by Philip Wylie
He went through the undergrowth fast, though the climb was steep. He felt, as he came out in the open, the way all Hawaiians feel about these slopes of graduated rocks, a fear. Masses of them could let go at any time. Rain could start such an avalanche, thousands of tons of it. Wind could; and they could be triggered by the tremor of a truck passing far below or the give of a rotted but temporary wedge. They were dangerous to climb—though the immense fringe of superboulders at their bases gave protection to land beyond. Every year the pali showed black, fresh swaths where a new slide had come partway down or down to the final barricade.
He could see nothing moving in his patrol range except where it usually moved in water—ponds, pools, tanks and the cove. He cast about and clambered around, peering into the poised, steep rock maze, sweating with unease. From time to time he made sure nothing had changed in the park-institute-Makai reach—more than a half mile long, now that they were building again. He was about ready to quit when a faint perception froze him. This time, he didn’t have to run through his sense alarms like dictionary pages to know what it was.
A brief drift of air from his left brought a scent he instantly identified. But it was not the perfume of ylang-ylang. It was the smell of old death.
He found the body a minute later: what was left of a body after the warm interval, after that hideous, battering fall, and after birds, insects. A woman lay there, the remains of a woman. He bent over the windward side of an opening between two rocks that were almost as tall as he. She had been smashed almost beyond belief: bombs or artillery, alone, did such things to human beings. Her clothes were in tatters and only part of them remained. She had dark hair but not the coarse kind of orientals. Not straight, or wavy, like Asian and Polynesian hair. He had a moment of fright and then was sure his fright was due to error: it was not the girl his second cousin had taken from Grove’s house. She was safe and on another island, he’d been told.
Jerry exhaled heavily in gratitude—and then almost grinned; Grove had shown a special concern for Miss Wilson. He had been very explicit when telling his second cousin Cy that the lady wasn’t to be “bothered” by Cy or any other man and not allowed to run away. Subsequent reports from Cy were approved.
Jerry used a few moments for that and a few more to note that the battered woman in the deep V made by the two boulders had been chic: the fingernails and expensive tatters showed that. She was without jewelry but he saw where rings had been worn on remnants of fingers. No pocketbook lay near, for plain reasons. One further finding startled Jerry: in two relatively unruined fingers she grasped part of a lei, hardly more than a scrap, and its brown flowers were ylang-ylangs. It was not, then, a lei she had herself worn but blooms snatched, at some final moment, from the neck or bosom of another person.
Jerry went back down, heedless now of starting a slide. He phoned Grove, who appeared in a remarkably short time and, together, they returned to the ghastly remains.
Grove studied them with a grim disregard of proximity. “People are beginning to climb the damn pali again,” he said at last. “I don’t know who she is. If it weren’t for that lei, I’d call the cops—rather, you would. But ylang-ylang once had the meaning I told you, and could still have: Mavis’ daughter in Bangkok. I can find out, in maybe a day, who she was, if she’s another of our people. Because they’ll have been missing her, and looking, for a couple of days, anyhow. Till I know, I’d rather these crazy fortune hunters—”
“They probably have more to find,” Jerry interrupted, gravely. “We can’t stop them. Crazy to risk this talus, let alone the cliffs on up.”
Grove thought briefly. “We’ll have to conceal the—remains.”
“How?”
Grove suggested a way and they acted swiftly.
When the first of the growing multitude ascending the treasure slopes drew near the site they passed without a second glance. The woman’s remains had been wrapped in plastic dropcloths. Several heavy rocks hid the bundle. On top of them and caught by a smaller rock was a bird’s feather plucked from a booby, along with evidence of what seemed its frequent use of the spot—a white spatter sufficient to account for what could not be entirely concealed.
Within an hour there was pandemonium on the Kalan. In both directions from the park, cars had braked, pulled over and come to rest more or less on the shoulders of the highway. For a mile, toward Waimanalo, and closing up on the Blowhole Observation Point in the other stretch, the shoulders were solid with vehicles.
By nine-thirty Roy Hedges was out of breath and close to a similar state in the matter of sense. A normal, all-day “gate” at Sea Life Park averaged five thousand heads, big and small. The parking facilities could easily accommodate cars and buses for twice that number. Judging by the auto incidence, there were, within the half hour after the ticket booths opened, some fifteen thousand people inside or eager to enter the gates. And of these, when the first show started, a large fraction had not remained as spectators. That portion had started up the talus.
Jerry and Grove had left long before, well aware that the search was going to go on and be big—but not remotely able to guess how big. Hack Davis had elicited the full story on WWHH only minutes before time ran out, that is, before 5 A.M.; and it takes awhile to prepare a gold rush even if the stampede doesn’t require rounding the Horn. Even when it’s a local affair.
Trent Ackley Abbott, called “Tack”—the dreamer-upper, fund raiser, designer and founder of the park, its associated enterprises and awesome intentions—was asleep. The phone rang and he opened occasionally smoky but very blue eyes. He raked a strong hand through curly hemp, that he had for hair, and called, “Get it, Sapphire, willya!” as the ringing continued. Then he remembered his wife had risen early and taken their three offspring to school over the mountains and was now, barring unforeseen digression, engaged in loading two Welsh ponies on a carrier hitched to their Number Four car for transport to pastures in Oolau.
Picking up the phone while scratching a chest that barely contrived to stretch far enough to reach his excessively broad shoulders, Tack tried to say hello and failed, owing to his not infrequent problem of speech impediment: a mere halt, not a stutter. Then he made it. “Yes?”
“Come to the park!”
Roy Hedges didn’t have to give his name although the panic version of his voice was bizarre. Naval fighter pilots who survived such action as Roy had seen will surely have come close to panic. But those who survive will not have panicked. Hedges now was in panic, the cause, therefore, unimaginable. Tack had stood, by then, at his six-two, less the hair swirls.
“What’s up?”
The phone talked. Tack began to smile. The smoke drifted from his eyes which, afterward, were fire-blue and, in that state, had a peculiar ability to make some people, cheats, liars, pork-snitching politicians and the like, think a tangible force was actually being projected from the blue gaze, one perhaps like a laser beam, but whatever, a deadly power. By the same token, the eyes (and the man operating them) gave the great and decent human majority a feeling that he exclusively emitted rays of kindness.
When he had listened to the point where Roy ran out of frenzy, he said tersely, “Be right over.” Then he bent double, laughing.
The Abbott house was on the seashore, closer to the Makai-Range-Oceanic-Institute-Sea-Life-Park complex than the home of Grove and the vacant house beside it; less than a mile from the nearest element, the Makai Range, a science-fiction construction. But Tack was not right over. Traffic crawled on the highway and more often stopped dead. Careless parking had already made the never adequate artery a one-way route. Cops were trying to get vacated cars off the pavement, with little help as few people cared to loiter even for a moment, once they were that near the gold fields.
Tack finally backed his Number Two car into a cul-de-sac which he created, partly, by crushing down shrubs. Then he walked.
When the structural oceanic Oz came in view, he stared, rotated a slow head and swiveled it: as far as th
e eye could see, cars. Up the road onto Makapuu Point, cars. Among them, people hurrying parkward, as were people at his Makai Range end. On the talus, on that unstable rock mass; people like flies. Thousands.
Absently, he helped a cop shove a Volks into somebody’s plumeria tree. He walked on. The cop followed and grabbed him. “Look, mister. I need help, clearing this road! Emergency.” Suddenly the officer’s face changed as his voice dropped in deference. “Oh! You’re Tack! What the hell is all this?”
“I dunno,” Tack said.
“Got beyond control before we even knew it started.”
Tack ran. He soon reached the office building where Roy now with Willard and Tim were staring at the human ant horde on the near-vertical rocks—an intent, insectile, manyhued multitude a mile wide or more. From that they looked to the park itself where regular buses and expected cars had deposited the morning’s unprecedented crowd which, now, gave half an eye to the Whaler’s Cove show from overspilling seats and the other half to the incredible mass climb.
“How do we deal with it, Tack?”
Will seemed near to cracking. Tack said, quietly, “Do we have to?”
“People are going to get hurt! Start a slide—”
“It isn’t,” Tim Baily, another top executive, said in a diffident tone, “our responsibility or our property. Though mobs of ’em paid admissions to get started up there.”
Willard Benton, the fourth member of top brass, squinted with his usual amused look, one that hid shrewd eyes and a vast knowledge of the strange wonderland called Hawaii. “The gate,” he said, “broke the record, a half hour ago.”
“People believe,” Tim added, “the fallen treasure is above the property. But, if it includes more big bills, they must think it’s worth spreading out, where the crowd’s too thick to push in for hunting.”
“Has anything more been found?” Tack sounded as if that could not be the case.
Hedges gave the answer while the two associate execs listened in wonder, wanting to hear it again to be sure. “According to the cops and the boys trying to block our non-public entrances, two more bills, both hundreds, a solid gold cigarette case and a ruby earring.”
Tack was silent—watchful and incredulous. At close intervals more or less determined by the nature of the steplike cliffs above them, gray rocks hung at the steepest angle their angular shapes permitted. Waterfalls had streaked notches in the pali during heavy rains. These trenched the mountainous face, and rocks the size of trucks sometimes thundered down those upended alleys.
Toward the upper part of the talus a multitude was moving, human confetti that reached apexes of loose stone, when some turned back or aside. Those more able or mad went on to the successive cliffs, acting evidently on the not improbable idea that the booty below was staked out and so certain of discovery but since it must have originated at the summit, chances were better for a find in the high shelves, recesses and gouged hollows. There, too, the vegetation was scarcer and the search easier—but the climbing was vertical for the most part.
Stupefying! Tack drew a deep breath and looked at Hedges, the man who worried about the vast flow of funds; the man some of the employees thought overly conscious of money and money above all. The man, actually, Tack mused, whose character, level sense, will, courage and education were responsible for the fact that the big dreamers in this multiple organization didn’t go bankrupt. The biggest dreamer was, of course, Tack himself—whom only Roy dared defy; Roy was a relative, by luck!
Roy Hedges was budgetmaster of the Oceanic Foundation, which was the holding company of what Tack had dreamed and others—what was, and was to be. And Roy was the one now suffering most—the one whose desperation related to the fact that people above would be injured; Roy of the bloody skies of the Pacific and of carrier decks set ablaze by kamikazes; Roy Hedges—the one in thirty who survived of his flight wing.
It didn’t surprise Tack but it moved him. Nothing would have made Roy more jubilant than the record-breaking gate receipts of that morning: nothing—unless some greater and truer value was interposed.
“We’ve got to get ’em down,” Tack finally said. “Hell. They’ll start an avalanche on a talus tongue; bound to, sooner or later, and it’ll be slaughter.”
As if Tack’s tense near command had been heard, a police bullhorn thundered at the northerly corner of the vast property and bounced back from the stiff slope and towering cliffs, more clearly in echo than in projection:
“This is the police. All climbers will now begin a careful descent. All persons not clear of the entire area in one hour will be arrested and severely punished. You are breaking the law. Penalties will be heavy for all climbers not off the mountain in one hour. Come down! You are in danger! Every man, woman and child is liable to be killed at any moment! Move with the utmost caution on your return! But … move! Down!”
A repeat of the whanging threat and warning began. A second bullhorn, near the park’s opposite end, took up the ad lib of a different police officer and this man was near to sobbing as he appealed. His voice, loud-bouncing at jet pitch, was so unmistakably driven by fear and so grief-resonant that Tim said, “What an act!”
Will Benton, once MC of a very popular radio program in Honolulu, answered with a caustic flash, “That’s not acting. His wife and kids are up there.”
A little time passed. The bullhorns thundered. But very few of the clamberers moved down. In the park, a constant mass of customers clattered ceaselessly through the turnstiles. These, now, were not, in the main, hunters. They had learned enough from TV and radio to realize that the park was a perfect grandstand for what was sure to become an avalanche, or many, a cascade of rocks in thousand-ton or million-ton volume … mixed with people, for grinding.
The park restaurant was being stormed. Elsewhere, daily routines were slowly stalled. But the shows went on as they, too, became crowded with audiences waiting for the sure, terrible reddening of an avalanche, or of many. And even the lovely lasses and handsome young men who swam with the porpoises, ran them through their amazingly brainy exhibitions, explained over PA systems and rode a boatswain’s chair to a high spar of the Essex to put a handful of fishes into the maw of a whale that had leaped for the prize, straight up and twenty-three feet—all these people kept glancing at the crawling colored carpet of humanity high above. Scientists abandoned experiments to watch. Their aides, young men and women, doctoral candidates, came out to behold. Carpenters, repair men, clean-up crews, porpoise trainers-in-training, visiting scientists being escorted on a tour of the magnificent and unique instruments and facilities, forgot their purposes and turned to the mountain.
The heavy machinery preparing new foundations at the Makai Range fell silent. Their growling engines, squeaking treads, titan arms and maws stood still. Offshore, work and research vessels, twenty-footers and ships with the tonnage of Columbus’ fleet added together, failed to leave Makai Range pier and the moorings. Their crews and the day’s passengers, specialists in a dozen disciplines, stood on the decks, sat on gunwales, climbed rigging or found perches on huge ventilators, to look.
Binoculars proliferated and were passed from hand to hand in the multitudes ashore and elsewhere. The users would generally make a running report of what was beheld:
“… woman with a baby in a squaw pack, way up. Looks pretty bushed … woops! … slipped!”
“…can’t be sure but I think there’s a kid, oh, maybe fifty feet to the right of that hole we were looking at—that band-shell place, to the left of the dead-ahead notch … a kid found something! He’s bending, getting it, straightening to see if anybody near him realized … What in hell, Martha…?”
“My eyes always were better than yours, David.” A pause.… “Now, tell me exactly where that boy…”
The people around Tack were making suggestions, none, so far, even hopeful. Additional bullhorns slammed threats and appeals.
“Might as well,” Benton observed, “have tried to get people off the Klondike t
rail—by offering free peanuts.”
Tack felt a presence and turned. “Hi, Ring! Know Roy, Will, Tim …”
Grove smiled. “Yes.” Hands shook.
“The traffic woke me. Took near an hour to push through on foot. Terrible thing!” Grove said.
Tack nodded. “Trying to figure how to get them back. You can see what’s certain to happen, sooner, later.”
“Best thing might be a slide that tapped a few—and scared the rest. Anybody know where the jewelry and dough came from?”
Tim answered. “All we have is the latest radio bulletin. Somebody, woman, evidently, parked a Jaguar at the road closest to the summit. And fell—or jumped—or maybe just dumped her valuables. God knows why.”
“Car belong to her?”
“Rented. But the police have a name. Maribel Dwelling, a divorcee, who’s been living in a fancy apartment in the Tahitian Towers for six months. Not at home, though; missing; and she had plenty of dough.”
Tack heard that for the first time. He scowled. “Then maybe she’s—up there, too?”
Grove was surveying the human flies and calculating. The corpse lay in a boulder-enclosed niche. The hunt was, mainly, to the right of that place. But it would surely, in time, extend its greedy and shifting shape to the spot. He knew, now, the real name of the late “Maribel Dwelling” and her employer: Eaper.
His mind returned to the dilemma. A small cascade, however mangling or lethal to a few, alone, might start the rest downward, as he had said. Listening to ad lib suggestions for a while and finding them inadequate or hopeless, he finally spoke. “The slide idea is sound; no other practical way. Try to get up to them and bodily bring ’em down-even with regiments of the National Guard—and you’ll have a shambles: no place to struggle with arrested men and women. But—a slide? With burlap, chicken wire—”