The Third Murray Leinster

by Murray Leinster

  Mr. Hallen, moving heavily, rested his telescope on the railing beside him. He put his eye to the eyepiece. The faraway mountain leaped toward him. He moved the instrument deliberately back and forth. Rock strata flashed past at a dizzy speed. A wide patch of dazzling white. Then vertical cliff, with a speck on it seen as the telescope’s field swept past.

  “The first man is Chips, all right.…” A voice down the terrace babbled. A heavy baritone cut in, smoothly, “He’d know we were watching from here. He ought to wave.” Other voices, blurring all sense in a confused soprano sound. Presently words came more clearly: “That’s very bad going, there.… A hundred feet in the past hour…”

  Mr. Hallen found the speck on the cliff again. It was a man. He climbed slowly, testing each handhold. Presently he stopped. Another speck below him moved. Another man. There were four of them roped together. One moved. Three held fast. The cliff was straight up and down. A pebble dislodged from the foot of any one of them would drop thousands of feet before it touched solid earth. There were wisps of cloud below them.

  “Yes,” said a voice decidedly. “That’s Chips leading. He’s good. But I’m glad I’m not in that party!”

  Mr. Hallen gave no sign of the meaning he saw in the sight in his telescope’s field. He seemed impassive and unconcerned. Actually, he was listening for the voice of Mona Dale. She ought to realize what had happened, over there on the mountain. The climbers were near the top of Chitna. Very near. But to get so high they had sacrificed every possibility of descent. Hours since, they had reached a spot where further climbing in the same line was absolutely impossible. Then, they could have given up the climb. They could have retreated. But there was another line of ascent they could attempt. To reach it, they had to pass downward and sidewise across the cliff’s smooth face.

  A part of the way they could move by normal rock-climbing methods. There was a place, however, where they had to use ropes. And through his telescope Mr. Hallen had seen the technique called for. It had told him that it was one of those places where you can get down, but cannot get back up. In taking the new line of ascent, then, they had cut themselves off from all possible retreat. Once there, they had to reach the top or die.

  Nobody spoke to Mr. Hallen. Nobody ever did. Even at such a moment, when all the inn regarded this climb as a sporting event and a gentlemanly bookmaker—so it was said—took bets at eight to three against its success, with lesser odds on the death of one or more members of the party. Nobody ever spoke to Mr. Hallen. He had cultivated solitude, even at the Valley Inn, until he was regarded as a sort of natural feature and ignored as such. Every morning his valet tucked him solemnly in his steamer chair, and he sat there in a magnificent remoteness until noon. In the afternoon he sat there again, with the same forbidding air of self-sufficiency.

  He had come to be disregarded now—the thought was grimly amusing—in the same way that a naturalist who sits perfectly still will come to be ignored by the wild things of a forest. Like the naturalist, too, he learned many things from those who ignored him. This was the Valley Inn, in what someone had quite inadequately called the American Alps. It was crowded with climbers and near-climbers and would-be climbers, and with merely social climbers in addition. There had been much to learn.

  Whiteness swept across the field of the telescope. Clouds again. The climbers were blotted out with the mountain flank to which they clung. Mr. Hallen put down the instrument. He looked impassively along the terrace. Mona Dale was there, yes, and with the Tommy Carteret to whom she was engaged. She was not smiling. She was not speaking. But Tommy Carteret talked with a smooth expansiveness that explained why most men did not like him. He was rich, and he traded on it.

  He’d sent Chips out to climb the east face of Chitna. Mr. Hallen knew why. So, probably, did Mona.

  “It isn’t often,” said Tommy Carteret’s smooth baritone, “that I can actually see what I get for my money. I told Chips I’d back him in a Mount McKinley climb if he could make the east face of Chitna, here. He took me up, and I can actually watch him do it, except when the clouds interfere. But the damned clouds cut him off so much that it’s costing too much per minute!”

  He laughed. Other voices laughed, too. He was very rich. Mr. Hallen bent his eyes to his book. The climbers were in trouble. He knew it. Apparently no one else did.

  Mr. Hallen looked stolidly at his book. He heard footsteps drawing near. Then he heard Mona Dale’s voice. It was studiedly calm:

  “Do you think he’s going to make it, Tommy?”

  “He?” repeated the smooth baritone amusedly. “There are four of them. Say they, Mona. They may make it—I don’t know. I told him I’d find money for a Mount McKinley expedition if he’d prove he and those three chaps with him were up to it. He assured me they were. I told him I wanted proof. When he asked what sort of proof. I suggested the east face of Chitna. So he’s trying it.”

  “Nobody’s ever climbed the east face, Tommy!”

  “I know.” Tommy Carteret’s voice was a shade less smooth. “That’s not my affair. If Chips tries the east face and gets hurt, it’s his funeral.”

  “It’s likely to be,” said Mona quietly. “I wish you hadn’t, Tommy.”

  His voice, then, was not smooth:

  “I’d reason to, don’t you think?”

  She did not answer. Mr. Hallen heard their footsteps die slowly away down the terrace.

  Mr. Hallen turned a page. He was not reading. He was remembering. He’d seen Chips meet Mona Dale. Pudgy Green introduced them—Pudgy, the hopeless dub at climbing, who revered Chips as the best man in America at that balanced climbing which is the most hair-raising yet useful trick of the alpinist. He brought Chips up and said reverently, “Mona, this is Chips Hardesty. You’ve heard of him! Chips is—” Mona did not hear the rest. Neither, most likely, did Chips. They looked at each other and something happened. Something immediate and unalterable and irrevocable. And nothing would ever be quite the same to those two again. Mr. Hallen knew. Anybody could have known, looking at them. It was just as simple as that.

  * * * *

  But that was two days ago. And two nights since…

  Two nights since Mr. Hallen sat on the terrace in a vast, impassive stillness. He smoked, bulky and aloof in his steamer chair. There was music inside the inn; it contrasted weirdly with the look of things outside. Rhythmic bedlam in the resort of men. Serene silence among the mountains; silence which had the quality of a frozen melody.

  From time to time people came from the ballroom into the outer stillness. Men and women, always. Never men alone, nor women. Mr. Hallen remained silent and impassive and self-contained. He heard secrets, out on the terrace, and gave no sign that he was not deaf. He saw kisses, and gave no indication that he was not blind.

  Then Chips came out with Mona Dale. They came to the edge of the terrace. They stood there in silence. Mona looked at the distant snow slopes. Chips looked at her. He frowned.

  “I just heard you’re engaged to that Carteret fellow. How’d it happen?”

  “Why shouldn’t it happen?”

  “Shall I tell you?” asked Chips.

  “No, don’t!” said Mona quickly. She paused. “He asked me to marry him, and I didn’t know anybody else who meant anything to me. So I said yes. Why not?”

  Chips admitted wryly, “There wasn’t any reason, then.”

  “And I’m going to marry him. There’s still no reason not to.”

  “If you can’t think of any, then there aren’t any,” said Chips. “Do you want to go back in again?”

  He Turned, but she stood still. She said defensively, “If you’d ever been poor—”

  “I am poor,” said Chips. “Why not? Most people are, compared to Carteret. I have lots of fun though. Or I thought I did.”

  She said abruptly, “What do you want more than anything else?”

  “Until
I came here,” said Chips, “I wanted to climb Mount McKinley. The three fellows with me are good. I trained them. We could make the climb, but it would take an expedition and supplies and so on, and we can’t manage that. So we climb where we can, and polish up our technique—and eat our hearts out thinking about the place we’d like to use it.

  “I said,” went on Chips grimly, “that’s what I wanted before I came here. Do you want to know what I want most now?”

  Again Mona said quickly, “No! Don’t tell me!” Then she added passionately, “What I want is to be rich. So I’m going to marry Tommy. I want to be rich!”

  “I think,” said Chips, “that’s a lie.”

  “I’m going to make it true,” said Mona.

  The door from the ballroom opened. Someone came out. Chips did not notice. He said grimly, “You can’t make it true. The same thing happened to you that happened to me, the minute I first saw you.”

  “Maybe it did,” said Mona, “but I can cure it and I will!”

  “I couldn’t,” said Chips, more grimly still, “and I don’t think you can.”

  Mona stirred restlessly and did not answer. Chips said most grimly of all, “If we stay out here I’ll probably kiss you. And you’ll like it. We’d better go in.”

  Mona hesitated. “I might not like it.”

  “But I shan’t try it,” Chips told her savagely, “because you’re engaged to Carteret. Just an eccentricity of mine. We’re going in!”

  They went in. Mr. Hallen looked out at the mountains. Where his steamer chair was placed, there was but little light. They had not seen him. Now the man who’d come out alone did not see him either. That man struck a match and lighted a cigarette. It was Tommy Carteret. He was scowling. He inhaled savagely, twice, and threw the cigarette away.

  That was two nights ago.

  * * * *

  Today, Mr. Hallen was the first to notice that the cloud had moved away again from Chitna. He put down his book with a vast deliberation. In an impassive fashion he trained his telescope upon the mountain flank.

  The climbing party had made another fifty feet, perhaps. They clung like flies to the wall. For ten minutes, for fifteen, the leader did not advance a foot. But every so often his arms made a spasmodic movement. At the end of that time he suddenly made what looked like an abrupt leap sidewise. Actually, of course, he had used a rope snubbed around a rock to enable him to swing from a quite impossible place to one that was merely impracticable. He made himself secure. And suddenly, in the telescope’s field, Mr. Hallen saw what looked like a vertical streak of tiny puffs of vapor. He knew what had happened, of course. The rope or the man had loosened a delicately balanced boulder. It went grinding and bouncing horribly down the cliff face—making spurts of rock dust where it touched—to end in a screaming drop to the screes at the base of the mountain.

  Then voices. A girl’s voice:

  “Mona, do you see them…? Are they moving fast…? Can you see Chips?”

  No answer save a babble of more voices than one. Mr. Hallen did not turn his head. Mona Dale had been watching through one of the terrace telescopes. The leader of the climbing party was motionless now. Very slowly and very painfully the second man wormed upward. The third man. The fourth. The leader went upward once more. Inch by inch.

  A voice down the terrace: “What do you call that kind of climbing? Pudgy Green said—”

  Mr. Hallen watched the climbing party. The leader again found himself at a place that was absolutely impossible. For five minutes, for ten, he seemed to be motionless. Actually, for a longer time than that he had been looking for a possible way to go higher.

  Now he descended. He went down twenty-five feet or more. Once he slipped. Ten feet. He pulled himself back with oddly awkward gestures. Then he teetered and suddenly made a curiously light and swift dart across sheer nothingness. That was balanced climbing, in which a man moves swiftly over footholds too tiny to support him for five consecutive seconds, but which will sustain him as long as he keeps in motion. It is like dancing. It is like skating on thin ice. It is a little like tightrope walking. But on a mountainside there may be a drop of thousands of feet below the man who tries that trick. There was here.

  The leader came to a halt and hugged the rock. The second man began to move.

  Mr. Hallen put down his telescope. There had been a storm cloud over the Brothers some time back. It was gone now. Baldy was wreathed in mist. Pudgy Green had climbed Baldy. Many times. Pudgy had climbed Mount Streicher, too, and the Otter, but the Brothers were beyond him. He’d climbed Chitna, though—but by the easy route.

  With all the passion for climbing that the greatest of alpinists might possess, Pudgy was hopelessly mediocre. An ice ax was an instrument by which Pudgy wore himself out, but with which he could not cut ice steps that would hold. Crampons served him well enough, but Pudgy could never tell when a piton was fast and when it would pull out at the slightest jerk. And Pudgy could climb a chimney, but only with such awkwardness that fifty feet of it reduced him to pitiable exhaustion.

  Mr. Hallen remembered. Yesterday morning Pudgy had come upon Chips. Chips was scowling, looking somberly out at the mountains. Pudgy was vastly respectful to and infinitely admiring of Chips.

  “Uh, listen, Chips,” said Pudgy, “one of the fellas with you was talking about McKinley. Said the four of you’d like to tackle it. Only been climbed twice. That’s right, ain’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Chips. “But we’re broke, all four of us. So we just bull around to each other about how we’d set about climbing McKinley, and figure on the thing, and then we say, ‘What the hell!’ and try to forget it.”

  “Uh—listen!” said Pudgy again, anxiously. “If somebody were to put up the money for a try at McKinley, would you—uh—take it?”

  “Sure!” said Chips. “I could put up an argument to prove it ought to be done, too. Why? Do you know a millionaire?”

  “Yes,” said Pudgy. “Tommy Carteret. I was talking to him. I told him you were the best climber in America, and it was a shame nobody’d tried the new climbing tricks on McKinley. He listened. Said he wasn’t a climber himself, but he could see it might be worth doing.”

  “No dice,” said Chips regretfully. “I’d try dry-nursing a beginner up some places, but not McKinley.”

  “He doesn’t want to go,” insisted Pudgy. “He just said he might put up for supplies and such for an expedition if the right people went on it.”

  Chips hesitated a long time. Then he said dryly, “Somebody ought to go up. I’ll talk to him. But I won’t try to sell myself for the party. I know two or three men who could do better.”

  Pudgy said confidently, “You sell him on the idea of the climb, and I’ll sell him on the one to do it. That’s you, Chips. I’ll attend to that!”

  Chips went with him, reluctant enough but inevitably thinking of the three he had trained to climb. Mr. Hallen gave no sign that he had heard a word. But he remembered.

  That was yesterday. Today Chips was close indeed to the summit of Chitna by the eastern face, and he was in trouble. The storm cloud that had been over by the Brothers still hung together. It was a dark cloud, a nasty cloud. A dubious mist whirled under it. Chitna, however, was unobscured. Mr. Hallen took up his telescope.

  The climbers were higher. The leader was no more than two hundred feet from the top of the cliff, and the top of the cliff meant the ascent completed. But they were not moving. There was sheer wall to the right and left, and sheer wall above, and sheer empty space below. But the important thing was that the climbers did not move.

  Fingers of mist drifted past, between them and the Valley Inn. It blotted them out and partly revealed them, and blotted them out again. Mr. Hallen put down the telescope.

  Voices, down the terrace:

  “Resting, I suppose.… They’re almost up.… Why don’t they finish? We ought to give them a
dinner for climbing Chitna by the east face.… Nobody ever did that before, did they?”

  Mr. Hallen heard footsteps near his steamer chair. The smooth baritone of Tommy Carteret.

  “I’ll make good on it,” he was saying sulkily. “I wouldn’t have minded if he’d broken his neck, but I’ll pay up.… What’s the damned expedition going to cost me, anyhow?”

  Mona Dale, sounding as if she had trouble breathing:

  “They—they’re not up yet.… Pudgy Green said the last few hundred feet were the worst.… I wish you hadn’t sent him, Tommy.…”

  The footsteps went on. Ten minutes passed. Fifteen. Twenty. Then exclamations. Chitna was not in the clear again. There was merely a gap in the cloud stratum that hid its peak. Mr. Hallen looked quickly.

  The four climbers were exactly where they had been before. They had not moved. They could not climb down, now. And Mr. Hallen knew by their immobility that they could not climb up. And they could remain there but so long. It was cold, up by the summit of Chitna. Their footholds were minute. Their handholds mere crevices.

  The cloud covered them again. There was swirling stuff below it. Perhaps it was snow. Then, buffeted by the fierce wind of a mountain storm, they would cling with fingers and toes to such tiny handholds as they had, while a voracious, biting cold devoured their strength. Perhaps it was sleet. Then every inch of rock would be sheathed in ice. Even Baldy was treacherous after a sleet storm. The east face of Chitna, sheathed in ice, would not be merely impossible. It would be murderous.

  Something of the truth came gradually to the watchers by the terrace telescopes. Voices argued shrilly. Pudgy Green was quoted as authority that Chips was the greatest climber in the world. But other voices quoted cases on the Breithorn and the Charmoz and the Eigerwand. They narrated tragedy after tragedy.