullduggery involved at all. Not a terrorist in sight. The damn fool just got drunk and wandered off too far. You really, really, really don't want to do that in Antarctica."



There was a sudden crunching, tinkling noise, and the inner air-lock door ground inward an inch and a half. On the next blow, it moved six inches, and the next caused the door to swing almost fully open, amid a sound like a cement mixer filled with champagne glasses. With nothing left in its way, Jack the Ripper shut down.



White dust drifted smokily in their lights. As it settled, they could see that the corridor beyond was coated with ice.



"They were hooked to a water source, all right," A.J. said, quite unnecessarily. "Well, let's take a look-see."



After he and Skibow moved the ripper to the side, all four of them started cautiously down the icy tunnel. Helen and A.J. were in the lead, with Rich coming next and Madeline bringing up the rear.



"The ice starts off incredibly thick on the ceiling," Helen reported. "Two meters thick, at a guess. Fortunately the roof is much higher than I'd expect with Bemmie construction. I think that's because, from the looks of it once the ice starts thinning out, this was originally a natural formation that they just took advantage of. The ice starts tapering two thirds of the way through, and is gone completely about fifteen meters from the end. The roof here is just rock. The walls are sort of gray colored, with the floors almost black."



"I see another door," Rich said. "It looks like it has a plaque with the same airlock markings."



Madeline came last, walking down the ice-coated corridor carefully, to keep from slipping. She was quite a ways behind them because she'd stopped to study the wall at one point.



The ceiling collapsed.





To Madeline, time seemed to freeze. The fact that the great slabs of ice fell more slowly than they would have on Earth just made the coming doom a bit more protracted. Even three eighths of a ton, multiplied by untold tons, is a crushing weight.



If time seemed frozen, her brain wasn't.



She saw A.J., Rich, and Helen ahead of her—facing the wrong way, and too far in any case to be able to reverse direction and escape. They were now almost at the far end of the tunnel.



They weren't in immediate danger, because Madeline could now see that only the central area of the tunnel was caving in. That was the part right above her.



She glanced back and saw that she had no time to make it out herself, even if the supports beyond the tunnel held and the entire cave system didn't come down. And even if she could, the other three would be trapped.



She might—barely—be able to race to shelter with them at the far end, assuming she didn't slip on the treacherous footing. But that would just leave all four of them trapped.



With not much oxygen left, only the water in their small sip tanks, and no food. And only Bruce and Joe—and him with a broken leg—to try and get them out. With, even leaving aside the fact they'd have asphyxiated by then, not more than forty hours they could count on the suits remaining powered. Once the batteries were dead, they'd freeze within minutes.