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in any of the chambers. I went back down to the pool.
He wasn't there, and the pool wasn't either. Water
was pouring everywhere over the rocks, white with
gypsum. The ponypile Ev had crouched on was
completely covered.
I climbed back up to the Wall and followed it over
the ridge. Bult was at the top, looking south toward
what you could see of the Ponypiles, which wasn't
much, the clouds were so low.
"Where's Carson?" I shouted over the rain.
He looked west and then down at the oil field we'd
crossed yesterday. "Dan nah," he said.
"He took one of the ponies," I shouted. "Which way
did he go?"
"Nah see liv," he said. "Nah gootbye."
"He didn't say good-bye to anybody," I said.
"We've got to find him. You go up along the ridge,
and I'll check the way we came up."
But the way we came up was flowing with water,
too, and too slick for a pony to have gotten down, and
when I went up to the overhang to get Ev, the whole
back half was underwater and Ev was piling
everything on a damp ledge.
"We've got to move the equipment," he said when
he saw me. "Where's Carson?"
"I don't know," I said. I found another overhang
higher up, not as deep and tilted up toward the back,
and we carried the transmitter and the cameras up.
When I went down for the rest of the equipment, I
found Carson's log. And his mike.
Bult came back, sopping wet. "Nah fine," he said.
And apparently he doesn't want to be found, I
thought, turning the mike over in my hands.
"That overhang isn't going to work," Ev said.
"There's water spilling down the side."
We moved the equipment again, into a carved-out
hollow away from the stream. It was deep, and the
bottom was dry, but by afternoon there was a river
running past it, spilling down catty-corner from the
ridge, and by morning we'd be cut off from the
ponies. And any way out if the water rose.
I went looking again. Water was pouring from both
overhangs we'd been in, and there was no way we
could get to the other side of the stream, even without
tssi mitss. I climbed up onto the ridge.
It was high enough, but we'd never last out here in
the open. I tried not to think about Carson, out in this
somewhere with nothing but his bedroll. And no
mike.
A shuttlewren dived at my head and around to the
Wall again. "Better get in out of this," I said.
I went back down to the hollow and got Ev and
Bult. "Come on," I said, picking up the transmitter.
"We're moving." I led them up to the ridge and over
to the Wall. "In here," I said.
"I thought this was against the regs," Ev said,
stepping over the rounded bottom of the door.
"So's everything else," I said. "Including drowning
and polluting the waterways with our bodies."
Bult stepped over the door and set his equipment
down, and got out his log. "Trespassing on Boohteri
property," he said into it.
It took us four trips to get everything up, and then
we still had the ponies, which were all lying in a
waterlogged pile and wouldn't get up. We had to push
them up through the rocks, protesting all the way. It
was dark before we got them to the Wall.
"We aren't going to put them in the same chamber
with us, are we?" Ev said hopefully, but Bult was
already lifting them over the door, paw by paw.
"Maybe we could knock out a door between this
passage and the next one," Ev said.
"Destruction of Boohteri property," Bult said, and
got out his log.
"At least with the ponies we'll have something to
eat," I said.
"Destruction of alien life-form," Bult said into his
log.
Destruction of alien life-form. I should get busy on
those reports.
"Where was Carson going?" Ev said, as if he'd just
remembered he was missing.
"I don't know," I said, looking out at the rain.
"Carson would've waded right in when he saw that
thing and killed it," Ev said.
Yeah, I thought, he would have. And then yelled at
me for not running an f-and-f check.
"They would have done a pop-up about it," he said,
and I thought, Yeah, and I know what that would
have looked like. Old Tight Pants without her pants
yelling, "Help, help!" and a fish with false teeth
lunging up out of the water, and Carson splashing in
with a laser and blasting it to hell.
"I told you to get out of the water, and you did," I
said. "I would've jumped out myself if I hadn't been
so far out."
"Carson wouldn't have," he said. "He would have
come to get you."
I looked out at the darkness and the rain. "Yeah," I
said. He would have. If he'd known where I was.
expedition 184: day 5
It took me all the next day to fill out the reports on
the tssi mitss, which was probably a good thing. It
kept me from standing in the door of the Wall like Ev,
staring out at the rain and the rising water.
And it kept me from thinking about Stewart, and
how he'd drowned in a flash flood, and about his
partner Annie Segura, who'd gone off looking for him
and never been found. It kept me from thinking about
Carson, washed up somewhere along the Tongue. Or
sitting at the bottom of a cliff.
The chamber wasn't much of an improvement on
the overhang. The ponies got the runs, and the
shuttlewren flew frantically back and forth around
our heads. With the rounded floor, there was no place
to sit, and the wind kept blowing rain in. Ev and I
could've used one of Bult's shower curtains.
Bult didn't need one. He sat under his umbrella
watching pop-ups all day. Carson had left it behind,
too. I tried to take it away from him, which got me a
fine, and then made Ev show him how to make it not
take up the whole chamber, but as soon as Ev went
back to watching out the door, Bult put it back to full
size.
"He's been gone too long," Tight Pants said,
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