Chapter 5

Rebecca woke quietly and looked around the room. She was in her bra and panties, covered loosely by her other clothes, lying on top of the air mattress and sleeping bag. Robert was asleep by her side, with one hand resting lightly on her abdomen just above her pubic fur. Millie was curled up in a corner of the room, also fast asleep. Rebecca was grateful for the moment, thankful to have some quiet time for reflection. She began to think of how tired she was just after closing the pipe.

"Wow, nothing like having my life in mortal danger to get my adrenaline flowing! Robert was so kind to undress me and prepare our bed after I ran out of gas. I was so tired! I've never had to hike like that! And Robert carried the pack the whole time... I remember him undressing me. After all my teasing, I was wondering if he wanted to have sex with me, and I was so tired! I lay on my stomach and spread my legs a bit, expecting him to take off my panties and mount me from my rear. But he never did! He was so sweet and understanding, just more massaging of my calf. It felt so good! It's so nice to be petted in love. I do remember the soft caresses of my buttocks over the panties, just before I fell asleep. But they were caresses of promise, not caresses of foreplay. I am so, so happy he thinks my body is sexy!"

Rebecca sat up and looked down at the sleeping Robert. "Patience, Rebecca. A little flirting and playfulness is fine. But build the love first, let the love be the foundation for the sexual union. Don't rush him! He loves you so much, he'll allow you to rush him as a gift to you. But he's being as gentle as he can in slowing you down Rebecca... I don't have to worry about losing him. He has committed to me, I can feel it. I'll let him take my virginity when he's ready to ask for it. It won't be long. I can see the hope and desire for me in his eyes."

"He is male. I should give him the pleasure of courting me, pursuing me, catching me... dominating me? Yes! At our core, we accept each other as equals. But I am his female. I should give him the pleasure of catching me, mounting me as he desires, letting him possess me. Eros is a possessive love. It will be one of the cornerstones of our union, along with our friendship and our caring love for each other. And I am so, so happy he thinks my body is sexy!"

"Good morning Becky! How are you?"

Robert had woken up. Rebecca bent down and kissed him. "Good morning! I'm fine. Ready for our next adventure?"

"Wouldn't miss it." Robert got up wearing just his briefs and looked about the room, then poked his head through the single door on the wall opposite of the closed pipe. "Seems peaceful at least. Comfortably warm too. Two cubical rooms, both about 16 feet in all three dimensions. This room has dark blue for three walls, floor, and ceiling, and a glowing yellow wall with the door. The next room has a mixture of red, green and blue for the walls, floor and ceiling, some glowing, some not. There are no doors except the one back to this room. But there's a spiral staircase in the middle that goes up. I guess our one option is to go up the staircase."

Rob and Becky spent a few minutes getting dressed and gathering their things. "Rob, I'm going to put Millie's collar on. Perhaps in the future we might need your rope as a leash for her... Rob, look at this!" Rob came over and saw a defined pinkish rectangle at the back of Millie's neck, entirely devoid of fur. "What do you think it means?"

"Not sure. Let me try something." Rob got out his thermos, took the cup, and poured some water in it. He then set it down on the floor with some dried beef jerky for Millie. Millie came over happily and looked at the food, but then looked confused. She sniffed the food for a moment, then lost interest and walked away. "Becky, I think you're conjecture is correct, impossible as it seems. We don't seem to need food or water anymore. This is probably an important clue to the big picture of what's going on, but I can't figure it out."

A few minutes later they were climbing the spiral staircase in the second room, entering the room above it. The staircase continued for another flight, and there was also a door on a yellow wall, with the other surfaces of blues and greens, some glowing, some not. Robert suddenly realized what they were dealing with. "A bunch of twisty, turning passages, all different!"

"The ancient Adventure maze, Rob? These different colors and intensities on the walls do provide a unique signature for each room. The number of combinations possible must be in the thousands. A huge 3-D maze? This will take an eternity to figure out! Do you think we'll find the 8-inch platinum pyramid along the way?"

"Ha! Probably not. We need though to start making a 3-D map of the maze. I'll reserve a bunch of pages in my notebook, one page for each level, start tracing the connections. Also we'll log the color patterns. This will help us from getting lost as we backtrack. Depending on the size of the maze, we'll probably be doing a lot of backtracking... This could really take a while. I turned off my cell phone last night, by the way. It was important to know the time in the spiral, but not now."

Robert and Rebecca began their efforts to solve the maze. In their first day, they concluded that that one wall of each cube (always in what they labeled the north direction) was red, yellow, or a black and white checkerboard color. The other five surfaces of the cubes were always green or blue. Each wall could either glow or not, providing 6 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 x 4 color possibilities, for a total of 6144 choices. The number of entrances to the rooms would also vary, from one (a dead-end) to six (the room Rebecca labeled the grand junction). Well over 50% of all the rooms were called conduit rooms, containing just two openings.

And the days flowed by. Mapping the maze was slow boring work that took little thought, and they spent most of the time talking to each other, sharing their values and their hopes and dreams for their futures. Both made the effort to help the other understand their personality and desires. Both recognized the bonds of trust and commitment that they were nurturing. Both were thrilled to be planning and dreaming of their future lives together. And the days flowed by...

Rebecca looked up from her analysis with the notebook. "Ready for my review of the new data?" It was the end of their fourteenth day in the maze, and it was Rebecca's turn to study the maps while Robert set up their sleep site and played with the dog.

Robert gave Millie a last pat on her head and got up from wrestling with her. "Sure! Find anything exciting?"

"Not really, which is a good thing. Everything we've found today fits our baseline model of the maze, that it's a 19 by 19 by 19 cube of cubical rooms. Whoever built this place really likes the number 19! Anyway, today we passed the 80% mark on the number of rooms visited. Baseline model of 6859 rooms total, and we've seen 5549 of them. Assuming our travel so far is a good statistical sample, our baseline model estimates this maze contains 361 dead-end rooms, 6144 conduit rooms, 256 rooms with 3 openings, 81 rooms with 4 openings, and 16 rooms with five openings, with most of them clustered around the grand junction room we found at the exact center of the maze. I don't know what we'll do if we finally explore all the rooms and don't find a way out. Opening the pipe in the entrance room will kill us, I'm sure of it." Rebecca was already dressed for bed, down to her bra and panties. She closed the notebook and lay face down on the sleeping bag, stretching out and relaxing and getting comfortable. "Rub my back?"