With the overhead team came the inevitable Porta-Johns, food trucks, and power struggles.

On duty less than three hours, Anna was happy to sit out the political squabbles in Oscar Iverson's snug little office. There, far from the madding crowd, she manned the phones in her official capacity as information officer, doling out approved statements to a press already panting for another media glut like that generated by the Baby Jessica case in Texas. When she was eight hundred feet below the surface of the earth and two days travel from the light of day, a grown woman in a limestone cave was almost as good as a baby in a well shaft.

For the past half hour reporters had been getting short shrift. Anna was reading. By chance she'd picked Trapped!, the story of caver Floyd Collins, off Iverson's shelves. It detailed the gruesome death and media circus surrounding the entrapment of a caver in the 1920s. Collins had become wedged in a tight passage; his attempts to wriggle free had brought down loose dirt and rock, entombing him from neck to heels, his arms pinned at his sides. For thirteen days, friends had made the dangerous descent to feed him, while up above concessionaires sold food and souvenirs to an ever-growing crowd of vultures gathered in curiosity, sympathy, and morbidity. On the fourteenth day rains so softened the earth that the access tunnel collapsed. Collins was left to die alone.

Scrawled in the margin of the book were the words "fact: wedge victims die."

Transfixed by the same dread a woman in a stranded VW might feel watching a logging truck bearing down on her, Anna was glued to the book. Iverson, Carlsbad's cave specialist, gusted into her sanctuary, and she dropped Trapped!, glad to be rescued from its bleak pages. He waved her back into his ergonomically correct office chair and folded himself haphazardly over the corner of the desk.