Then he turned, and we went up. We mounted to the ridge, and stared down the awful precipice of the South Face, down, down, 15,000 feet to the Nepal hills. We worked our way toward the second step, where Mallory and Irvine were last seen. Though the great swords of the wind were sheathed that day, its small, keen lancets thrust through all our clothes down to our flowing blood. What snow there was was dazzling, the sky was an appalling blue, and the summit was a hidden thing behind its plume of cloud.
Toward that plume we worked. Even with oxygen, it was pure agony. Up there, the air is thin, thin, thin. The thinness of the air is in your flesh and bones, and in your brain. You move, and pause, and try to move again. And presently your whole attention is confined to that next move.
I can remember certain things. The sense of danger on the second step, the fear that it might prove unclimbable. Barbank stopping to rub the circulation back into his hands. The hiss of oxygen. My own raw throat. The rising wind. The skyline snow peaks off across Tibet.
On such a mountain, physically, there can be no question over who shall lead. But morally there can. I can remember husbanding my strength, giving Barbank a drudging minimum of aid, and waiting for my opportunity. I can remember Barbank weakening, relinquishing the lead high on a summit slab. I can remember the look in Barbank’s eyes—
The hours had dragged. My watch had lied. Eight and nine, and ten. I moved. I ached. I forced myself to try and move again. Endlessly.
Then, without warning, the plume enfolded us. Now it was small, wind-shredded, tenuous. The Top of the World was 50 feet away.
I realized it. I knew that I would be the Man on Top, that I had Barbank where I wanted him. And suddenly I stopped. I don’t know why. I laughed aloud. I waved him on. He passed by, hating me. I followed him.
He reached the summit edge. He turned his head. I could not see his lips, but I could feel their curl of triumph and their contempt. He turned again—
And, as he turned, a single gust screamed past us and laid the summit bare. I saw its rock. I saw a wide depression packed with snow.
But in the center there was no snow at all, for it had melted. On his woven mat, naked and serene, the Holy Man was waiting there.
Slowly, his moon-round face looked up. He smiled upon us with his statue’s smile. His soft syllables flowed through the frozen air.
In that tone of pleased surprise with which one welcomes an unexpected guest, he spoke to Barbank. “How did you get up here?”
Barbank staggered. A strange sound came from his leather mask. Automatically, his arm came up and pointed—at the harsh summit, the ridge, the slabs, at all those miles of rock and ice and snow.
The Holy Man lifted both his hands. His gesture was exquisite, polite, incredulous. I could have sworn that in his voice there was no irony.
“You mean,” he said, “you walked?”
THE BEASTS THAT PERISH
(also published as “The Accident Epidemic”)
Some of us on The Team don’t even know that it exists. We’re never told about it when we’re hired; nor are we ever given the real reasons for our hiring. And those of us (like me) who do catch on, seldom even discuss it with each other. On paper, The Team doesn’t exist at all. It permeates other agencies; we shuffle filing cards, or act as couriers, or translate documents, or diddle with computers, and each of us has been checked very, very carefully where security is concerned, not only by the hush-hush people but by Colonel Samuel Warhorse, who either is or isn’t a displaced Army medic, and who once or twice a year goes back to Oklahoma to do his thing as a Medicine Chief of the Osage Nation, and who’d be captain of The Team if it existed, just as I’d be his second-in-command.
The best way to describe it is by using the example of water departments and their dowsers. Just about every major city water department has one or more dowsers on its payroll—but never as dowsers, because water-witching still isn’t quite respectable. They’re hired as backhoe operators, or truck drivers, or whatever, and there they are, ready to do their real job when necessary.
That’s how it is with us. Somehow our real jobs filter in to us, always through Chief Sam, and we tackle them and do our best, and afterwards everybody forgets all about them, just as people forget about water department dowsers when they fill their bathtubs.
What sort of jobs? Problems that defy ordinary, logical solutions. Puzzles that make no sense. Perils materializing for no reason out of nowhere. Disasters that simply cannot be, but are.
For instance—
Chief Sam called me at 11:30. “We’ve got another one, Garry,” he said. “Smells like a real collector’s item. How’s about lunch at noon?”
I didn’t argue I already had a date. I cancelled it, and half an hour later, when he walked into the chop house with two other characters, I was waiting for him.
I stood up, and he introduced them. Two were state police captains, one out from Pennsylvania, the other a tall, rangy, local Western type named Tod Welles; the third, with a French name and nice manners, was an R.C.M.P. [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] superintendent from up across the border.
“Douglas Garrioch,” Sam told them. “He used to be a fly-boy. Sometimes he turns out to be pretty useful.” He grinned at me, his eyes black-agate under his black sequoia eyebrows and gray hair, and slapped me on the shoulder with a hand like a bear-paw. We ordered drinks, making small-talk till the waiter brought them. Then there was silence. I looked at him.
“Our problem for the day,” he said, “is simply stated. “During the past week, the fatal one-car accident rate has suddenly gone up—by four-thousand eight-hundred and some-odd percent.”
“Where?” I asked.
“The entire United States and all of Canada. Garry, that means that almost fifty times as many people as usual have started smashing their cars into concrete abutments, plunging them into rivers, rolling them down cliffs—and at top speeds. And at night, only at night. Folks are getting spooked. Insurance companies are already having fits. The press is starting to get too damn interested and making noises. So far, nobody’s released the real statistics, but there’s no way to keep the local police and sheriffs quiet. It’s lucky winter’s almost on us, so there’s weather to blame it on, but the story’s sure to break wide open before too long—and we just can’t afford that kind of panic.”
“So?” I said, feeling those familiar small cold feet along my back.
“So you go back to work. You dig right in and find what’s going on, and just who’s killing whom—if there is a who. The boys here’ll fill you in on everything they know. It’s yours from there. Now let’s have lunch.”
They told me while we ate. They were experts in their field, specialists on highway accidents, and they had all the facts and figures at their fingertips, all the hows and wheres and whens—and nothing else, no whys. I asked the obvious questions, trying to find a pattern that’d link everything together.
What about the drivers? What kind of people were they? That angle had been pretty thoroughly explored; they were just about every kind. The only thing they seemed to have in common was that most of them had done a lot of freeway driving—the percentage of big-rig truckers was astonishing—but there were too many exceptions to lay down a rule. Otherwise, they were of all ages, sexes, races, driving every kind of car or truck and a few motorcycles. Almost always, they had been alone, or just about alone, on the road, with the next vehicle at least half a mile away; and always, always they had been going way over the limit—estimated speed 80, 85, 90, sometimes about a hundred.
How about passengers? Well, there’d been just a few, no bus loads, no big groups, not even any foursomes—and all strictly in the past tense when found.
“Any last words?” I asked. “Did any of ’em drop any kind of hint about what happened? About what might’ve hit ’em?” And I was told tha
t no, they hadn’t, not really. There’d been a salesman in Ohio somewhere who was still alive when they pulled him out; they thought he screamed out something about hitting a coyote before he coughed up blood and died, but they weren’t sure, and anyhow no coyotes had been anywhere around those parts since frontier days.
Besides him, there was just a doctor in Saskatchewan, out on the motel circuit with his office nurse; she had lived long enough to whisper something that sounded like “squirrel… squirrel… squirrel…”
“The birds and the beasts were there,” quoted Chief Sam. “An odd coincidence.”
“Odd—but hardly pertinent,” the R.C.M.P. man shrugged. “People say weird things when they’re dying.”
And that was that. They had no more to add. Chief Sam and I walked them to the door after he’d paid the check, and he said how I’d keep in touch with them, with Welles especially, and how they’d pass on all reports to me; and I guess somebody had briefed them—they asked no questions about how we’d operate. Then the Chief and I went back into the bar for one more drink and my instructions.
“Hit the road, Garry,” he said. “Tonight and every night, till you find out something. Stay on the freeways, particularly the Interstates. There’ve been a few bad ones on back-country roads, but its the freeways where everything’s been really happening. Here are your credentials, state and federal.” He grinned. “They’re sort of hoked up for the occasion, but they’re genuine and guaranteed to impress everybody, even us Honest Injuns.” He handed me two cards and an enamel-and-gold badge. “They make out you’re sort of a cross between Ralph Nader, Oh-Oh-Seven, and the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover. Don’t throw their weight around unless you have to.”
“Thank you, Heroic Leader,” I said, knocking off my drink. “You’ve put me in the ticket-fixing business. Now I can make my fortune and retire, and take Marina on a trip around the world.”
“Any time,” said Chief Sam, “after you stop those folks getting themselves killed off. Now don’t forget to fill your tank—you’re going to need it.” His grin disappeared. “Take care, Garry, and give that lovely girl of yours my love.”
I drove back to the office, and checked out early; and drove slowly up to the apartment, thinking about The Team, and Chief Sam and Marina and myself, and how the strangeness of our natures and our backgrounds and our lives had brought us together to do jobs that needed doing and otherwise would never have been done.
Take me, for instance—three of my grandparents were of Scotch descent, by way of Nova Scotia; the fourth was French and English mixed. And there was second-sight on both sides of the family. My great-grandfather Garrioch had seen visions, and known when death would come for friends and relatives there in the cold Western Isles.
His son, my grandfather, had it also; but it was different in him, for almost never was it conscious. Usually it simply guided him in simple acts, things done or not done to keep one out of danger; he fought four years as an infantryman in World War I, in the Black Watch, and lived to emigrate—very nearly a survival record.
My father inherited it again, and it protected him after he moved down to New England to fish the harsh Atlantic, and in the Navy all through the Second War.
In my case it again had changed. I didn’t know I had it until I took my first tour as a chopper pilot in Vietnam. Yes, it protected me—but it also told me, quite consciously and definitely, when death was going to strike—when Charlie was going to slam his rockets or mortar shells into the base, and who on any mission wouldn’t make it back.
What do you do with that kind of talent? You don’t report yourself to Headquarters. No, you worry about it, and maybe drop a hint to a close friend or two when you feel they’d ought to hit the sick list, and grieve when they won’t take your advice and end up dead. Then, if like me you’re very, very lucky, maybe you run into someone like Chief Sam. He was doing his stuff there at the great base hospital in Saigon, and I was taking a routine physical; and next thing I knew somehow I’d told him everything, and his advice had been simply to accept it, to say nothing, and to keep in touch. We’d be seeing more of one another, he said.
So there I was, driving home to my golden girl, thinking that if it hadn’t been for him probably I never would’ve met her. She had been born in Hawaii, on Maui, her father an Icelander, her mother Japanese, and she was golden-skinned and glowing, and so delicate that she looked almost breakable. She was as sensitive as a Gothic heroine, and as tough as whalebone.
She had to be. Her talent had just missed being her tragedy. She is an empath. Even as a child, she could feel—in each degree, in every terrible detail—the agony of others. Not physical pain itself, but its tormenting tensions and its terrors, the futile thrashings of trapped minds trying to cope with other kinds of pain.
It is a talent unhappily too common, and children born with it often become autistic, withdrawing totally into themselves, for in societies that deny and fear the extrasensory, they have no way of learning how to distinguish between exterior agonies and those genuinely their own.
But Marina’s parents were wise enough to listen, wise enough not to put her down. They had no rules to follow, so—instead of calling in the headshrinkers—when she was seven they took her to her grandmother in Japan, who had retired to a convent for Zen Buddhist nuns. There she was cared for until she was 14, visited at least twice a year by one or another of her parents and in constant touch with all her Japanese relations. And there she learned, not how or why her talent came to be, but how she herself, her being, her spirit, could live with it and maintain tranquility.
When she returned to her father and mother in Hawaii, it had in no way been suppressed, but now she knew how to avoid the dangerous chains of emotional identification, how to say, “This agony’s not mine, it is not me,” how not to react to it.
And yet a visit to a hospital was still, for her, an act of heroism, and she would ask me to detour for miles rather than pass a penitentiary, an insane asylum, a slaughterhouse. For her talent differs from ordinary telepathy; distance is an important factor in it, and so are numbers. She can handle the impact of suffering individuals well enough, but groups still can overwhelm her. She cannot heal; except very rarely, with people whom she loves, she is powerless even to ameliorate. She can only feel.
In the islands, she went through high school and then on to college, taking a degree in librarianship—a wise choice, for libraries have more books than people, and books, whatever torments they contain, don’t broadcast them. Then she got a job stateside, at a small college library in eastern Washington; and that was where Chief Sam ran into her—by accident, of course, the way he always seems to find his people. He was asking her a question at the reference desk when, without warning, she just came out of gear, leaving the conversation dangling. She turned deathly pale; her pupils dilated; she gasped for breath. It took her several minutes to pull herself together, while he watched.
And then they heard the sirens. Some self-tortured kid, stoked up on speed and LSD and God knows what, had climbed the campanile tower and tried to fly. She had tuned in him in that first dreadful second when he had found that he could not.
Chief Sam coaxed it all out of her, and found her a new library job at a nice quiet computer center in Cinnabar, the little Colorado mining town half grown up where The Team works—still small enough so that you aren’t psychically snowed under as you are in, say, Chicago or New York, but big enough to hold those government subagencies we need to keep us going plausibly.
He introduced us. I saw her glowing skin, her strange, green-golden eyes, her hair like the fine black lacquer of a household shrine in ancient Nara, and instantly I knew the joy and fire of her temperament, and the tempered strength under her gentleness and her fragility. We drew together, feeling one another before we had so much as touched our hands; and it was wonderful that neither she nor I, nor Chief Sam even�
��neither then nor later—had to conceal why we were there, what we were all about.
That made it a whole lot easier, for we needed no barriers of security between us. I could tell her exactly what I was getting myself into, just as she could tell me. So as soon as I got home I phoned her on the job and asked her to take the rest of the afternoon off. I filled her in on the whole deal, and told her there’d probably be nights I’d have to spend away from home. She shook her shining head, and smiled ruefully. “I guess there’s just no limit to the things some men won’t do to get out of making love to their poor, lonely wives,” she said.
And of course, with that, I had to pick her up, laughing in my arms, and carry her into the bedroom.
We went to dinner early, and I told her everything again, somehow hoping that she might, intuitively, think of an angle we had missed. Those drivers, I repeated, driving at top speeds and late at night, must’ve seen something, something startling enough to make them swerve suicidally. The only alternative was to believe spooks were riding with them, or flying saucer people were suddenly controlling them, or the Russkies or Red Chinese were playing with a new secret weapon. For a few moments, she responded with that look people get when they are searching in themselves, but when she spoke it was only to say that she didn’t like the freeways.
“I’m not happy on them,” she said, looking a little puzzled. “There’s—well, there’s something wrong about them. But it’s too vague. I can’t get hold of it. It’s only strong enough to make me feel uneasy.” She took my hand in both of hers. “I know it’s silly of me, Garry, with your—your talent. But you will be careful, won’t you? Promise me?”
It was six days to Thanksgiving. The weather had been nasty for a week, but the night was clear. The highways had dried off, and though yesterday’s snow blanketed trees, houses, hillsides, when I reached I-25 it was all clear going and the traffic was moving ten miles an hour faster than the law allowed, with the big rigs and some other drivers pushing even beyond that.
The First Reginald Bretnor Megapack Page 14