He looked at his watch, wondering that the flashlight batteries had run down so soon. The watch had run down, too, and had stopped. He couldn't remember. Had he wound it before coming to the cave? He was chilled now. It was cold and damp in the limestone passages. He shivered and pulled up his collar.
The panic rose up again. He didn't know how long he had been in the cave. Had it been only a short while, or so many hours that his watch had run down? He said to himself as calmly as he was able, "I'll have to get where I'm going before the light fails altogether."
He began to run.
The illusion grew that he was trying to overtake the end of the flashlight's beam. When he did catch up with it, that would be the end. He had completely forgotten the infrared light on the camera, even though the case banged against his side as he ran. He had been carrying it for so long it had become a part of him.
He dodged through passages, rounded turns, leaped over stalagmites. Once he had to crawl on his hands and knees under water-smooth limestone, pushing his rifle ahead of him.
And all the time he was catching up to the end of the light. The radius of illumination narrowed as the batteries failed, increasing the danger of stumbling into a sudden crevice. Outside, the flashlight would have been rejected long ago as a source of light. But far underground, with no other light of any kind, it was still useful.
Running more slowly now, at a stumbling dogtrot, he broke into a cave larger than any he had seen since the first one, at the end of the passage from the Black Buddha. The feeble light failed to reach the opposite wall.
Rick stopped, panting for breath. He knew he had to rest. He found a natural seat next to a twisted pillar of limestone and sat down.
The light slowly faded until there was only the dimmest of red tints to the bulb, and then that vanished too, and he was again in total darkness. As he watched the light fade, he remembered the infrared. Now he got the glasses from the case and put them on. He took the camera out and adjusted the handstrap so it could be carried like a satchel. But he didn't turn on the light just yet. The battery had to be conserved at all costs. Because....
He swallowed hard. Because when the battery for the infrared light ran down, there would be nothing but darkness. Darkness would mean feeling his way through the limestone tangle, and he realized fully that he would not get far before death claimed him in the form of a yawning canyon in the limestone rock. He had passed many of them.