To Climb a Flat Mountain

by G. David Nordley

  “A Napoleon complex?” Doc offered. “He seems content to let Eddie take the lead. Anyway, I saw him on a Chesapeake Bay cruise with Maria Lopes. She touched him in a pretty friendly fashion. Eddie was there, too, if I recall.”

  Jacques looked over at Collette, who looked back and frowned. They’d been thinking in terms of one saboteur and murderer; they hadn’t considered more than one.

  * * * *

  Ten days from becoming snowbound, Jacques, trailing a tether, squeezed through the narrow horizontal crack of the window, stuck his head out into a freezing wind and looked up fifty meters at an overhang of ice-covered rock, and down to the snow-covered terrace, a kilometer below. To his right there was the bare hint of a ledge, covered with snow—which probably covered ice—that slanted down and then up in the distance toward a notch in the ledge.

  It was, he realized, less dangerous than his Earth-gravity-trained intuition told him. But without an ax, crampons or pitons, it was still a suicidal traverse. He wiggled himself back in, and for a moment, the erstwhile cold damp air of the cave felt warm and inviting.

  “I think,” he told the assembled group, “we’re better off attacking the snow pillar.”

  Three hours later, using the light of improvised torches, they stared up at the barely visible mountain of snow that had drifted down into, and eventually sealed off, the “skylight” entrance to Eagle’s Nest. Somewhere in there was the rope they had used to come in and out.

  Soob attempted climbing up the snow hill and sank up to his crotch. As he attempted to extricate himself, he triggered a small avalanche that picked him up and flung him against a rock headfirst. Helen tried to move to him and was overwhelmed herself and buried.

  “Hang on,” Jacques yelled to everyone left. “Let it play out!”

  When the snow stopped sliding down, he began moving toward Helen, half wading, half swimming through the snow. The footing was treacherous—he found he made the best progress by lying down on the snow and pushing against the rocks with his feet while doing something like a butterfly stroke with his hands until he got to where he thought Helen lay.

  Meanwhile, Collette mimicked him in an effort to reach Soob from the other side of the avalanche.

  Helen was nowhere to be seen, so Jacques felt around with his feet.

  Something or someone grabbed his leg and started climbing up him. Jacques cried out in startlement before he realized it had to be Helen. He reached down into the snow, found a hand, and pulled her up. Her face was ashen white, and she coughed in great hacking spasms that gradually decreased in frequency and harshness.

  “Don’t try breathing snow,” she choked out as the coughs subsided.

  “Can you make it out?” Jacques asked.

  “What about Soob?” Helen asked, followed by another fit of coughing.

  “We’re looking. I’m not sure when this will let go again.” Jacques tossed his head in the direction of the snow pile. “I don’t want to lose all of us.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “Watch your step.”

  She nodded and began to pick her way out of the avalanche area.

  Jacques resumed “swimming” toward where he thought Soob’s last position was. Despite the cold of the snow, he was sweating with effort. Soon, he and Collette met in the middle without having found Soob.

  “It may have carried him downhill a ways,” Collette said. “Let’s stay in contact so we don’t miss anything.”

  They did, slowly feeling their way through the snow shoulder-to-shoulder, foothold by foothold, steadying each other when the other slipped.

  “Jacques!” Collette said at last. “I don’t think this is a rock.”

  Quickly, they dug down with their hands and found the still form of their comrade. They brushed the snow away from his head with their bare hands. He had bled from a scalp wound, but not, it seemed, profusely. Collette tried to take his pulse and shook her head.

  “Get him free first,” Doc called. “The cold may reduce his life signs. We’re trying to make a smooth area for him to lie down, clear of the avalanche danger.”

  “Yes,” Jacques said, and bent to the task of extricating Soob’s limp, motionless body.

  In one gravity, it would have been impossible, but the gentle pull of Cube World made them supermen and superwomen. Jacques and Collette finally freed him and built a ramp of compressed snow to pull him up to the surface. There, they dragged him as if he were a toboggan toward the edge of the avalanche. Doc and an apparently recovered Helen took over then as Jacques and Collette collapsed in the snow in exhaustion.

  “The good news,” Doc proclaimed at length, “is that he isn’t dead. Unfortunately, that may be the bad news as well. I wish I had the resources of a hospital...”

  * * * *

  Two days later, they were near the end of their food. Soob was still unconscious, and though they’d managed to get some water into him, they had no IV or liquid nourishment. He could, Jacques realized, be the first to starve to death.

  “It’s got to be apastron,” Helen said. “The weather should start to moderate. Half rations may give us four days. We could just go hungry for another five or six. Spring should come quickly.”

  “Not quickly enough for Soob, I fear,” Doc replied.

  “I think we need to try again,” Collette said. “Try smarter.”

  Jacques reviewed events in his mind. “I could try to trigger another avalanche.”

  “Risky.” Doc said.

  “Yeah. I’ll need some kind of headgear and a long tether. If I get buried, pull me out.”

  That was greeted with silence. Everyone realized the risk involved. But they were not going to sacrifice one of their own. One for all, all for one, Jacques thought. The beau geste. The stuff of legends. He looked around and everyone nodded.

  They had one log left—in a small blessing, they’d needed less fire to keep warm than initially anticipated. Jacques planned to use it to put some distance between himself and what he thought would be the most unstable snow.

  They planned it like a military campaign, beating a packed snow path between rocks to the target area. With a rope around his waist, Jacques advanced. As he approached the center, however, the path gave way, and he found his boot in water. Apparently, a melt creek was forming beneath the snow.

  He extricated himself, made a “dry” snow path around the hole, and trudged on.

  Then he was there. He made his way up the snow as high as he could, then used the log to bludgeon the snow above him. Nothing. He whacked it again with similar results, then he pushed the log into the snow and tried to lever some out of the pile. He was doing this again when Colette shouted.

  “Jacques, above you! Look out!”

  He glanced up the snow hill and saw the avalanche coming. He backed off as quickly as he could without abandoning the log—they would need it for fuel—and avoided the worst of the oncoming snow. The tether, pulled by all his companions, moved him out of the deluge.

  When things settled down, there was a gap above the snow hill and the skylight, filled only by the rope they had left a couple of weeks earlier. And above that was daylight.

  They tested the rope with their total weight and found it had not gone rotten. Climbing it in the low local gravity was no problem and soon Jacques and Doc reached the snowy surface. Doc, whose voice carried farther, yelled down the hole to let them know they were out. Then they put on improvised snowshoes and headed for the forest.

  The landscape had been transformed; snow weighed much less here than on an Earth-gravity world and compressed much less under its own weight. Drifts towered around them, and the lava tube had been a ridge to start with.

  As they neared the forest, they noticed the snow under the trees pockmarked with holes about a hand’s width wide.

  “Somebody’s out of hibernation, I think,” Doc said.

  “Somebody edible, I hope,” Jacques answered. He had put hunger out of his mind, but with the prospect of food nearby, he
felt almost irrationally famished.

  With a whoosh, the something fell by Jacques, nearly hitting him on the head, punched a hole deep in the soft snow, and stopped with a sort of distant plopping sound. He looked up just in time to avoid getting hit by the next one.

  “Bitterwood fruit, high-altitude version,” Doc said, looking up.

  “Hard to find down there,” Jacques said, looking down the hole, hungry.

  “Keep looking up,” Doc said. “Come on now...”

  He didn’t have to wait long. A faint crack and rustle and he shuffled under the next one before it completed its 300-meter fall. With the expertise of an American-rules football receiver he plucked it out of the sky before it hit the snow. Wordlessly, they split it, cleaned it, and ate it immediately.

  “Not too much more, right away,” Doc said.

  Jacques nodded. They caught a dozen more and headed back to the cave, somewhat lightheaded. They had survived the apastron winter and could get back to the business of finding the shuttle, or establishing a settlement.

  Doc rigged a tube from the shells of hirachnoid legs and some of their precious tape to get soup into Soob’s stomach. They took turns watching him, feeding him, cleaning him, and finally, a week after the accident, he began to regain consciousness. But he wasn’t really lucid and couldn’t care for himself.

  The snow melted and their sun was approaching its maximum size.

  Temperatures climbed above freezing all day, snow melted, and the forest filled with bizarre critters and alien fragrances, as their sun approached.

  Three days before periastron, they experienced a small earthquake, a thud followed by rumbling and groaning for about twenty seconds. Stones rocked around them, but nothing fell from the ceiling.

  The next day, it hit 15 Celsius, and Helen went for a short swim in a small lake near the terrace edge. There were no other takers, but her joy in being bare and wet again, temperature be damned, made them all feel a bit warmer. They had a picnic in front of a low concave ridge of bare red rock by the lakeshore that sheltered them from the breeze and reflected the feeble sunlight on them. It was pleasant—even warm—there.

  Helen picked up a rock and showed it to Jacques. “Geologically speaking,” she said, “we’re on a lava field between two volcanoes. I’ll bet it slides down over millions of years and subducts just beyond the edge of the ocean.”

  “Then gets recirculated?” Doc asked.

  Helen nodded. “I expect so, if this configuration is more or less stable over eons.”

  “What powers it?” Doc asked. “A world this small should lose heat faster than radioisotopes make it.”

  “Tides, maybe.” Helen shrugged. “I wish I could do a simulation.”

  “There needs to be another world, farther out, to keep the orbit eccentric,” Doc offered. A Neptune-mass giant, maybe.”

  “We haven’t seen one,” Collette said. “I think we would have.”

  Jacques nodded. “That’s true, though I haven’t looked carefully.”

  Helen said, “It might be dimmer than you think. Given the air pressure and temperature, I’m thinking we get half or something less of solar insolation here. But the primary is an M dwarf, so the visual light is maybe a tenth ... half of a tenth ... the amount of visual light one gets on Earth, and maybe a sixteenth of that at the nearest plausible giant planet orbit.”

  Jacques agreed. “Yes. A Jupiter equivalent would be something like an eightieth as bright. That’s third or fourth magnitude here—visible but not really noticeable.”

  “Or,” Doc said, “the planet could be closer to the star and too hard to see in the twilight.”

  Another, lesser quake interrupted the discussion.

  “We can’t stay forever,” Jacques said, voicing what they all thought, staring up at the lava tube ceiling. “We’re apparently still some distance from the shuttle. The season is getting on.”

  “We’re about forty-eight kilometers above sea level now,” Helen said. “I’m not sure it would be wise to winter at any higher altitude. What we could do is lay out supply caches at higher altitudes this summer, then make a dash up the following year.”

  “I should stay with Soob,” Doc said.

  “We should have two able-bodied people here,” Jacques countered.

  “We can rotate placing the caches,” Collette offered. “You and me, Helen and me ... you and Helen.”

  Did she sound just a bit hesitant about the last pairing? Jacques wondered. Helen’s approach to the three men, two women thing, was to spread her attention around more or less equally. Collette had not really tried to keep up; though she had genuine affection for Soob and Doc, she had taken a proprietary interest in Jacques. This flattered and excited Jacques, but the long-term implications also worried him. Taking care of human needs was important, he thought, but in their present circumstances “keeping it professional” might be the best policy. Helen was having none of that, of course. Still, he had no complaints from others. The discussion went on to the more comfortable subject of logistics and schedule.

  The result of all this was that, on what he had determined to be periastron, midsummer’s day, he and Collette set out, loaded up with as much as they could carry.

  * * * *

  Chapter 14

  Jacob’s Ladder

  Up and down, up and down the crews went. They could go up three terraces and back in a day, and it generally took two trips to set enough supplies for a trip to a higher stage—though on the first two stages, they found they could stretch things by foraging. As summer drew to a close, they reached the tree line at forty-eight kilometers altitude, where it was only above freezing for a few hours a day. A hardy form of tanglegrass kept on over the next three terraces, and this was grazed on by a four-footed relative of the kangasaur about six times the size of an African elephant. It didn’t have a prehensile nose, though, and made do with only one flat tusk growing from the lower jaw and a talented tongue.

  These were far too big to think about killing, but the “hairadactyls” that tended them were another matter. These were eagle-sized and pigeon-brained, so the staging crews came back with as much as they took up.

  The terraces changed; the higher ones were no longer sheer cliffs, but more rounded and slumped, often with natural ramps on which herds had beaten paths from one level to another. Climbing cliffs became easier, but to make up for that, the slopes between them became steeper.

  With the first chill of winter in the air, Jacques and Helen set out for the last foray until the next summer. They passed five depots, at fifty-six, sixty, sixty-four, sixty-eight, and seventy-two kilometers altitude—as estimated from the wrist comp’s barometric readings—on the way up, overnighting in a tiny log lean-to on permafrost. They established a depot at seenty-six kilometers in a small cave on a rare outcropping of rock in a field of ice. By eighty-three kilometers the ice was gone; they’d found a small lava tube, however, and the rock below it was still warm. Wrapped in their batskin sleeping rolls, with a tiny fire guarding the entrance, Jacques felt downright cozy.

  “What do you think?” Helen asked. “Only thirteen kilometers up to the one bar level.” She snuggled up to him, as natural and unconcerned as ever.

  On Earth, Jacques thought, thirteen kilometers altitude gain would be ridiculous for an up-and-back. But with the gravity being only about an eighth of Earth’s at this altitude, and the terrain now simply rolling hills paved with smooth pahoehoe lava, it was probably doable.

  “The oxygen partial pressure is going down,” Jacques said. “It’s harder to start a fire. We’re still above Earth normal pressure, about 1,200 millibars, but oxygen partial pressure must be less than Earth’s.”

  “Time to put the shipsuits on?” she asked.

  Jacques thought about it. Their carefully preserved shipsuits had hoods, transparent in front, that could be sealed airtight. They were intended to serve as emergency vacuum suits on spacecraft. They could easily hold a few hundred millibars of pressure
differential. They used the heat of their wearers’ bodies to power the efficient nanosystems that removed carbon dioxide, but...

  “They still need an air supply, and we don’t have one. Maybe we can rig up some kind of bellows for next year. But we can wear them for warmth tomorrow, along with our batskins.”

  “Our Cube World language is evolving.”

  “Huh?”

  Helen laughed. “You dropped the ‘mega.’ So I’m wearing ‘batskins.’ Its a better word.”

  “Yeah. If Gabe and company have made a similar discovery, they’ll call it dragonskin, or something like that. Then we’ll argue about it.”

  “If we ever see them again. Or maybe if our descendants meet theirs.”