Over and Under Read Online Free

rock was falling through open space, I counted in my head “one Mississippi” to mark the seconds. Before I could say “miss,” the rock struck the bottom, a hard, high-pitched crack that echoed sharply.
    “Let me try that again.” I grabbed another rock from the cave floor.
    “That’s bigger,” said Tom. “It’ll fall faster.”
    “No it won’t,” I said. “But it will be louder.” I rolled it down the chute again, and counted the brief fall.
    “So how far is it, professor?”
    “It takes two seconds to fall fifty feet,” I said, standing up and brushing the dirt off my hands.
    “And it doesn’t matter how big the rock is?” He sounded as doubtful as I had about reaching Squire Boone.
    “Nope. You’d take two seconds to fall fifty feet, too. And that rock fell in less than a half-second.”
    “So…”
    “It’s hard to say. I’m guessing around ten feet.”
    “Then it’s like jumping off your porch roof,” said Tom. “That’s about ten feet. Let’s go.”
    He resumed climbing into the hole, forcing himself through it backward. At one point before he completely disappeared, he looked up at me with only his head visible, like a grinning human hunting trophy that had been mounted to the wall of the cave. Then he popped through and was gone. When I didn’t hear any screams or breaking bones, I knew I had to follow.
    It was a tight squeeze, even for wiry kids like us. I had to put my hands over my head to fit through. I pushed backward, slid for a few feet, and then fell straight down through a brief, terrifying emptiness, before landing squarely on my ass. Stars traced tiny curls in the blackness. When they faded, I pointed my flashlight straight up, to see where I had landed, but realized with awe that the size of the chamber was too large—my beam couldn’t reach the top. Tom and I had discovered something massive.
    “Holy shit,” I said, the leisurely response of my echo another indication of the room’s giant size. I swept my flashlight around; I saw Tom’s beam moving in the distance as he did the same.
    Surrounding us like the trunks of redwoods were thebiggest stalagmites I had ever seen, ropy columns of pink stone that looked like molten wax, each identical, each at least twenty feet around at the base and rising straight up. They were wet—alive—still growing as water dripped onto them from the unseen ceiling, depositing tiny amounts of dissolved limestone with each drop, growing each massive column a few molecules at a time. Right through the middle of the room ran the stream we’d heard from the other side, burbling in from a hole at one end and crashing into another at the far wall. The stream had cut a trench through the stone floor as straight and true as an irrigation ditch.
    “Think how old these are,” shouted Tom from across the room. I knew I wasn’t supposed to, I had been warned in countless school field trips that the oil from our hands could kill the cave formation’s growth, but I reached out anyway and put the palm of my hand against the side of one of the columns. It felt preternaturally immovable and solid, as if the columns were holding the whole surface of Clark County above us in place.
    Tom was less transfixed than I. He quickly worked his way to the other side of the chamber. “Check this out,” he shouted in the distance, his voice echoing more sharply. I walked toward his flashlight beam. It felt strange to be so far away from him in a cave, where usually things were more compact. “Look,” he said when I reached his side at the edge of the chamber.
    He had called me over to a wavy sheet of rock growing up from the floor. It was as thin as paper, thin enough that we saw the yellow glow of a flashlight held to it on the other side. Its folds and curves looked like a curtain blowingover an open window. Tom and I stood on each side, facing each other, examining it—we’d never seen anything like it in all of our explorations. Water dropped onto