“Stay harnessed up!”
Outside, one of the katabatic blasts shoves him hard. It’s very cold, perhaps 20 degrees Celsius below, so that the wind chill factor when it is blowing hardest is extreme. Unfortunately, he does have a touch of the runs. Much relieved, and very chilled, he pulls his pants up and steps back into the tent. Eileen is on the radio. People are to stay inside until the winds abate a little, she says. Roger nods vigorously. When she is done she laughs at him. “You know what Dougal would say.”
“Oh, it was very invigorating all right.”
She laughs again.
* * *
Time passes. When he warms back up Roger dozes off. It’s actually easier to sleep during the day, when the tent is warmer.
He is rudely awakened late in the morning by a shout from outside. Eileen jerks up in her bag and unzips the tent door. Dougal sticks his head in, pulls his oxygen mask onto his chest, frosts them both with hard breathing. “Our tent has been smashed by a rock,” he says, almost apologetically. “Frances has got her arm broke. I need some help getting her down.”
“Down where?” Roger says involuntarily.
“Well, I thought to the cave, anyway. Or at least to here—our tent’s crushed, she’s pretty much out in the open right now—in her bag, you know, but the tent’s not doing much.
Grimly Eileen and Roger begin to pull their climbing clothes on.
* * *
Outside the wind rips at them and Roger wonders if he can climb. They clip onto the rope and jumar up rapidly, moving at emergency speed. Sometimes the blasts of wind from above are so strong that they can only hang in against the rock and wait. During one blast Roger becomes frightened—it seems impossible that flesh and bone, harness, jumar, rope, piton, and rock will all hold under the immense pressure of the downdraft. But all he can do is huddle in the crack the fixed rope follows and hope, getting colder every second.
They enter a long snaking ice gully that protects them from the worst of the wind, and make better progress. Several times rocks or chunks of ice fall by them, dropping like bombs or giant hailstones. Dougal and Eileen are climbing so fast that it is difficult to keep up with them. Roger feels weak and cold; even though he is completely covered, his nose and fingers feel frozen. His intestines twine a little as he crawls over a boulder jammed in the gully, and he groans. Better to have stayed in the tent on this particular day.
Suddenly they are at Camp 9—one big box tent, flattened at one end. It is flapping like a big flag in a gale, cracking and snapping again and again, nearly drowning out their voices. Frances is glad to see them; under her goggles her eyes are red-rimmed. “I think I can sit up in a sling and rappel down if you can help me,” she says over the tent noise.
“How are you?” asks Eileen.
“The left arm’s broken just above the elbow. I’ve made a bit of a splint for it. I’m awfully cold, but other than that I don’t feel too bad. I’ve taken some painkillers, but not enough to make me sleepy.”
They all crowd in what’s left of the tent and Eileen turns on a stove. Dougal dashes about outside, vainly trying to secure the open end of the tent and end the flapping. They brew tea and sit in sleeping bags to drink it. “What time is it?” “Two.” “We’d better be off soon.” “Yeah.”
* * *
Getting Frances down to Camp 8 is slow, cold work. The exertion of climbing the fixed ropes at high speed was just enough to keep them warm on the climb up; now they have to hug the rock and hold on, or wait while Frances is belayed down one of the steeper sections. She uses her right arm and steps down everything she can, helping the process as much as possible.
She is stepping over the boulder that gave Roger such distress, when a blast of wind hits her like a punch, and over the rock she tumbles, face against it. Roger leaps up from below and grabs her just as she is about to roll helplessly onto her left side. For a moment all he can do is hang there, holding her steady. Dougal and Eileen shout down from above. No room for them. Roger double-sets the jumar on the fixed rope above him, pulls up with one arm, the other around Frances’s back. They eye each other through the goggles—she scrambles for a foothold blindly—finds something and takes some of her weight herself. Still, they are stuck there. Roger shows Frances his hand and points at it, trying to convey his plan. She nods. He unclips from the fixed rope, sets the jumar once again right below Frances, descends to a good foothold and laces his hands together. He reaches up, guides Frances’s free foot into his hands. She shifts her weight onto that foot and lowers herself until Roger keeps that hold in place. Then the other foot crosses to join Roger’s two feet—a good bit of work by Frances, who must be hurting. Mid-move another gust almost wrecks their balance, but they lean into each other and hold. They are below the boulder, and Dougal and Eileen can now climb over it and belay Frances again.
They start down once more. But the exertion has triggered a reaction inside Roger, and suddenly he has to take a shit. He curses the cave silt and tries desperately to quell the urge, but it won’t be denied. He signals his need to the others and jumars down the fixed rope away from them, to get out of the way of the descent and obtain a little privacy. Pulling his pants down while the winds drag him around the fixed rope is actually a technical problem, and he curses continuously as he relieves himself. It is without a doubt the coldest shit of his life. By the time the others get to him he is shivering so hard he can barely climb.
* * *
They barge into Camp 8 around sunset, and Eileen gets on the radio. The lower camps are informed of the situation and given their instructions. No one questions Eileen when her voice has that edge in it.
The problem is that their camp is low on food and oxygen. “I’ll go down and get a load,” Dougal says.
“But you’ve already been out a long time,” Eileen says.
“No, no. A hot meal and I’ll be off again. You should stay here with Frances, and Roger’s chilled down.”
“We can get Arthur or Hans to come up.”
“We don’t want movement up, do we? They’d have to stay up here, and we’re out of room as it is. Besides, I’m the most used to climbing in this wind in the dark.”
Eileen nods. “Okay.”
“You warm enough?” Dougal asks Roger.
Roger can only shiver. They help him into his bag and dose him with tea, but it is hard to drink. Long after Dougal has left he is still shivering.
“Good sign he’s shivering,” Frances says to Eileen. “But he’s awfully cold. Maybe too hypothermic to warm up. I’m cold myself.”
Eileen keeps the stove on high till there is a fug of warm air in the tent. She gets into Frances’s bag with her, carefully avoiding her injured side. In the ruddy stove light there faces are pinched with discomfort.
“I’m okay,” Frances mutters after a while. “Good’n warm. Get him.”
Roger is barely conscious as Eileen pushes into his bag with him. He is resentful that he must move. “Get your outers off,” Eileen orders. They struggle around, half in the bag, to get Roger’s climbing gear off. Lying together in their thermal underwear, Roger slowly warms up. “Man, you are cold,” Eileen says.
“’Preciate it,” Roger mutters wearily. “Don’t know what happened.”
“We didn’t work you hard enough on the descent. Plus you had to bare your butt to a wind chill factor I wouldn’t want to guess.”
Body warmth, seeping into him. Long hard body pressed against him. She won’t let him sleep. “Not yet. Turn around. Here. Drink this.” Frances holds his eyelids up to check him. “Drink this!” He drinks. Finally they let him sleep.
* * *
Dougal wakes them, barging in with a full pack. He and the pack are crusted with snow. “Pretty desperate,” he says with a peculiar smile. He hurries into a sleeping bag and drinks tea. Roger checks his watch—midnight. Dougal has been at it for almost twenty-four hours, and after wolfing down a pot of stew he puts on his mask, rolls to a corner of the tent, and falls i
nto a deep sleep.
* * *
Next morning the storm is still battering the tent. The four of them get ready awkwardly—the tent is better for three, and they must be careful of Frances’s arm. Eileen gets on the radio and orders those below to clear Camp 7 and retreat to the cave. Once climbing they find that Frances’s whole side has stiffened up. Getting her down means they have to hammer in new pitons, set up rappeling ropes for her, lower her with one of them jumaring down beside her, while occasionally hunkering down to avoid hard gusts of wind. They stop in Camp 7 for an hour to rest and eat, then drop to the cave. It is dusk by the time they enter the dark refuge.
* * *
So they are all back in the cave. The wind swirls in it, and the others have spent the previous day piling rocks into the south side of the cave mouth, to build a protective wall. This helps a bit.
As the fourth day of the storm passes in the whistle and flap of wind, and an occasional flurry of snow, all the members of the climb crowd into one of the large box tents, sitting upright and bumping arms so they will all fit.
“Look, I don’t want to go down just because one of us has a busted arm,” Marie says.
“I can’t climb,” says Frances. It seems to Roger that she is holding up very well; her face is white and her eyes look drugged, but she is quite coherent and very calm.
“I know that,” Marie says. “But we could split up. It’ll only take a few people to get you back down to the cars. The rest of us can take the rest of the gear and carry on. If we get to the cache at the top of the scarp, we won’t have to worry about supplies. If we don’t, we’ll just follow you down. But I don’t fancy us giving up now—that’s not what we came for, eh? Going down when we don’t have to?”
Eileen looks at Ivan. “It’d be up to you to get Frances down.”
Ivan grimaces, nods. “That’s what Sherpas are for,” he says gamely.
“Do you think four will be enough for it?”
“More would probably just get in the way.”
There is a quick discussion of their supply situation. Hans is of the opinion that they are short enough on supplies to make splitting up dangerous. “It seems to me that our primary responsibility is to get Frances to the ground safely. The climb can be finished another time.”
Marie argues with this, but Hans is supported by Stephan, and it seems neither side will convince the other. After an apprehensive silence, Eileen clears her throat.
“Marie’s plan sounds good to me,” she says briefly. “We’ve got the supplies to go both ways, and the Sherpas can get Frances down by themselves.”
“Neither group will have much margin for error,” Hans says.
“We can leave the water for the group going down,” Marie says. “There’ll be ice and snow the rest of the way up.”
“We’ll have to be a bit more sparing with the oxygen,” Hans says. “Frances should have enough to take her all the way down.”
“Yes,” Eileen says. “We’ll have to get going again in the next day or two, no matter what the weather’s like.”
“Well?” says Marie. “We’ve proved that we can get up and down the fixed ropes in any weather. We should get up and fix Camp 9 as soon as we can. Tomorrow, say.”
“If there’s a bit of a break.”
“We’ve got to stock the higher camps—”
“Yeah. We’ll do what we can, Marie. Don’t fret.”
* * *
While the storm continues they make preparations to split up. Roger, who wants to stay clear of all that, helps Arthur to build the wall at the cave’s entrance. They have started at the southern end, filling up the initial crack of the cave completely. After that they must be satisfied with a two-meter high wall, which they extend across the entrance until the boulders on the floor of the cave are used up. Then they sit against the wall and watch the division of the goods. Wind still whistles through the cave, but sitting at the bottom of the wall they can feel that they did some good.
The division of equipment is causing some problems. Marie is very possessive about the oxygen bottles: “Well, you’ll be going down, right?” she demands of Ivan. “You don’t need oxygen at all once you get a couple camps down.”
“Frances will need it longer than that,” Ivan said. “And we can’t be sure how long it’ll take to get her down.”
“Hell, you can reel her down once you get past the Thank God Ledge. Shouldn’t take you any time at all—”
“Marie, get out of this,” Eileen snaps. “We’ll divide the supplies—there’s no reason for you to bother with this.”
Marie glares, stomps off to her tent.
Arthur and Roger give each other the eye. The division goes on. Rope will be the biggest problem, it appears. But everything will be tight.
* * *
At the first break in the winds the rescue party—Frances and the four Sherpas—take off. Roger descends with them to help them cross the Thank God Ledge, and to recover the fixed rope there. The wind still gusts, but with less violence. In the middle of the ledge crossing Frances loses her balance and swings around; Roger reaches her (not noticing he ran) and holds her in. “We have to stop meeting like this,” Frances says, voice muffled by her mask.
When they reach the Great Gully, Roger says his good-byes. The Sherpas are cheery enough, but Frances is white-faced and quiet. She has said hardly a word in the last couple of days, and Roger cannot tell what she is thinking. “Bad luck,” he tells her. “You’ll get another chance, though.”
“Thanks for grabbing me during the descent from Camp 9,” she says just as he is about to leave. She looks upset. “You’re awfully quick. That would have hurt like hell if I had rolled onto my left side.”
“I’m glad I could help,” Roger says. Then, as he leaves: “I like how tough you’ve been.”
A grimace from Frances.
* * *
On the way back Roger must free the fixed rope to recover it for the climb above, and so on the Thank God Ledge he is always belayed only to the piton ahead. If he were to fall he would drop—sometimes up to twenty-five meters—and swing like a pendulum over the rough basalt. The ledge becomes new again; he finds that the smooth surface of the sidewalk is indeed wide enough to walk on, but still—the wind pushes at his back—he is alone—the sky is low and dark, and threatens to snow—and all of a sudden the hair on his neck rises, the oxygen whistles in his mask as he sucks it down, the pitted rock face seems to glow with an internal light of its own, and all the world expands, expands ever outward, growing more immense with every pulse of his blood; and his lungs fill, and fill, and fill.…
* * *
Back in the cave Roger says nothing about the eerie moment on the ledge. Only Eileen and Hans are still in the cave—the others have gone up to supply the higher camps, and Dougal and Marie have gone all the way up to Camp 9. Eileen, Hans and Roger load up their packs—very heavy loads, they find when they duck out the cave—and start up the fixed ropes. Jumaring up the somewhat icy rope is difficult, in places dangerous. The wind strikes from the left now rather than from above. By the time they reach Camp 7 it is nearly dark, and Stephan and Arthur already occupy the single tent. In the mirror dusk and the strong side wind, erecting another tent is no easy task. There is not another level spot to set it on, either—they must place it on a slope, and tie it to pitons hammered into the cliff. By the time Eileen and Roger and Hans get into the new tent, Roger is freezing and starving and immensely tired. “Pretty bloody desperate,” he says wearily, mimicking Marie and the Sherpas. They melt snow and cook up a pot of stew from their sleeping bags, and when they are done eating, Roger puts on his oxygen mask, sets the flow for sleep, and slumps off.
The moment on the Thank God Ledge jumps to his mind and wakes him momentarily. Wind whips the taut walls of the tent, and Eileen, pencilling logistic notes for the next day, slides down the slope under the tent until their two sleeping bags are one clumped mass. Roger looks at her: brief smile from that tired, pu
ffy, frost-burned face. Great deltas of wrinkles under her eyes. His feet begin to warm up and he falls asleep to the popping of the tent, the hiss of oxygen, the scratching of a pencil.
That night the storm picks up again.
* * *
The next morning they take down the tent in a strong wind—hard work—and start portering loads up to Camp 8. Halfway between camps it begins to snow. Roger watches his feet through swirls of hard dry granules. His gloved fingers twist around the frigid jumar, sliding it up the frosted rope, clicking it home, pulling himself up. It is a struggle to see footholds in the spindrift, which moves horizontally across the cliff face, from left to right as he looks at it. The whole face appears to be whitely streaming to the side, like a wave. He finds he must focus his attention entirely on his hands and feet. His fingers, nose and toes are very cold. He rubs his nose through the mask, feels nothing. The wind pushes him hard, like a giant trying to make him fall. In the narrow gullies the wind is less strong, but they find themselves climbing up through waves of avalanching snow, drift after drift of it piling up between their bodies and the slope, burying them, sliding between their legs and away. One gully seems to last forever. Intermittently Roger is concerned about his nose, but mostly he worries about his immediate situation: moving up the rope, keeping a foothold. Visibility is down to about fifty meters—they are in a little white bubble flying to the left through white snow, or so it appears.
At one point Roger must wait for Eileen and Hans to get over the boulder that Frances had such trouble with. His mind wanders and it occurs to him that their chances of success have shifted radically—and with them, the nature of the climb. Low on supplies, facing an unknown route in deteriorating weather—Roger wonders how Eileen will handle it. She has led expeditions before, but this kind only comes about by accident.
She passes him going strong, beats ice from the ropes, sweeps spindrift from the top of the boulder. Pulls up over it in one smooth motion. The wind cuts through Roger as he watches Hans repeat the operation: cuts through the laminated outer suit, the thick bunting inner suit, his skin.… He brushes spindrift from his goggles with a frigid hand and heaves up after them.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Third Annual Collection Page 78