The Eiger Sanction

It was not until they were sitting in the shadowy cool of the bar, concentrating on much appreciated glasses of beer, that Jonathan had leisure to look at his host. Robust virility was projected through every detail of Ben's face, from the thick, close-cropped silver hair to the broad leathery face that looked as though it had been designed by Hormel and shaped with a dull saber. Two deep creases folded in his heavily tanned cheeks, and the corners of his eyes crinkled into patterns like aerial photographs of the Nile Delta.

The first beers drained off, Ben signaled the Indian bartender for two more. Jonathan recalled Ben's epic fondness for beer that had been an object of comment and admiration among the climbing community.

"Very posh," Jonathan complimented, scanning his surroundings.

"Yeah, it begins to look like I'll make it through the winter."

The bar was separated by a low wall of local stone from the lounge, through which an artificial stream wound its way among the tables, each of which was on a little rock island connected to the walkways by an arched stone bridge. A few couples in sports clothes talked quietly over ice-and-foliage drinks, enjoying the air conditioning and ignoring the insipid music from ubiquitous but discreet speakers. One end of the lounge had a glass wall through which could be seen the pool and bathers. There was a scattering of prosperous-looking men with horizontal sun-tans who sat in drinking groups around white iron tables, or sat on the edges of gaudy padded sun chairs, concentrating on stock journals, their stomachs depending between their legs. Some waddled aimlessly along the sides of the pool.

Young ladies lolled hopefully on beach chairs, most of them with one knee up, revealing a beacon of inner thigh. Sunglasses were directed at books and magazines, but eyes above them scouted the action.

Ben regarded Jonathan for a moment, his droop-nig blue eyes crinkled up at the sides. He nodded. "Yeah, it's really good to see you, ol' buddy. My phony guests really make my ass weary. How you been doing? Keeping the world at arm's length?"

"I'm staying alive."

"How's that screwy church of yours?"

"It keeps the rain off my head."

"Good." He was pensive for a moment. "What's this all about, Jon? I got this telegram telling me to take care of you and get you into condition for a climb. They said they would pay all expenses. What does that mean, ol' buddy? 'All expenses' can cover a lot of ground. Are these people friends? Want me to take it easy on them?"

"By no means. They're not friends. Soak them. Give me the best accommodations you have, and put all your meals and drinks on my bill."

"Well now! Ain't that nice! Goddam my eyes if we don't have some kind of ball at this expense. Hey! Talking about climbing. I've been invited to be ground man for a bunch taking a shot at the Eiger. How about that?"

"It's great." Jonathan knew his next statement would cause comment, so he tried to drop it offhandedly. "Matter of fact, that's the climb I'm here to train for." He waited for the reaction.

Ben's smile faded frankly, and he stared at Jonathan for a second. "You're kidding."

"No."

"What happened to Scotty?"

"He had an auto accident."

"Poor bastard. He was really looking forward to it." Ben communicated with his beer for a moment. "How come they picked you?"

"I don't know. Wanted to add class to an altogether undistinguished team, I guess."

"Come on. Don't bullshit me, ol' buddy."

"I honestly don't know why they picked me."

"But you are going?"

"That's right."

A girl in an abbreviated bikini came up to the bar and squeaked her still-damp bottom onto a stool one away from Jonathan, who did not respond to her automatic smile of greeting.

"Beat it, Buns," Ben said, slapping her ass with a moist smack. She giggled and went back to the poolside.

"Getting much climbing in?" Jonathan asked.

"Oh, I gimp up some small stuff, just for the hell of it. Matter of fact, that part of the business is long gone. As you can see, my patrons come here to hunt, not climb." He reached over the bar and took an extra bottle of beer. "Come on, Jon. Let's go talk."

They threaded their way along the lounge walkway and over a bridge to the most secluded island.

After waving the waiter away, Ben sipped his beer slowly, trying to collect his thoughts. Then he carefully dusted the top of the table with his hand. "You're—ah—what now? Thirty-five?"

"Thirty-seven."

"Yeah." Ben looked out across his lounge toward the pool, feeling he had made his point.

"I know what you're thinking, Ben. But I have to go."

"You've been on the Eiger before. Twice, as I recall."

"Right."

"Then you know."

"Yes."

Ben sighed with resignation, then he changed the tone of his comments, as befitted a friend. "All right, it's your thing. The climb starts in six weeks. You'll want to get to Switzerland for some practice runs, and you'll need a little rest after I'm done with you. How long do you want to spend conditioning here?"

"Three, four weeks."

Ben nodded. "Well, at least you don't have any fat on you. But you're going to have to sweat, ol' buddy. How are the legs?"

"They reach from the crotch to the ground. That's about all you can say for them."

"Uh-huh. Enjoy that beer, Jon. It's your last for a week at least."

Jonathan finished it slowly.

ARIZONA: June 16-27

The insistent grind of the door buzzer insinuated itself into the narrative structure of Jonathan's dream, then it shattered his heavy sleep, and local reality flowed in through the cracks. He stumbled to the door and clawed it open without ever getting both eyes open at the same time. As he leaned against the frame, his head hanging down, the Indian bellboy wished him a good morning cheerily and told him that Mr. Bowman had left instructions to be sure Dr. Hemlock was wide awake.

"Whadymizid?" Jonathan asked.

"Pardon me, sir?"

"What... time... is... it?"

"Three thirty, sir."

Jonathan turned back into the room and fell across the bed, muttering to himself, "This can't be happening."

No sooner had he slipped into a vertiginous sleep than the phone rang. "Go away," he mumbled without picking up the receiver, but it rang on without mercy. He pulled it onto the bed and pawed around with his eyes clamped shut until he had located the receiver.

"Rise and shine, ol' buddy!"

"Ben—argh—" He cleared his throat. "Why are you doing this to me?"

"Breakfast in ten minutes."

"No."

"You want me to send someone up there with a bucket of ice water?"

"He better be someone you're tired of having around."

Ben laughed and hung up. Jonathan rolled out and groped his way around until he lucked into the bathroom where he let a cold shower drum consciousness into him until he felt the danger of accident by failing was remote.

Ben pushed two more eggs onto Jonathan's plate. "Put them down, ol' buddy. And finish that steak."

They were alone in the lodge kitchen, surrounded by glowing, impersonal, stainless steel. Their voices had a cell-block bounce.

Jonathan looked at the eggs with nausea constricting his throat. "Ben, I've never lied to you, have I? Honest to God, I believe I'm dying. And I've always wanted to die in bed."

"Sit back down and get at that chow!"

It was one thing to push food into his mouth, but another to swallow it.

Ben chatted on, impervious to the stares of hate. "I've been up half the night working out details of the Eiger climb. I'm buying the heavy equipment for the team and bringing it over with me. I'll order your climbing kit with the rest. You can go with jeans and soft shoes for the first few days here. We ain't going to do anything hard right at first. Come on! Drink the milk!" Ben finished his beer and opened another can. The beer for breakfast was more than Jonathan could stand to look at. "You still get your climbing boots in Spain?"

Jonathan nodded heavily and found the lower part of the motion so appealing that he let his head hang there and tried to return to sleep.

"All right. Leave me their name and your account number and I'll get a cable off today. Come on! Time's a-wasting! Eat!"

The one-mile, two-minute drive across open grassland in inky predawn dark brought Jonathan fully awake.

For three hours without a rest they climbed a rough, switch-back trail up one of the faces that ringed around the flat-bottomed depression in which Ben had established his lodge. Morning came while they were trudging upward, but Jonathan took no joy in the russet mantle. When the path was wide enough, Ben walked alongside and chatted. The slight limp from the missing toes was all but imperceptible, save that he pushed off more strongly from one foot. Jonathan spoke little; he puffed along concentrating on the pains in his thighs and calves. He was carrying a thirty-five pound training pack because Ben did not want him to get used to going light. That would not be the way of things on the Eiger.

About eight, Ben looked up the trail and waved. There was a figure sitting in the deep shadow of a rock, obviously waiting for them.

"Well, I'm going to turn back, ol' buddy."

"Thank God."

"No, not you. You need the work. George Hotfort yonder will take you on up."

The figure was coming down to meet them.

Jonathan protested, "Hey, she's a girl!"

"Yeah, there's been a lot of people notice that. Now, George," Ben said to the young Indian girl who had joined them, "this here's Jonathan Hemlock, my old climbing buddy. Jon, meet George Hotfort. Now listen, George, you bring him up another couple of hours, then get him back to the place in time for dinner." The girl nodded and leveled a scornful and superior look at Jonathan.

"I'll see you, ol' buddy." And Ben turned back down the trail.

Jonathan watched him go with genuine hate in his soul, then he turned to the girl. "You don't have to do everything he tells you, you know. Here's your chance to strike back at the white man."

The girl gazed on him without the trace of an expression on her wide-cheekboned, oriental face.

"Georgette?" he ventured.

She made a curt motion with her head and started up the hill, her long strong legs effortlessly pulling the trail under her swinging bottom.

"How about Georgianna?" He huffed along after her.

Each time she got a distance ahead, she waited, her back against a rock, watching his exertions calmly. But as soon as he came close enough to appreciate the filled denim shirt, she would push off the rock and move on, her hips swinging metrically with the long regular strides. Even at the steep angle of the rise, her ankles were supple enough to allow her heels to touch the ground, as the heels of Alpine guides do. Jonathan's calves were tight and inelastic; he was walking mostly on his toes, and feeling every step.

The trail steepened, and his legs started to wobble, causing him to lose his footing occasionally. Whenever this happened, he would look up and find her gazing at him with distant disgust.

The sweat ran from his hair into his eyes, and he could feel the thump of his pulse against his eardrums. The web straps of his pack chafed his shoulders. He was breathing orally by now, and his lips were thick and coated.

He wiped the sweat out of his eyes and looked up after her. Directly in front of him was a vertical bank about thirty feet high with only little dents in the baked earth for foot and hand holds. She stood on top looking down at him. He shook his head definitely and sat down on the trail. "Oh, no. No-o, no, no."

But after a couple of minutes of silence broken only by the distant whip of a lark, he turned to discover that she had not moved and was still regarding him placidly. Her face was smooth and powdery, not a trace of perspiration on it, and he hated her for that.

"All right, George. You win."

With a catalogue of pain, he clawed his way up the bank. When he had scrambled to the top he grinned at her, expecting some kind of praise. Instead, she archly walked around him, getting no nearer than three feet, and started on the return trip to the lodge. He watched her glissade easily down the bank and take the downward trail.

"You are a savage, George Hotfort. I'm glad we took your land!"

Back in the rock garden lounge, he consumed an enormous dinner with the concentration of a Zen neophyte. He had showered and changed clothes, and he felt a little more human, although his legs and shoulders still protested with dull, persistent aches. Ben sat across from him, eating with his usual vigor and drawing off great gulps of beer to wash the food down. Jonathan envied him the beer. George had left him a few hundred yards from the lodge and had returned up the trail without a word.

"What do you think of George?" Ben asked, stabbing at his face with a napkin.

"Lovely person. Warm and human. And a conversationalist of considerable accomplishment."

"Yeah, but she's a climbing fool, ain't she?" Ben spoke with paternal pride.

Jonathan admitted that she was that.

"I use her to help break in the handful of climbers who still come for conditioning and training."

"No wonder your trade has fallen off. What's her real name, anyway?"

"George is her real name."

"How did that happen?"

"She was named after her mother."

"I see."

Ben studied Jonathan's face for a moment, hoping to discover the discouragement that would make him give up the idea of climbing the Eiger. "Feeling a little bashed?"

"A little. I'll remember that workout the rest of my life. But I'll be ready to get back to work tomorrow."

"Tomorrow's balls! That was just an appetizer. You go back up in an hour."

Jonathan started to object.

"Hush up and listen to your ol' buddy." Ben's broad face bunched up in folds around his eyes as he became serious for a moment. "Jon, you're no kid anymore. And the Eiger's one bitch-kitty of a face. Now, if I had my druthers, I'd have you give up this whole idea."

"Can't."

"Why not?"

"Just take my word for it."

"All right. I think you're out of your head, but if you're set on going, then goddam my eyes if I don't make sure you're in top condition. Because if you ain't, you're pretty likely to end up a grease spot on those rocks. And it's not just for you either. I'm ground man for the team. I'm responsible for all of them. And I'm not going to let them be dragged off by a headstrong old man, you, who ain't ready for the climb." Ben punctuated his uncommonly long tirade with a deep pull of beer. "Now you just take yourself a swim in the pool yonder and then lay around in the sun eye-balling the skin. I'll have them call you when it's time."

Jonathan did as he was told. He had begun to enjoy the game of estimating the ballistic competence of the various young ladies around the pool when a waiter came to tell him his rest period was over.

Once again Ben took him partway up the trail, then he was turned over to George, who paced him even farther and faster than in the morning. Jonathan spoke to her several times, but he could not dent the expressionless facade, much less get a word from her. It was twilight when she left him as before, and he limped back to his suite. He showered and fell on the bed with a lust for sleep. But Ben arrived just in time to prevent him from finding that refuge.

"No you don't, ol' buddy. You still got a big meal to put away."

Although he nodded off repeatedly over his plate, Jonathan consumed a big plank steak and a salad. And that night he found sleep without the usual soporific assistance of the Lautrec article.

The next morning (if three-thirty has any right to that title) found his joints filled with cement and pain. But he and Ben were on the trail by four-thirty. It was a different path and noticeably steeper, and again he was turned over to George Hotfort about halfway up. Again the easily swinging hips drew him upward as he muttered curses against his pain, the heat, his trembling legs, and all Indians. Again at each pause George's mocking, disdainful eyes observed his struggles without comment.

Dinner and a swim, and up again in the afternoon.

And the next day; and the next; and the next.

His climbing trim came back faster than he had dared to hope, and faster than Ben cared to admit. By the sixth day he was enjoying the training and keeping up with George all the way. They moved higher and steeper each day, always making more distance in the same amount of time, and sometimes now Jonathan led and George followed. On the seventh day he was scrambling up a shale drift when he looked back to see (oh, rewarding sight!) perspiration on George's brow. When she got to him she sat down and rested, breathing hard.

"Oh, come on George!" Jonathan pleaded. "We can't spend out lives sitting here. Upward, upward. Get thine swinging ass in gear." Because she never spoke, he had fallen into the habit of talking to her as though she could not understand. George evaluated the hang of scruffy rock above them and shook her head. Her denim shirt was dark with sweat under the arms and at each pocket where her breasts pressed against the cloth. She smiled at him for the first time, then she started back down the trail.

Never before had she accompanied him all the way back to the lodge, but this time, while Jonathan showered, she and Ben had a long talk. That evening a champagne cooler with half a dozen bottles of beer buried in ice appeared with dinner, and Ben told Jonathan that the first phase of his conditioning was over. They were through with the soft shoe work. His kit had been assembled, and the next morning they would go to work on the stone faces.

A second six-pack was consumed in Ben's rooms where he outlined the next few days. They would begin on easy faces, no more than ten or fifteen feet above the scree, where Jonathan would get the feel of the rock again. Once Ben was satisfied with his progress, they would move up and put a little void under themselves.

Their plans made, the two men chatted and drank beer for an hour. Ben took vicarious pleasure in watching his comrade's delight in the cold brew he had been denied throughout the first phase of conditioning, although he admitted mistrusting any man who could go without beer for that many days.

For some time Jonathan had been aware that his hardening body was growing eager to make love, not as an affectionate expression, but as a biological eruption. It was for this reason that he asked Ben, more or less offhand, "Do you have anything going with George?"

"What? Oh! No." He actually blushed. "For Christ's sake, I'm twenty-five years older than her. Why do you want to know?"

"Nothing really. I'm just feeling tough and full of sperm. She happens to be around and she looks capable."

"Well, she's a grown-up girl. I guess she can go with whoever she wants."

"That might present a difficulty. I can't say she's been pestering me with her attentions."

"Oh, she likes you all right. I can tell from the way she talks about you."

"Does she ever speak to anyone but you, Ben?"

"Not as I know of." Ben finished his bottle at one long pull and opened another. "Kind of funny," he commented.

"What is?"

"You wanting George. Considering the way she's been grinding you down, a body would think you'd have some kind of hate going for her."

"Who knows the devious working of the id? In the back of my mind I may be carrying the image of impaling her—stabbing her to death, or something." Ben glanced at Jonathan with a hint of a wince in his eyes. "You know what, ol' buddy. Way down deep you've got the makings of a real bad ass. I don't know that I'd like to be alone on a desert island with you if there was a limited food supply."

"No worry. You're a friend."

"Ever have any enemies?"

"A few."

"Any of them still around and kicking?"

"One." Jonathan considered for a moment. "No, two."

There had been rather a lot of beer, and Jonathan was asleep quickly. The Jemima dream began, as it had each night, with deceptive gentleness—a rehearsal in sequence of their relations from the first meeting on the plane. The sudden images of Dragon's derisive face, like quick intercuts in a motion picture, never lasted long enough to force Jonathan awake. The flickering hurricane lamps dissolved into harlequin flecks. The arc of her cigarette glowed in the dark. He reached out for her, and she was so real he experienced a tactile tingle as he slid the flat of his hand over her hard-under-soft stomach. He felt it press up against his palm—and he was fully awake! Before he could sit up, George drew him tightly against her, gripping him with strong arms and wrapping supple legs around his. Her eyes too had a Mongol cast, and it was possible to make the substitution.

He did not wake until after five. Because of recent habit, the late hour seemed to accuse. But then he recalled that they would be working faces today, and you cannot work a face before light. George had gone. She had left as silently as she had come. A stiffness in his lower back, a feeling of tender emptiness in his groin, and a slightly alkaline smell from beneath the sheets reminded him of the night. He had been awake when she left, but he feigned sleep, fearful of being called on to perform again.

As he showered, he promised himself to use the girl sparingly. She would send a man to a sanatorium in a fortnight, if he let her. She climaxed quickly and often, but was never satisfied. Sex for her was not a gentle sequence of objectives and achievements; it was an unending chase from one exploding bubble of thrill to the next—a plateau of sensation to be maintained, not a series of crests to be climbed. And if the partner seemed to flag, she introduced a variation calculated to renew his interest and vigor.

Like those of swimming, the techniques of climbing are never forgotten, once properly learned. But Jonathan knew he would have to discover what new limitations the past few years of age and inactivity had placed on his skill and nerve.

The experienced climber can move up a face he cannot cling to. A regular, predicted set of moves from one point of imbalance to its counterpoise will keep him on the face, so long as he continues moving, rather in the way a bicycle rider has little trouble with balance, unless he goes too slowly. It is necessary to read the pitch accurately, to plot out and rehearse the moves kinesodically, then to make them with smooth conviction from hold to hold, ending in a predicted and reliable purchase. In the past, this constellation of abilities had been Jonathan's forte, but during his first day of free climbing he made several misjudgments that sent him slithering down ten or fifteen feet to the scree, banging a little skin off elbows and knees and doing greater damage to his self-esteem. It was some time before he diagnosed his problem. The intervening years since his last climb had had no effect on his analytical powers, but they had eroded the fine edge of his physical dexterity. This erosion was beyond repair, so it was necessary that he train himself to think within the limits of his new, inferior body.

At first, for safety, Ben insisted that they use many pitons, making the face look as though lady climbers or Germans had been there. But it was not long before they were making short grade five and six pitches with a more Anglo-Saxon economy of ironmongery. One problem, however, continued to plague Jonathan, making him furious with himself. In the midst of a skillful and businesslike series of moves, he would suddenly find himself fighting the rock, succumbing to the natural, but lethal, desire to press his body against it. This not only deprived him of leverage for tension footholds, but it made it difficult to scan the face above for cracks. Once a climber presses the face, a fearful cycle begins. It is an unnoticed welling up of animal fear that first makes him hug the rock; hugging weakens his footholds and blinds him to purchases that might be within grasp; and this, now real, danger feeds the original fear.

On one occasion, after Jonathan thought he had overcome this amateurish impulse, he suddenly found himself caught up in the cycle. His cleated boots could find no grab, and suddenly he was off.

He fell only three of the forty meters between him and the rock below before his line snapped up short and he was dangling and twisting from the rope. It was a sound piton.

"Hey!" Ben shouted from above. "What the fuck you doin'?"

"I'm just hanging from this piton, wise ass! What are you doing?"

"I'm just holding your weight in my powerful and experienced hands and watching you hang from that piton. You look real graceful. A little stupid, but real graceful."

Jonathan kicked angrily off the rock and swung out and back, but he missed his grab.

"For Christ's sake, ol' buddy! Wait a minute! Now, don't do anything. Just rest there for a minute."

Jonathan dangled from the line, feeling foolish.

"Now think about it." Ben gave it a moment. "You know what's wrong?"

"Yes!" Jonathan was impatient, both with himself and with Ben's condescending treatment.

"Tell me."

With the singsong of rote Jonathan said, "I'm crowding the rock."

"Right. Now get back on the face and we'll go down."

Jonathan took a mind-clearing breath, kicked out and swung back, and he was on the face. During the whole of the retreat he moved glibly and precisely, forgetting the vertical gravity of the valley and responding naturally to the diagonal gravity of weight-versus-rope that kept him leaning well away from the face.

On the valley floor they sat on a pile of scree, Jonathan coiling rope while Ben drank the bottle of beer he had stashed in the shade of a rock. They were dwarfed by the nine "needles" towering around them. It was on one of these that they had been working, a column of striated, reddish rock that rose from the earth like a decapitated trunk of a giant fossil tree.

"How would you like to climb Big Ben tomorrow?" Ben asked out of lengthy silence. He was referring to the tallest of the columns, a four-hundred-foot shaft that eons of wind had eroded until it was wider at the top than at the base. It was the proximity of these peculiar formations that had caused Ben to select this spot for his climbing school, and he had promptly named the grandest after himself.

Jonathan squinted at the needle, his eyes locating half a dozen dicey areas before it had swept halfway up. "You think I'm ready?"

"More than ready, ol' buddy. Matter of fact, I figure that's your problem. You're overtrained, or trained too fast. You're getting a little skitterish." Ben went on to say that he had noticed Jonathan pushing off too hard when he was in a tension stance, taking little open moves without being sure of the terminal purchase, and letting his mind wander from the rock when it seemed too easy. It was during these moments of inattention that Jonathan suddenly found himself hugging the face. The best cure for all this might be an endurance run—something to break down the overcoiled legs and to humble the dangerously confident animal in Jonathan.

His eyes picking their way up from possible stance to stance, Jonathan played with the climb for twenty minutes before he accomplished the optical ascent. "Looks hard, Ben. Especially the top flange."

"It ain't no bedpost." Ben stood up. "Goddam my eyes if I don't think I'll come along with you!"

Jonathan glanced at Ben's foot before he could help it. "You really want to go?"

"No sweat. I've stumped up it once before. What do you say?"

"I say we walk up it tomorrow."

"Great. Now why don't you take the rest of the day off, ol' buddy."

As they walked back to the lodge, Jonathan experienced a lightness of spirit and eagerness for the morrow that had, in the old days, been the core of his love for climbing. His whole being was focused on matters of rock, strength, and tactic, and the outside world with its Dragons and Jemimas could not force its way into his consciousness.

He had been eating well, sleeping perfectly, training hard, drinking much beer, and using George with gingerly discretion. This kind of elemental life would bore him beyond standing in a couple of weeks, but just then it was grand.

He leaned against the lodge's main desk, reading an effervescent postcard from Cherry sprinkled with underlinings, and ————, and !!!!, and ......, and (parenthesis), and ha! ha! ha! No one, evidently, had burned down his home. Mr. Monk was as angry and scatological as ever. And Cherry wanted to know if he could suggest some reading on the preparation of aphrodisiacs for a friend of hers (someone he had never met) for use on a man (whom he had also never met) and whom he would probably not like, inasmuch as this nameless party was such a heartless turd!!! as to allow lusty girls to go untapped.

Jonathan felt something touch his foot and looked down to see a nervous little Pomeranian with a rhinestone collar sniffing around. He ignored it and returned to his postcard, but the next moment the dog was mounting an amorous attack on his leg. He kicked it aside, but the dog interpreted this rejection as maidenly coyness and returned to the attack.

"Leave Dr. Hemlock alone, Faggot. I am sorry, Jonathan, but Faggot has not learned to recognize the straight, and he hasn't the patience to wait for an invitation."

Without looking up, Jonathan recognized the chocolate baritone of Miles Mellough.

ARIZONA: June 27

Jonathan watched the lace-cuffed and perfectly manicured hands descend to pick up the Pomeranian. He followed the dog up to Miles's face, tanned and handsome as ever, the large blue eyes gazing languidly from beneath long black lashes, the broad, lineless forehead supporting a cluster of trained soft waves that swept around to the sides in a seemingly artless pattern that was the pride of Miles's hairdresser. The dog kissed at Miles's cheek, which affection he accepted without taking his eyes from Jonathan.

"How have you been, Jonathan?" There was a gentle mocking smile in his eyes, but their movements were quick, ready to read and avoid a thrust.

"Miles." The word was not a greeting, it was a nomination. Jonathan put his postcard into his pocket and waited for Miles to get on with it.

"How long has it been?" Miles dropped his eyes and shook his head. "A long time. Come to think of it, the last time we met was in Arles. We had just finished that Spanish thing—you and I and Henri."

Jonathan's eyes flickered at the mention of Henri Baq.

"No, Jonathan." Miles laid his hand on Jonathan's sleeve. "Don't imagine I have made a verbal blunder. It's about Henri that I want to chat. Do you have a moment?" Feeling the forearm muscles tense, Miles patted Jonathan's arm and withdrew his hand.

"There's only one possibility, Miles. You have an incurable disease and lack the guts to kill yourself."

Miles smiled. "That's very good, Jonathan. But wrong. Shall we have a drink?"

"All right."

"Rather like old times."

"Not at all like old times."

The eyes of all the young ladies in the lounge followed Miles as he preceded Jonathan along the walkway and over an arched stone bridge to an isolated table. His uncommon good looks, the grace and strength of his dancer's walk, and the extreme styling of his clothes would have eclipsed a man of less panache, but Miles moved slowly among the girls, granting them the benediction of his easy smile, honestly pitying them because he was ultimately unavailable.

As soon as they were seated, Miles released the dog which vibrated with tense energy until its toenails clicked on the rock, scrambling in circles of frenzy, then scampered along to a nearby table where he was captured, whimpering, by three young ladies in bikinis who were clearly delighted to possess this entree to the handsomest man they had ever seen. One of them approached the table carrying the shivering, clawing animal in her arms.

Miles rested his eyes on her breast languidly, and she produced a nervous laugh. "What do you call him?" she asked.

"Faggot, my dear."

"Oh, that's cute! Why do you call him that?"

"Because he's a bundle of nerves."

She did not understand, so she said, "That's cute!"

Miles beckoned the girl to his side and placed his hand lightly on her buttock. "Would you do me a great favor, dear?"

She giggled at the unexpected contact, but did not withdraw. "Surely. Glad to."

"Take Faggot and go play with him for a while."

"All right," she said. Then, "Thank you."

"There's a good girl." He patted the buttock in dismissal and the girl left the lounge, followed by her companions who were just dying to know what had transpired.

"They're cute little tricks, aren't they, Jonathan. And not completely without their uses. Bees are attracted to the honey."

"And drones," Jonathan added.

A young Indian waiter stood by the table.

"A double Laphroaig for my friend, and a brandy Alexander for me," Miles ordered, looking deeply into the waiter's eyes.

Miles's gaze followed the waiter as he made his way along the walkway and over the artificial streams of bubbling water. "Good-looking boy, that." Then he turned his attention to Jonathan, touching his palms together and resting his forefingers against his lips, his thumbs under his chin. Over the tips of his fingers, his still eyes smiled with gentle frost, and Jonathan reminded himself how dangerous this ruthless man could be, despite appearances. For a minute neither of them spoke. Then Miles broke it with a rich laugh. "Oh, Jonathan. No one can best you at the game of cold silence. I should have known better than to try. Was my memory accurate about the Laphroaig?"

"Yes."

"A whole monosyllable! How gracious."

Jonathan supposed Miles would come to the subject in his own time, and he had no intention of helping him. Until the drinks came, Miles scanned the men and girls around the pool. He sat poised in his black velvet suit, high-rolled linen collar with a drooping velvet cravat, slim and expensive Italian boots. Obviously, he was doing well. It was rumored that, after leaving CII, Mellough had set himself up in San Francisco where he dealt in all kinds of merchandise, chiefly drugs.

In essential ways, Miles had not changed. Tall, brilliant in his physical trim, he pulled off his epic homosexuality with such style that plebeian men did not recognize it, and worldly men did not mind it. As always, girls were attracted to him in gaggles, and he treated them with amused condescension of a glamorous Parisian aunt visiting relatives in Nebraska. Jonathan had seen Miles in tight and dangerous spots during their time together in CII, but he had never seen a hair out of place or a rumpled cuff. Henri had frequently mentioned that he knew no equal to Miles for cold physical courage.

Neither Jonathan nor Henri had objected to their comrade's sexual preference; indeed, they had benefited upon occasion from the clusters of women he attracted but did not satisfy. Miles's divergence had been one of his most valuable assets to CII. It had put him in contact with people and sources not open to the straight, and had given him the power of blackmail over several highly placed American political figures.

As the waiter placed the drinks on the table, Miles spoke to him. "You're a very attractive young man. It's God's gift to you, and you should be grateful for it. I hope you are. Now run along and attend to your duties."

The waiter smiled and left. Once he was out of earshot, Miles sighed and said, "I would say he's made, wouldn't you?"

"If you have time."

Miles laughed and raised his glass. "Cheers." He sipped the frothy mixture thoughtfully. "You know, Jonathan, you and I have similar approaches to love, or to balling, if you prefer. Both of us have discovered that the confident cold turkey technique drops more of them than all the romantic mooning around our sexual inferiors bait their little traps with. After all, the targets want to be made. They simply ask to be protected from guilt by feeling they've been swept off their feet. And it is refreshing for them to have their paths to evil lubricated with urbanity. Don't you agree?"

"I assume you're covered?"

"Of course."

"Where is he?"

"Behind you. At the bar."

Jonathan turned and glanced along the bar until, at the end, he sighted a blond primate who must have weighed two hundred twenty pounds. Jonathan guessed him to be in his mid-forties, despite the heavy purplish sun lamp tan and the long bleached hair that fell over his collar. He was typical of the ex-wrestlers and beachboys Miles carried along, half as bodyguards, half as lovers, should nothing better turn up. "And that's all the cover you have?" Jonathan asked, returning to his drink.

"Dewayne is very strong, Jonathan. He used to be a world's champion."

"Didn't they all."

"I'll send Dewayne away, if he makes you nervous."

"He doesn't look like much of a threat."

"Don't depend on that. He's very well paid, and he's totally devoted to me." Miles's movie smile displayed his perfect teeth as he pushed the mash of ice around in his glass with a swizzle stick. Then he began rather tentatively, "It must seem odd to you that I have sought you out, instead of waiting for you to step up to me someday and relieve me of the burden of existence."

"Your phrasing answered any questions I might have had."

"Yes, I've grown weary of ice in my stomach every time I see a man who resembles you." He smiled. "You have no idea how damaging it's been to my cool."

"It will soon be over."

"One way or another. And I think I'm in a good bargaining position."

"Forget it."

"Not even curious?"

"About one thing. How did you know I was here?"

"Oh, you remember what we used to say: CII secrets and common knowledge differ only in that common knowledge..."

"...is harder to come by. Yes, I remember."

Miles rested his large, soft eyes on Jonathan. "I didn't actually kill Henri, you know."

"You set him up. You were his friend and you set him up."

"But I didn't actually kill him."

"I probably won't actually kill you."

"But I'd rather be dead than like the Greek you gave Datura to."

Jonathan smiled with the bland, gentle look he donned before combat. "I didn't actually prepare the Datura. I paid someone else to do it."

Miles sighed and looked down, his long lashes covering his eyes. "I see your point." Then he looked up and tried a new tact. "Did you know that Henri was a double agent?"

In fact, Jonathan had discovered this several months after Henri's death. But it did not matter. "He was your friend. And mine."

"It was only a matter of time, for God's sake, Jonathan! Both sides wanted him dead."

"You were his friend."

Miles's voice became crisp. "I hope you'll understand if I find this harping on ethics a little presumptuous in a killer!"

"I was holding him when he died."

Miles's tone softened instantly. "I know. And I'm truly sorry about that."

"You remember how he always joked about going out with a clever line? At the last minute he couldn't think of one, and he died feeling foolish." Jonathan's control was flaking off.

"I'm sorry, Jonathan."

"Oh, that's fine. You are really and truly sorry! That fixes everything!"

"I did what I could! I arranged a small income for Marie and the children. What did you do? You rammed your rod up her that very night!"

Jonathan's hand flashed over the table, and Miles was snapped sideways in his chair with a backhand across the face. Instantly, the blond wrestler left his barstool and started toward the table. Miles stared hate at Jonathan, tears smarting in his eyes, then, after a struggle with his self-control, he raised his hand, and the wrestler stopped where he was. Miles smiled sadly at Jonathan and gestured the bodyguard away with the backs of his fingers. Angry at being denied his prey, the wrestler glared for a moment before returning to the bar.

Jonathan realized at that moment the first thing he would have to do would be to discourage the blond bodyguard.

"My fault probably, Jonathan. Shouldn't have baited you. I imagine my cheek is red and unsightly?"

Jonathan was angry with himself for allowing Miles to taunt him into premature action. He finished his Laphroaig and gestured to the waiter.

Until the waiter left the table, neither Jonathan nor Miles spoke, nor did they look at each other until the cerebral toxic of adrenalin had drained off. Miles had turned away, not wanting the Indian waiter to see his glowing cheek.

Miles smiled forgiveness at Jonathan. He had not wiped the tears from his eyes, imagining they might help his case. "I tender you a bit of information as a propitiatory offering."

Jonathan did not respond.

"The man who made the fiscal arrangements with me for Henri's death was Clement Pope—Dragon's boy."

"That's good to know."

"Jonathan—tell me. What if Henri had set me up?"

"He would never have done that to a friend."

"But if he had. Would you have gone after him like you've come after me?"

"Yes."

Miles nodded. "I thought so." He smiled wanly "And that vitiates my case considerably. But I still don't intend to allow myself to die, a sacrifice to your peculiar reverence for the epic traditions of friendship. Neither heaven nor reincarnation attracts me. The one seems dull, the other undesirable. So I feel bound to protect this fleeting life of mine with all my energies. Even if it means killing you, dear Jonathan."

"What are your other choices?"

"I would hardly have come to the marketplace if I were not in a position to bargain."

Big Ben entered the lounge. With his habitual broad smile, he started to join Jonathan, then he saw Miles, and sat at the bar instead, eyeing the blond wrestler with flagrant disdain.

"You might at least give me your attention, Jonathan."

"A friend just walked in."

"Does he realize the possible cost of that privilege?"

"You're wasting my time, Miles."

"I may be saving your life."

Jonathan retreated into his gentle combat smile.

"When I left CII, Jonathan, I went into business in San Francisco. I'm in transportation. I move things from one point to another point and distribute them. All sorts of things. It's amazingly profitable. But life has not been comfortable for me, with the specter of you lurking in every shadow."

"Distressing."

"Then, early this month, I received an assignment to transport a bit of information from Montreal to... somewhere else. Gaining the information necessitated the killing of an agent. I didn't participate in the assassination because, unlike you, I am not a predator." He glanced to see the reaction. There was none. "But I know who did the killing. You got one of them shortly later. And now you're after the other. Dragon has told you that he will have the identity of this other person by the time of the sanction. Maybe. Maybe not. I know who it is, Jonathan. And until you have that information, you're in great danger."

"How so?"

"If I tell this person who and what you are, the hunted will become the hunter."

"But you're willing to sell this man out to me?"

"In return for your promise to stop stalking me. Don't let this bargain pass you by."

Jonathan looked out the window at a circle of girls near the pool laughing and screeching as they playfully teased the neurotic Pomeranian, which danced frantically in one spot, its claws clicking on the tile, urine dribbling from beneath it. Jonathan turned and looked at the wrestler still sitting at the bar, keeping him under observation. "I'll think about it, Miles."

Miles smiled with patient fatigue. "Please don't play me like an amateur. I can't remain inactive and unprotected while you 'think about it.' I believe it was you who first advised me never to con a con."

"You'll know my decision within five minutes. How's that?"

Then Jonathan's voice mellowed. "Whichever way it goes, Miles. We were once friends... so..." He held out his hand. Miles was surprised, but pleased. They shook hands firmly before Jonathan left for the bar where only Ben and the blond bodyguard sat. The latter leaned back on two legs of his stool, his back to the bar and his elbows hooked over it, eyeing Jonathan with a snide superior expression. Jonathan approached him, his whole bearing diffident and apologetic. "Well, as you saw, Miles and I have made up," Jonathan said with a weak, uncertain smile. "May I buy you a drink?"

The wrestler scratched his ear in disdainful silence and leaned further back on his stool to create more distance between himself and this fawning nobody who had dared to slap Mr. Mellough.

Jonathan ignored this rejection. "Boy, I'm glad it worked out all right. No man of my size looks forward to tangling with a guy built like you."

The wrestler nodded understandingly and pressed his shoulders down to set the pectorals.

"Well, just so you know," Jonathan said. He converted his motion of departure into a skimming kick that swept the tilted barstool from beneath the wrestler. First the edge of the bar, then the brass rail cracked the blond head as it thudded down. Dazed and hurt, his long hair tumbled into his face, the wrestler had no time to move before Jonathan had stepped on his face with his heel and pivoted. The nose crunched and flattened underfoot. The sound brought gall to the back of Jonathan's throat, and his cheeks drew back with nausea. But he knew what was necessary in situations like these: they must remember the hurt.

Jonathan knelt over the wrestler and snatched the face up by the hair until it was only inches from his own.

"Hear me. I don't want you out on my flank like that. It scares me. I don't like being scared. So hear this. Come near me ever, and you're dead. Hey! Listen to me! Don't pass out while I'm talking to you!"

The wrestler's eyes were dulled by pain and confusion, and he did not respond.

Jonathan shook him by the hair until several strands came out between his fingers. "Did you understand what I said?"

"Yes." The reply was faint.

"Good boy." Jonathan set the head back gently on the floor. He stood up and faced Ben, who had watched the whole thing without moving. "Will you take care of him, Ben?"

"All right, ol' buddy. But goddam my ass if I understand what's going on."

"Talk about it later."

Two Indian busboys grunted under the task of conducting the toppling giant to his room, as Jonathan walked back to the entrance of the lounge. He stood there, looking across at Miles who, alone of the patrons, had been aware that a conflict had occurred. Their eyes, so similar in color and frost, intersected for a moment. Then Miles nodded slowly and turned his attention away, gracefully flicking a particle of dust from the sleeve of his velvet jacket. He had his answer.

ARIZONA: That Evening

His back against a vertical pillow, his feet straight out before him, Jonathan sat up in his bed. He rolled and licked his second smoke, then forgot to light it as he stared, eyes defocused, into the deepening gloom.

He was working out, in rough, how he would put Miles away. There was no chance of getting to him before he could alert the sanction target to his identity. Everything in Switzerland would hinge on Search identifying the man early.

Jonathan's attention suddenly narrowed to the present as he heard a faint metallic click outside his door. He slowly rose from bed, keeping a rolling downward pressure with his hands to reduce the sound of the springs. There was a soft knock, one calculated not to awaken him if he were sleeping. He had not expected Miles to make his move this quickly. He regretted the absence of a gun. The tapping was repeated, and again he heard the click of metal. He crept to the wall on the hinge side of the door. A key turned in the lock, and the door opened a crack, a shaft of light bisecting the room. He tensed and waited. The door swung open deliberately, and someone without whispered. Two shadows spilled across the rug, one of a man, the other a monstrous figure with a huge disk poised over its head. As the shadows advanced, Jonathan kicked the door shut and threw his weight against it. There was a crash and clatter of metal and shattering glass, and he realized instantly what it must have been.

Sheepishly he opened the door and looked out. Big Ben was leaning against the wall across the corridor, and an Indian waiter sat stunned on the floor in the midst of a wreckage of dishes and silver, his white uniform jacket a visual menu.

"Now you wouldn't believe this, ol' buddy, but there are folks who just say so when they ain't hungry."

"I thought you were someone else."

"Yeah. Well, I hope!"

"Come on in."

"What you got up your sleeve this time? Going to clout me with a chest of drawers?" Ben gave orders for the mess to be cleaned up and another dinner to be served, then he went into Jonathan's room, making much of leaping through the doorway in a bound and turning on the lights before something else befell him.

Jonathan assumed a businesslike tone, partially because he wanted to work on a plan he had made while sitting in the dark, partially because he did not want to dwell on his recent faux pas.

"Ben, what information do you have on the three men I'll be climbing the Eiger with?"

"Not much. We've exchanged a few letters, all about the climb."

"Could I read them over?"

"Sure."

"Good. Now, another thing. Do you have a detailed map of the area around here?"

"Sure."

"Can I have it?"

"Sure."

"What lies to the west of us?"

"Nothing."

"That's what it looked like from the high country. What kind of nothing is it?"

"Real bad-ass country. Rock and sand and nothing else. Goes on forever. Makes Death Valley look like an oasis. You don't want to go out there, ol' buddy. A man can die out there in two days. This time of year it gets up to a hundred fifteen in the shade, and you'd play hell finding any shade."

Ben picked up the phone and asked that a map and a packet of correspondence be brought from his office, along with a six-pack of beer. Then he called out to Jonathan who had gone into the bedroom to empty his ashtray, "Goddam my eyes if I know what's going on around here! 'Course, you don't have to tell me, if you don't want to."

Jonathan took him at his word.

"No. You don't have to tell me about it. What the hell? Slap guys around in my lounge. Break heads at my bar. Bust up my dishes. None of my business."

Jonathan came into the room. "You keep a few guns around, don't you, Ben?"

"Oh-oh."

"Do you have a shotgun?"

"Now, wait a minute, ol' buddy..."

Jonathan sat in a chair across from Ben. "I'm in a tight spot. I need help." His tone suggested that he expected it from a friend.

"You know you got all the help I can give, Jon. But if people are going to get killed around here, maybe I should know something about what's going on."

There was a knock at the door. Ben opened it, and the waiter stood there with the beer, the file, and the map. He entered only after looking carefully around the door, and he left as quickly as he decently could.

"Want a beer?" Ben asked, tearing the top from a can.

"No, thanks."

"Just as good. There's only six."

"What do you know about this Miles Mellough, Ben?"

"The one you were talking to? Nothing much. He looks like he could give you change for a nine-dollar bill, all in threes. That's about all I know. He just checked in this morning. You want me to throw him out?"

"Oh, no. I want him right here."

Ben chuckled. "Boy, he's sure tickling the imaginations of a lot of girls. They're flocking around him as though he held the patent on the penis. I even saw George eyeing him."

"She'd be in for a letdown."

"Yeah, I figured."

"How about the other one? The big blond?"

"He checked in at the same time. They got adjoining rooms. I got the doctor up from town, and he fixed some on his nose, but I don't believe he's ever going to be a real close friend of yours." Ben crushed the empty beer can in his hands and opened another thoughtfully. "You know, Jon? That fight really bothered me some. You came at that man pretty slick for an aging college professor."

"You've gotten me into top shape."

"Uh-unh. No, that ain't it at all. You set him up like you were used to setting people up. He was so fazed out, he never had a chance. You remember I told you how I'd hate to be with you on a desert island with no food? Well, that's the kind of thing I mean. Like stepping on that big guy's nose. You'd already made your point. A body could get the feeling you got a real mean streak in you somewhere."

It was obvious that Ben needed at least a limited explanation. "Ben, these people killed a friend of mine."

"Oh?" Ben considered that. "Does the law know about it?"

"There's nothing the law can do."

"How come?"

Jonathan shook his head. He did not intend to pursue the matter.

"Hey, wait a minute! I just got a real scary flash. I suddenly got the feeling that all this has something to do with the Eiger climb. Else why would they know you were here?"

"Stay out of it, Ben."

"Now, listen to me. You don't need any more trouble than that mountain's going to give you. I haven't told you this, but I better. You're training real good, and you're still a crafty climber. But I've been watching you close, Jon. And to be honest, you don't have more than a fifty-fifty chance on the Eiger at best. And that doesn't count your fooling around trying to kill people and them trying to kill you. I don't mean to dent your confidence, ol' buddy, but it's something you ought to know."

"Thanks, Ben."

A waiter knocked at the door and brought in a tray with a training meal for two, which they consumed in silence while Jonathan pored over the terrain map and Ben finished the cans of beer.

By the time the meal was a clutter of duty dishes, Jonathan had folded up the map and put it into his pocket. He began questioning Ben about his forthcoming climbing partners. "How close has your correspondence with them been?"

"Nothing special. Just the usual stuff—hotel, rations, team rope and iron, how to handle the reporters—that sort of stuff. The German guy does most of the writing. He kind of thought the whole thing up in the first place, and he makes noise like a leader. That reminds me. Are you and I going to fly over together?"

"I don't think so. I'll meet you there. Listen, Ben, have any of them...? Are they all in good physical shape?"

"At least as good as you."

"Have any of them been hurt lately? Or wounded?"

"Wounded? Not as I know of. One of them—the German—wrote that he had a fall early this month. But nothing serious."

"What kind of fall?"

"I don't know. Roughed up his leg some."

"Enough to make him limp?"

"Well, that's pretty hard to tell from a guy's handwriting. Hey, why you asking me all this shit?"

"Never mind. Will you leave this file of correspondence with me? I want to read it over—get to know these men a little better."

"No skin off my ass." Ben stretched and groaned like a sated bear. "You still planning to make that climb on the needle in the morning?"

"Of course. Why wouldn't I?"

"Well, it might be a little tough, climbing with a shotgun cradled over your arm."

Jonathan laughed. "Don't worry about it."

"Well, in that case, we better get some sleep. That needle ain't no tent pole, you know."

"You mean it ain't no bedpost."

"It ain't neither one."

Shortly after Big Ben had gone, Jonathan was propped up in bed studying the letters from the other climbers. In each case, the first letter was rather stiff and polite. Evidently, Ben's answers had been robust and earthy, because all succeeding letters cleaved to hard technical matters of climbing: weather reports, observations about conditions on the face, descriptions of recent training climbs, suggestions for equipment. It was in one of these letters that the German mentioned a short fall he had taken resulting in a gashed leg which, he assured Ben, would be in fine shape by the Eiger ascent.

Jonathan was deep in this correspondence, trying to read personality between the arid lines, when he recognized the scratching knock of George Hotfort wanting to be let in.

His recent encounter with Mellough made him cautious. He turned off his reading light before crossing to unlatch the door. George entered into the darkness uncertainly, but Jonathan latched the door behind her and conducted her to the bed. He was eager to use her as sexual aspirin, to relieve the tensions of the afternoon, although he knew he would only experience discharge and release without local sensation.

Throughout the event, George's eyes locked on his, expressionless in their Oriental mold, totally severed from her aggressive and demanding body.

Sometime later, while he slept, she slipped away without a word.

ARIZONA: June 28

He sensed that he was going to be magnificent.

Immediately upon waking, he was eager for the climb on Big Ben Needle. Once or twice in his climbing career he had experienced this scent of victory—this visceral hunch. He had it just before he set a time record on Grand Teton, and again when he introduced a new route up the Dru into the mountaineering handbooks. His hands felt strong enough to punch holds into the rock, if need be, and his legs carried him with more than vigor and ease, with a sensation of moon gravity. He was so finely tuned to this climb that his hands, when he rubbed the palms together, felt like rough chamois gloves capable of adhering to flat, slimy rock.

After his shower, he neither shaved nor combed his hair. He preferred to be rough and burry when he met the rock.

When Ben knocked at his door, he was already tying off his boots and admiring their feel: broken in from his recent training climbs, but the cleats in excellent condition.

"You look mighty ready." Ben had just gotten out of bed and was still in his pajamas and robe, grizzled and carrying with him his first can of beer.

"I feel great, Ben. That needle of yours has had it."

"Oh, I wouldn't be surprised if it took some of the shine off you before it's all over. It's near four hundred feet, mostly grade 6."

"Tell your cooks we'll be back in time for lunch."

"I doubt that. Especially considering you got to drag a tired old man along behind you. Come to my room and I'll get dressed."

He followed Ben down the hall and into his rooms where he declined the offer of a beer and sat watching dawn quicken, while Ben slowly found and donned the various elements of his climbing gear. The finding was not easy, and Ben grumbled and swore steadily as he shoveled clothes out of drawers onto the floor and emptied boxes of random paraphernalia onto his rumpled bed.

"You say I'm going to pull you along behind, Ben? I had imagined you would lead. After all, you know the route. You've been up before."

"Yeah, but I ain't one to hog all the fun. Goddam my eyes if I can find that other sock. Can't stand wearing socks that don't match. Puts me off balance. Hey! Maybe if I worked it out just right I could make up for these missing toes by wearing a lighter sock on that foot! 'Course I'd run the risk of ending up with the opposite of a limp. I might find myself up an inch or two off the ground, and that'd play hell with my traction. Hey, get off your ass and kick around in this stuff and see if you can find my climbing sweater. You know, the old green one."

"You're wearing it."

"Oh, yeah. So I am. But lookee here! I ain't got no shirt on under it!"

"Not my fault."

"Well, you ain't helping much."

"I'm afraid if I got out into the middle of the room they'd never find me again."

"Oh, George would come across you when she put all this mess away."

"George cleans up your room?"

"She's on my payroll, and she's got to do more to earn her keep than just be a spittoon for your sperm."

"You have a delicate sense of imagery, Ben."

"No shit? All right, I give up. Goddam my eyes if I can find them boots. Why don't you let me use yours?"

"And I go up barefoot?"

"Considering how sassy-assed and prime you're feeling, I didn't figure you'd notice the difference."

Jonathan leaned back in the chair and relaxed with the dawn view. "I really do feel good, Ben. I haven't felt like this for a long time."

Ben's characteristic gruffness fled for a moment. "That's good. I'm glad. I remember how it used to be for me."

"Do you miss climbing much, Ben?"

Ben sat on the edge of his bed. "Would you miss it if someone ran off with your pecker? Sure, I miss it. I'd been climbing since I was eighteen. At first, I didn't know what to do with myself. But then..." He slapped his knees and stood up. "Then, I got this place. And I'm living high on the hog now. Still..." Ben wandered over to the closet. "Here's my boots! I'll be goddamed!"

"Where were they?"

"In my shoe rack. George must have put them there, goddam her."

Over breakfast in the glittering, empty restaurant kitchen, Jonathan asked if Miles Mellough had done anything of interest after the fight.

"He worry you, Jon?"

"Right now I'm only worried about the climb. But I'll have to deal with him after I get back."

"If he don't deal with you first."

"Say it out."

"Well, one of my help heard this Mellough and his friend having a set-to in their rooms."

"Your help spends a lot of time with their ears to doors?"

"Not usually. But I figured you might want me to keep an eye on these guys. Anyway, the fancy one was some kind of pissed off at the way the other guy let you set him up. And the big fellow said that it would be different next time. Then later on they ordered a rental car from town. It's parked out front now."

"Maybe they want to take in the countryside."

"What's wrong with our guest cars? No, I figure they want to get somewhere in a hurry. Maybe after they've done something to be ashamed of. Like killing somebody."

"What makes you think they're going to kill somebody?"

Ben paused, hoping to make an effect, "The waiter told me the big fellow carries a gun." Jonathan concentrated on sipping his coffee and denied Ben the expected reaction. Ben tore off the top of a can of beer. "You don't seem much bothered about that guy carrying a gun."

"I knew he did, Ben. I saw it under his coat. That's why I stepped on his nose. So he wouldn't be able to see clearly. I needed walking away time."

"Here I was thinking you had a mean streak, and all the time you was just doing what you had to do."

"You should be ashamed of yourself."

"I could cut out the tongue that spoke evil of you, ol' buddy."

"I was just trying to stay alive."

"And that's why you want the shotgun?"

"No, not for protection. I need it for attack. Come on! That hill's eroding out there. There won't be much left of it by the time you get ready."

Jonathan's boots crunched over the loose fall rock around the base of the needle which beetled out overhead, still black on its western face in the early morning. A rock drill, a hammer, and fifteen pounds of pitons, snap rings, and expansion bolts clanged and dangled from the web belt around his waist.

"Right about here," he judged, guessing the position of a long vertical crack he had observed the day before. The crack, averaging four inches in width and running up from the base for a hundred feet, seemed to him to be the highway up the first quarter of the face. It was after the fissure petered out that the mushroom top began its outward lean, and then the going would be more challenging.

"Is this the way you started up, Ben?"

"It's one way, I guess," Ben said noncommittally.

They roped up. "You don't intend to be very helpful, do you?" Jonathan said, passing the loose coils of line to his partner.

"Hell, I don't need the practice. I'm just along for the ride."

Jonathan adjusted the straps on the light pack Ben had insisted he carry for training. Just before taking to the rock, they urinated into the arid ground, pressing out the last drops. Numberless beginners have overlooked, in their eagerness to start, this propitiatory libation to the gods of gravity, and have rued the oversight when they were later faced with the natural problem while on the face, both hands engaged in the more pressing matter of survival. The only solution available under such circumstances is not calculated to make the climber a social success during the press of congratulations following the climb.

"OK, let's go."

The move up the crack went quickly and uneventfully, save in places where the fissure was too wide for a snug foot jam. Jonathan drove no pitons for climbing, only one each thirty feet or so to shorten the fall, if there was one.

He enjoyed the feel of the rock. It had character. It was well-toothed and abrasive to the grip. There were very few good piton cracks, however. Most of them tended to be too wide, requiring one or two additional pitons as wedges, and they did not drive home with the hard ring of the well-seated peg. This would matter more once they began the three hundred feet of outward-leaning climb. Jonathan realized he would have to use the drill and expansion bolt more than he cared to. He had always drawn a fine, but significant line between piton and expansion bolt. The conquest of a face by means of the piton had elements of seduction about it; the use of the drill and bolt smacked of rape.

They moved smoothly and with high coordination. Ben tied off and belayed from below, while Jonathan inched up as far as his rope would allow before finding an acceptable purchase from which to belay Ben up to him. Ben's passage was always faster. He had the psychological advantage of the line; he used the holds and grips Jonathan had worked out.

Even after the crack petered out and progress slowed, Jonathan's feeling of indomitability persisted. Each square meter of face was a gameboard of tactics, a combat against the unrelenting, mindless opposition of gravity in which the rock was a Turkish ally, ready to change sides if the going got rough.

They niched up, Ben's experienced and sympathetic pressure on the line lending it cooperative life, always slack when Jonathan was moving, always snug when it alone held him on the face. For some time there had not been a free purchase where either man could hold to the rock without rope or piton.

Jonathan began to tire; the drag of his pack and the knotting pressure on thighs and calves were constant mortal reminders. But his hands were still strong, and he felt fine. Particularly did he enjoy the touch of the rock, warm where the sun was upon it, cool and refreshing in the shade. The air was so clean it had a green flavor, and even the salt taste of his sweat was good. Nevertheless, he did not object when, after three hours and with two-thirds of the face under them, Ben called for a rest.

It was another quarter of an hour before they found a slim lip of rock into which they could plant their heels. Jonathan tapped in extra pitons, and they hung there side by side against the ropes, facing outward, squatting on their haunches to rest their legs. Their bodies leaned some twenty degrees away from the face, which itself inclined ten degrees from the vertical. Ben struggled with his pack and produced a loaf of hard-crusted bread and a thick disc of cheese which he had carried along out of Alpine tradition. They ate with slow satisfaction, leaning out against their ropes and looking down at the small knot of thrill-seekers who had gathered near the base of the needle once someone at the lodge had seen men on the face of this seemingly impossible pillar.

"How you feeling, ol' buddy?"

"Just... really great, Ben."

"You're climbing fine. Best I ever seen you climb."

"Yes. I know I am." Jonathan's admiration was frank, as though he stood outside himself. "It might just be a fluke—a coincidence of conditioning and temperament—but if I were on the Eigerwand right now..." His voice trailed off as his imagination overcame each of the Eiger's notorious obstacles.

Ben returned to an old theme. "Why go at all, Jon? What do you want to prove? This is a great climb. Let it go at this."

Jonathan laughed. "You certainly have it in for the Eiger."

"I just have this feeling. That isn't your mountain, ol' buddy. She's knocked you off twice before. Hell's bells! This whole thing is screwy-assed! That fairy down there waiting to shoot you up. Or you waiting to shoot him up. Whichever it is. And all this about checking up on the men you're going to climb with. I don't know what's going on, and I don't think I want to know. But I got a feeling that if you try to take the Eiger while your mind's on these other things, that hill's going to flick you off onto the rocks. And you know that's going to smart some!"

Jonathan leaned out, not caring to talk about these matters. "Look at them down there, Ben. Miniature people. Miniaturized by the Japanese technique of slowly decreasing their intake of courage and individuality until they're only fit to serve on committees and protest air pollution."

"Yeah, they ain't much, are they? They'd sure get their cookies if one of us was to fall off. Give them something to talk about for the better part of the afternoon." Ben waved his arm. "Hi, turds!"

Those below could not hear, and they waved back vigorously and grinned.

"How'd you like a beer, ol' buddy?"

"I'd love one. Why don't you shout down for room service. Of course, the boy would deserve a considerable tip."

"We got beer."

"I hope you're kidding."

"Never. I kid about love and life and overpopulation and atomic bombs and such shit, but I don't ever kid about beer."

Jonathan stared at him with disbelief. "You carried a six-pack of beer up this rock? You're insane, you know that."

"Maybe insane, but not stupid. I didn't carry it. You did. I put it in your pack."

Jonathan contorted his body and grappled a six-pack out of his backpack. "I'll be goddamned! I think I'm going to throw you down on those rubbernecks."

Wait until I finish this beer."

Jonathan ripped the top off a can and sucked at the foam. "It's warm."

"Sorry about that. But I thought you'd balk at carrying ice."

They ate and drank in silence, Jonathan occasionally feeling a ripple of butterflies in his stomach as he looked into the space below him. In all his years of climbing, he had never completely lost the fluttering in the stomach and the tingle in the groin that came over him when he was not concentrating on problems of the face. It was not an unpleasant sensation and one that he associated with the natural way of things on a mountain.

"How far up would you say we are, Ben?"

"About two-thirds in distance. About halfway in time."

Jonathan nodded agreement. They had observed the day before that the last quarter of the climb, where the mushroom top began its outward flange, would be the most difficult. Jonathan was eager to get at it. "Let's push on."

"I haven't finished my beer!" Ben said with genuine offense.

"You've had two."

"I was talking about this third one." He tugged the top off the can and tipped it up until it was empty, swallowing with great gulps, some beer trickling from the corners of his mouth.

The next three hours involved a sequence of tactical problems, one after the other, the last forgotten as the next was met. For Jonathan there was nothing in Creation but himself and the rock—the next move, the quality of the piton, the sweat in his hair. Total freedom purchased at the risk of a fall. The only way to fly, if you happen to be a wingless animal.

The last five feet were rather special.

The weather had worked its erosive will on the fragile flange around the flat top of the needle. The outward angle was thirty degrees, and the rock was rotten and crumbling. Jonathan moved laterally as far as he could, but the rock did not improve and he could find no valid seat for a piton. He traversed back to just above Ben.

"What's going on?" Ben called up.

"Can't find a way up! How did you make it?"

"Oh, guts, skill, determination, talent. That sort of stuff."

"Screw you."

"Hey, look ol' buddy. Don't do nothing hasty. This piton is mostly for show."

"If I go, the beer goes."

"Oh, my."

There was no safe way to make the curling lip. Jonathan swore under his breath as he clung to the face, considering the problem. An improbable solution presented itself.

"Give me some slack," he shouted down.

"Don't do nothing foolish, Jon. We've had a nice climb like it is."

"Ninety-nine percent of the way is called a failure. Give me the goddam slack!"

Crouched under the overhang, facing outward, Jonathan flattened his palms against the rock shelf above him. By maintaining constant pressure between his legs and the heels of his hands, he could ease out, one hand after the other. As the angle of his body increased, the force required to wedge himself in became greater until he could no longer lift a palm from the rock above lest he shoot out into space. He had to skid his hands along, inch by inch, grinding the skin off his palms and moistening the rock with blood. At last, his legs trembling with fatigue, his fingers found the edge of the flange and curled over it. He could not judge the soundness of the lip, and he knew that when he pulled up his knees his body might swing so far out that his hold would be lost.

But he was no longer facing a decision. He could neither return nor hold the stance much longer. His strength was almost gone.

He squeezed until the finger bones were in contact with the rock through the pads of his fingertips. Then he released and tuck-rolled up.

For an instant, only his legs from the hips down were over the flange; the heavier part of his body and his pack began to drag him, head downward, into the void. He scrambled and fought back, slithering on his stomach, without finesse or technique, in a desperate animal battle against gravity.

He lay face down, panting, his mouth ajar and saliva dripping onto the flat hot rock of the top. His heart thudded in his ears painfully, and the palms of his hands stung with the bits of grit embedded in the raw flesh. A slight breeze cooled his hair, matted and thick with sweat. When he could, he sat up and looked around at the barren slab of stone that had been the goal of all this effort. But he felt just fine. He grinned to himself with the elation of victory.

"Hey? Jon?" Ben's voice came from under the lip. "Anytime you're through admiring yourself, you might bring me up with you."

Jonathan passed the line around a small outcropping of rock and held it in a sitting belay as Ben scrambled up over the edge.

They did not talk for ten minutes, weary with their climb and awed by the prospect around them. They were the highest things in the basin. To the west the desert stretched out forever, shimmering and featureless. From one edge of the tabletop they could look down on Ben's lodge, compressed by distance, its swimming pool a fragment of broken mirror glinting in the sun. Occasional gusts of wind swept the heavy heat off the rock and chilled their sweat-dampened shirts.

They opened the two remaining beers.

"Congratulations, ol' buddy. You bagged yourself another first."

"What do you mean?" Jonathan sipped the tepid froth gratefully.

"I never thought anybody'd climb this needle."

"But you've climbed it yourself."

"Who told you a thing like that?"

"You did."

"You ain't going to get very far in life, listening to known liars like that."

Jonathan was silent for a time.

"All right. Tell me about it, Ben."

"Oh, just this plot of mine that backfired. Some pretty fair country climbers have taken shots at this needle. But it stayed cherry. It's that last little bit that stopped them all. You got to admit that it was a mite hairy. Matter of fact, no sane man would have tried it. Especially with a friend tied on to the other end of the rope."

"I'm sorry, Ben. I didn't think about that."

"You're not the type likely to. Anyway, I figured that if you couldn't make a climb you thought I had made, even with my game foot, you'd think twice about going after the Eiger."

"You're all that set against my going?"

"I am, and that's a fact. I'm scared of it, ol' buddy." Ben sighed and crushed his beer can. "But, like I said, my plot kind of backfired. Now that you've made this climb, I guess nothing in the world's going to keep you away from the Eiger."

"I have no choice, Ben. Everything's tied to the climb. My house. My paintings."

"From what I hear, dead people don't get much kick out of houses and paintings."

"Look. Maybe this will make you feel better about it. If everything goes well, I may not have to make the climb after all. There's a chance that I can finish my business before the climb starts."

Ben shook his head as though he felt something loose inside. "I don't get all this at all. It's too screwy-assed."

Jonathan touched his palms together to test for pain. They were tacky with the thick clear liquid of coagulation, but they did not hurt much. "Let's go back down."

Leaving the pitons for future climbers, and rappelling in great descending swoops, they reached the flat land in forty minutes, which seemed somehow unfair after the grueling six hours of the climb.

Immediately, they were surrounded by a throng of backslappers and congratulators who offered to buy drinks and gave suggestions on how they would have made the climb, if they had been climbers. Ben, one arm around each of two cute young things, led the crowd back to the lodge; and Jonathan, suddenly drained and leaden, now that nervous energy no longer sustained him, trudged along behind the convivial parade. He had been surprised to see Miles Mellough standing apart from the welcoming group, aloof and cool in a sky blue suit of raw silk, his well-combed Pomeranian squirming and whining in his arms. Miles fell in step with him.

"An impressive display. Do you know, Jonathan, that in all the time we were friends, I never saw you climb? It's rather graceful, in its way."

Jonathan walked on without answering.

"That last little part there was particularly tingling. It sent little thrills down my spine. But you made it after all. What's the matter? You seem rather done in."

"Don't count on it."

"Oh, I don't underrate you." He shifted the jittery dog from one arm to the other, and Jonathan noticed that it wore around its neck a ribbon of the same blue silk as Miles's suit. "It is you who insist on underrating me."

"Where's your boy?"

"Back in his room. Moping, I suspect. And looking forward to his next encounter with you."

"There better not be one. He's dog meat if I see him again on my side of the street."

Miles snuggled his nose into Faggot's fur and purred, "You mustn't take offense, little boy. Dr. Hemlock wasn't talking about you. He was using one of the little vulgarisms of his profession."

The dog whimpered and licked vigorously at Miles's nostrils.

"I hope you've reconsidered, Jonathan." The flat professionalism of Miles's tone contrasted sharply with the cooing purr he had used to the dog. Jonathan wondered how many men had been lulled into a lethal sense of security by Miles's feminine facade.

He stopped and turned to face Miles. "I don't think we have anything to talk about."

Miles adjusted his stance, putting the weight on one foot and pointing the toe of the other out in a relaxed variant of the fourth position in ballet, the better to show the line of his suit. "As a climber, Jonathan, your sense of brinksmanship is well developed. You're telling me now that you're willing to face an unknown target, rather than make your peace with me. All right. Allow me to raise the ante a little. Suppose I contact the target and identify you. That would put him in the shadow and you in the light. How would that feel? An interesting reversal of the normal pattern, isn't it?"

Jonathan had considered this uncomfortable possibility. "You don't have as good a bet as you think, Miles. Search is working on the identity of the man."

Mellough laughed richly. The sound startled Faggot. "That is lovely, Jonathan! You're willing to bet your life on the efficiency of CII? Does your barber perform operations on you?"

"How do I know you haven't already contacted the target?"

"And played away my last trump? Really, Jonathan!" He burrowed his nose into Faggot's fur and playfully nipped at his back.

Jonathan walked away toward the lodge.

Miles called after him. "You don't leave me much choice, Jonathan!" Then he nuzzled against Faggot's ear. "Your daddy doesn't have any choice, does he. He'll just have to tell on Dr. Hemlock." He looked after the retreating figure. "Or kill him."

Ben was grumpy and incommunicative throughout supper, but he manfully put away quantities of food and beer. Jonathan made no attempts at conversation, and often his attention strayed from the food and focused on an indeterminate point in space. At length he spoke without breaking his vacant stare. "Anything from your switchboard operator?"

Ben shook his head. "Neither of them has tried to call out, if that's what you mean. No telegrams. Nothing."

Jonathan nodded. "Good. Whatever you do, Ben, don't let them make contact with the outside."

"I'd sure give my front seat in hell to know what's going on around here."

Jonathan looked at him for a long moment, then asked, "Can I borrow your Land-Rover tomorrow?"

"Sure. Where you going?"

Jonathan ignored the question. "Do me a favor, will you? Have one of your people fill it up and put two extra jerry cans of gas and one of water in the back."

"This has something to do with this Mellough character?"

"Yes."

Ben was moodily silent for a time. "All right, Jon. Whatever you need."

"Thanks."

"You don't have to thank me for helping you put your ass in a sling."

"You know that shotgun we talked about yesterday? Will you load it and have it put in the Rover too?"

"Whatever you say." Ben's voice was grim.

Unable to sleep, Jonathan sat up in bed late into the night, working turgidly on the Lautrec article that had been the sponge of his free time for almost a month. George's scratching knock presented an excuse to abandon the arid labor. As usual, she was wearing jeans and a denim shirt, its collar turned up under her long black hair, the three top buttons undone, and her unbound breasts tugging the shirt up from the jeans in taut folds.

"How are you this evening, George?"

She sat on the edge of^ his bed and regarded him blandly with her large, dark eyes.

"Did you watch Ben and me make that climb today? Wasn't that something?" He paused, then responded for her. "Yes, that was something."

She slipped off her shoes then stood to unbutton and unzip her jeans with the brisk movements of a person with business to attend to.

"It looks as though I'll be leaving tomorrow or the day after. In some ways, George, I'll miss you."

With a clapper action of her bottom, she forced the jeans over her hips.

"No one can say that you've cluttered up our relationship with sticky sentiment or unnecessary chatter, and I appreciate that."

She stood for a second, the tails of her shirt brushing her olive thighs, then she began unbuttoning it, her placid eyes never leaving his.

"I have an idea, George. Why don't we give up this banal chatter and make love?" He barely had time to get his notes off the bed and turn off the light before she was tangled up amongst his limbs.

He lay on his stomach, his arms thrown limply across the bed, every muscle liquid with relaxation as George trickled her fingers from the small of his back to the nape of his neck. He hovered on the rim of sleep as long as he could, trying not to anticipate the eddies of thrill her fingernails churned up as they slid with barely perceptible contact around his waist, up his sides, and outward along his upper arms. By way of thanks, he hummed a couple of times with contentment, although he would rather not have put forth the effort.

She stopped stroking him, and he began to slip over the edge of consciousness.

"Ouch!"

He felt something like a wasp sting in his shoulder. George leaped out of bed and cowered in the darkest corner of the room. He fumbled the light on and looked around, squinting against the sudden glare. Quite nude, George pressed into her corner, the hypodermic needle still in her hands, both thumbs against the plunger and the point directed at him, as though it were a gun she could protect herself with.

"You little bitch." Jonathan, also nude, advanced on her.

Fear and hate flickering in her eyes, she made a lunge at him with the needle, and with one broad backhand blow he reeled her along the wall and into the opposite corner, where she crouched like a treed cougar, blood trickling from the corner of her mouth and one nostril, her lips drawn back in a frozen snarl that revealed her lower teeth. He was moving in to expand on her punishment when the buzzing in his ears settled toward his stomach and made him stagger. He turned back toward the door, now an undulating trapezoid, but he realized he would never make it. He stumbled toward the phone. His knees buckled under him, and he went down, knocking over the bedside table and plunging the room into darkness as the lamp burst with a loud implosion. The buzzing pulsed louder and in tempo with the dancing bursts of light behind his eyes.

"Desk," answered a thin, bored voice near him on the floor, somewhere in the rubble of broken glass. He pawed about blindly, trying to find the receiver. "Desk." He felt a volley of pains in the small of his back, and he knew the little bitch was kicking him with the relentless rhythm of frightened fury. "Desk." The voice was impatient. He could not ward off the kicks; all he could do was curl up around the receiver and take it. The pains became duller and duller until they were only pressures. "Desk." Jonathan's tongue was thick and alien. With his disobedient lips pressing against the mouthpiece, he struggled to form a word.

"Ben!" he blurted with a treble whimper, and the word chased him down into warm black water.

ARIZONA: June 29

A light fluttered on the black water, and Jonathan, disembodied, rushed through miles of space toward it. He gained on the spark, and it grew larger, until it developed into a window with stripes of daylight glaring through a Venetian blind. He was in his room. A great flesh-colored glob hung over him.

"How's it going, ol' buddy?"

He tried to sit up, but a thud of pain nailed him to the pillow.

"Relax. Doctor said you're going to be just fine. He says it may hurt for a few days when you piss. George sure gave your kidneys a going over."

"Give me something to drink."

"Beer?"

"Anything." Jonathan inched his way to a sitting position, moving up through strata of thickening headache.

Ben made a clumsy attempt to feed him the beer, but Jonathan relieved him of his heavy solicitude by snatching the can away after a third of it had spilled on his chest. "Where is she?" he asked once his thirst was slaked.

"I got her locked up, and a couple of my staff are watching her. Want me to call into town for the sheriff?"

"No, not yet. Tell me, Ben..."

"No, he hasn't. I figured you'd be wondering if this Mellough had checked out The desk will call me if he tries."

"So it was Miles?"

"That's what George says."

"All right. He's had it. Let's get me into the shower."

"But the doctor said—"

Jonathan's suggestion as to what the doctor could do with his advice was beyond the routine of physiotherapy and, moreover, beyond ballistic probability.

Ben half carried him into the shower where Jonathan turned on the cold water and let it beat on him, clearing the moss from his mind. "Why, Ben? I'm really not that bad."

"The oldest reason in the world, ol' buddy," he shouted over the noise of the shower.

"Love?"

"Money."

The water was doing its work, but with the return of feeling came a pounding headache and pains in his kidneys. "Toss me in a bottle of aspirin. What did she shoot into me?"

"Here." Ben's big paw thrust the bottle through the shower curtain. "Doctor says it was some relative of morphine. He had a name for it. But it wasn't a lethal dose."

"So it would appear." The aspirin disintegrated in his hand with the splatter of water, so he tipped the bottle up to his mouth then washed the tablets down by gulping under the shower head. He gagged as bits of aspirin caught in his throat "Morphine figures. Miles is in the drug business."

"Is that right? But how come he went that far and didn't put you away for good? George said he had promised her nothing serious would happen to you. Just wanted to scare you off."

"Her concern is touching."

"Maybe she just didn't want to die for murder."

"That sounds more like it." Jonathan turned off the water and began to towel himself down, but not too vigorously, because every sharp motion slopped pain around in his head. "My guess is that Miles intended to come in after George put me under and shoot me full of junk. The death would be attributed to an overdose. It's typical Mellough. Safe and oblique."

"He's a bad ass all right. What are you going to do about him?"

"Something massive."

After Jonathan dressed, they went down the hall to the room in which George was being kept. He felt a twinge of regret when he saw her swollen eye and the split lip he had given her, but this quickly faded when the bruises along his spine reminded him of how she had tried to help the morphine put him away.

She looked more Indian than ever, clutching a blanket around her shoulders, under which she was as naked as she had been when Ben broke in to save him.

"How much did he pay you, George?" he asked.

She almost spat back her response. "Goddam your eyes, you shit!"

These were the only words he ever heard her speak.

Ben could not help chuckling as they returned to Jonathan's room. "I guess she's been around me too much."

"It's not that, Ben. They always talk about my eyes afterwards. Look, I'm going to get a couple hours' sleep. Will you have your people at the desk make up my bill?"

"You leaving right away?"

"Soon. Is the Land-Rover ready?"

"Yeah."

"And the shotgun?"

"It'll be on the floorboards. I imagine you don't want Mellough to know you're checking out."

"On the contrary. But don't do anything special about it. He'll find out. Miles is a specialist in information."

He awoke refreshed three hours later. The effects of the morphine had worn off and his headache was gone, but his kidneys still felt a little soggy. He dressed with special care in one of his better suits, packed his suitcases, and telephoned to the desk to have them put in the Land-Rover.

As he entered the lounge he saw the blond wrestler sitting at the bar, a broad strip of tape over his swollen nose.

"Good afternoon, Dewayne." Ignoring the bodyguard's glare of hate, he passed through the lounge, along a walkway, and over a bridge to the table at which Miles sat, poised and impeccable in a suit of metallic gold.

"Join me, Jonathan?"

"I owe you a drink."

"So you do. And we all know what a stickler you are for old debts. You're looking very nice. Your tailor is accurate, if uninspired."

"I'm not feeling too well. I had a bad night."

"Oh? I'm sorry to hear that."

The young Indian waiter who had served them the first day approached the table, his glances at Miles filled with tender remembrance. Jonathan ordered, and the two of them watched the bathers around the pool until the drinks arrived and the waiter departed.

"Cheers, Jonathan?"

Jonathan drank off the Laphroaig and put the glass on the table. "I've decided to forget about you for now, Miles."

"Have you? Just like that?"

"I'm going to be staying here in training for a couple more weeks, and I won't be able to concentrate on it with you on my mind. I have a big climb in front of me." Jonathan was sure that Miles knew he had checked out. The obvious lie was calculated to make Miles think he had him on the run, and Miles was the kind to press such an advantage.

"I sympathize with your problem, Jonathan. Truly I do. But unless this means you are crossing me off your list for good..." He lifted his shoulders in helpless regret.

"I might do just that. Let's have dinner together tonight and talk about it."

"A delightful idea."

Jonathan had to admire Miles's silky control.

Jonathan rose. "See you this evening."

"I'm looking forward to it." Miles raised his glass in salute.

The Land-Rover was parked in the loading zone in front of the lodge. As Jonathan climbed in, he noticed on the floorboards next to the shotgun a thoughtful gift from Ben: a six-pack of cold beer. He opened a can and sipped at it while he glanced over the area map on his lap. He had earlier located a long dirt road running in thin broken lines deep into the desert. Ben had told him it was a little-used rut track that only government rangers drove on. For more than a hundred fifty miles, the road pierced into the core of the western desert, then it stopped abruptly.

Tracing back with his finger, he found the place where the dirt track began, branching west from a north-south gravel access road. This gravel road joined the main highway about a mile west of the turnoff to Ben's place. Considering the difference in speed between the Rover and the rental car at Miles's disposal, that mile of good highway promised to be the most dangerous stretch.

Fixing the map in his mind, Jonathan folded it away and drove off, slowly winding up from the basin. On one of the cutbacks he glanced down to find that Miles's car was already in pursuit. He pressed down on the gas.

Seated beside Dewayne, Faggot in his arms, Miles saw Jonathan's sudden increase in speed. "He knows we're following him. Go get him, Dewayne. Here's your chance to reinstate yourself in my good graces." And he fondly scratched behind Faggot's ears as the car sprayed dust in a skidding turn.

The Rover's superior traction and suspension made up for its disadvantage in speed, and the distance between the two did not much alter throughout the race until the last flat hundred yards before the highway, during which Miles gained perceptibly on the Rover. Dewayne pulled an automatic from his shoulder holster.

"Don't," Miles ordered. "We'll pull along side on the highway where we can be sure of it." Miles knew the Rover had no chance of outdistancing him along the five miles of good road to town.

Jonathan approached the highway at full speed and quickly turned west, away from town.

For an instant Miles was troubled by the unexpected move. Then he decided that Jonathan realized the hopelessness of an open race and was seeking some back road on which the qualities of the Rover would give him a chance.

"I think this would be a good time to get him,

Dewayne."

The car torqued low on its springs as it bounced onto the highway and screamed around the corner in pursuit.

Jonathan held the accelerator to the floor, but at seventy the Rover was flat out, and the automobile gained on him steadily. The gravel cutoff was only half a mile away, but the car behind was so close that he could distinguish Miles through the rearview mirror. In a moment they would swing out and pull up beside him. He saw Miles roll down his window and lean back to give Dewayne a clear field of fire.

When they were almost on his bumper, Jonathan reached down and switched on his lights.

Seeing the tail lights flash, and imagining Jonathan had hit his brakes, Dewayne jammed down on his own, and the wheels squealed and smoked, while the Rover roared on at its best speed.

By the time Dewayne had fumbled his foot back onto the gas, Jonathan had gained sufficient distance to reach the gravel road with fifty yards lead. Miles swore to himself. It had been Henri who had told them about the headlight ploy.

Several times on the gravel road, when his lead was threatened, Jonathan wagged the wheel and caused the Rover to zigzag slightly, raising clouds of blinding dust which forced the car to fall back. In this way he held his advantage until he came to the ranger trail that led out into the desert. Once he was on this meandering track of potholes, and unbanked turns, and ruts so deep the automobile repeatedly bottomed, he had no difficulty maintaining his lead. He was even able to open another can of beer, although it splashed over him when he bounced into an unexpected hole.

"Just keep him in sight, Dewayne." At the turnoff onto the dirt road Miles had seen a weathered sign warning drivers that there was no outlet. Sooner or later, Jonathan would have to turn back. The road, often winding between giant outcroppings of sandstone, was not wide enough for two cars to pass. He had Jonathan in a box.

For nearly an hour the vehicles sped over the flat, gray-tan country where nothing grew in the powdery, baked earth. Dewayne had returned his gun to its holster where its pressure made him sweat freely. Faggot whimpered and pranced with sharp claws in Miles's lap. Sliding from side to side with each abrupt turn, Miles braced himself with pressure between feet and back. His lips were tight with chagrin at being unable to sit with poise. Even Faggot's frantic and moist gestures of affection irritated him.

The vehicles raced and jolted over the desert, lofting two high plumes of fine dust behind them.

Despite the stream of air gushing in through the open side of the Rover, Jonathan's back adhered with perspiration to the plastic seat. As he bounced over a rut, the jerry cans behind him clanged together, reminding him that it would not do for those chasing him to run out of fuel. He began to search for a site appropriate to his needs.

Dewayne hunched over the wheel and squinted into the dust rising before him. His jaw muscles flexed in anticipation of revenge.

About two miles farther on, Jonathan caught sight of an outcropping of rock, a single ragged sandstone boulder around which the track made an S-turn. It was ideal. He slowly eased off on the gas, allowing those behind to close to within a hundred yards. The instant he made the first turn, he hit his brakes, skidding to a stop and raising dense clouds of choking dust. He snatched the shotgun off the seat, leaped out of the Rover, and dashed for the boulder, knowing he had only seconds in which to scramble around the rock and come out from behind.

As Dewayne steered into the first turn, he was blinded by the swirl of dust. The Land-Rover loomed in front of him, and he jammed down on the brakes. Before the car had slid to a stop, Miles had his door open and had rolled out onto the ground. Dewayne twisted the window handle, grappling desperately at his automatic. Hemlock! The barrels of the shotgun jabbed painfully into his left side. He never heard the shot.

Jonathan snapped back the hammers of the shotgun as he raced desperately around the boulder. He heard the squeal of brakes, and plunged through the dust at a full run. Dewayne's face emerged out of the billowing white fog. He was trying to get his window down. Jonathan rammed the gun in through the half opened window and snapped on both triggers. The blast was deafening.

Dewayne snorted like a hammered steer as the force of the impact slid him across the seat and halfway out the open door, where he dangled and twitched until his nerves discovered they were dead.

Jonathan stepped around in front of the car and reached in under the hanging arm to extract the automatic. He wiped his sticky fingers off on a fragment of Dewayne's jacket he found several feet away from the car.

Miles stood in the settling dust, straightening his cuffs and slapping dirt from his gold suit. The Pomeranian danced epileptically about his legs.

"Really, Jonathan! This suit cost me three hundred dollars and, what's more, five fittings."

"Get into my car."

Miles picked up the squirming dog and walked in front of Jonathan to the Rover, his casual dancer's stride betraying no effect of recent events.

They drove on westward, deeper into the desert. Their lips began to crack with the salt that prevented the most meager vegetation from growing. Jonathan held the automatic high in his left hand so he could fend off any attempt Miles might make for it.

For an hour and a half they pressed on through the shimmering heat of the desert. Jonathan knew that Miles was ready to make his try for the gun. Slight contractions of his hand on his lap, and minute tensings of his shoulders predicted Miles's move. Just as he threw himself after the gun, Jonathan hit the brakes, and Miles went face first into the steering wheel. Jonathan snapped back the emergency brake and jumped out, dragging Miles after him by the collar. He dumped him onto the crackled ground and sprang back into the Rover. By the time Miles had staggered to his feet, a rivulet of blood caked with dirt running from his nose, Jonathan had backed the Rover in a sharp arc. Miles stood in the road, blocking the path with his body.

"You're not going to leave me out here!" The recognition of Jonathan's plan for him grew and filled him with horror as no bullet in the head could have.

Jonathan tried to steer around him, but before he could get up any speed Miles jumped onto the hood. He lay over it, his face pressed against the glass.

"For Christ's sake, Jonathan," he screamed. "Shoot me!"

Jonathan raced forward, then hit the brakes, dumping Miles off the hood. He roared in reverse away from the crumpled body, then sped on, making a wide curve to avoid him.

By the time Jonathan could see his dancing image in the rearview mirror, Miles had reclaimed his characteristic composure and was standing, the dog in his arms, looking after the diminishing Land-Rover.

Jonathan never forgot his last image of Miles, the gold suit glinting in the sunlight. Miles had set the dog down and had taken a comb from his pocket. He ran it through his hair and patted the sides into place.

KLEINE SCHEIDEGG: July 5

Jonathan sat at a round metal table on the terrace of the Kleine Scheidegg Hotel, sipping a glass of grassy Vaudois, enjoying the slight snap of its latent effervescence. He looked across the up-tilted meadow to the gloomy north face of the Eiger. The unstable warmth of the weightless mountain sunlight was puffed away time and again by wisps of crisp highland air.

Touched only once a day and briefly by the sun, the dark concave face hovered malignantly above him, looking as though it had been scooped out of the body of the mountain by some olympian shovel, its brittle gray-black crescent rim cutting into the glittering blue of the sky.

A breeze stirred, and he shivered involuntarily. He remembered his two previous attempts at the face, both beaten back by those brutal storms that roll in from the north and are collected and amplified in the natural amphitheatre of the Eigerwand. So common are those rages of wind and snow that the dour Bernese Oberland guides speak of them as "Eiger Weather." After the last nine-hour dicey retreat from the high ice field called the White Spider—that salient epitome of the mountain's treachery—he had promised himself never to try again.

And yet... It would be a fine mountain to take.

He adjusted his sunglasses and gazed with reluctant fascination at the awful sublimity of the Eiger. The view was uncommon; normally, heavy shrouds of mist hang from the crest, obscuring the storms that lash it, and muffling the crack and roar of avalanches that constitute the mountain's most potent defensive weapon. His eyes snagged on each of those features associated with the defeat and death of some mountaineer.

He was afraid of the mountain; his groin tingled with the fear. But at the same time, his hands itched for the touch of its cold rock, and he was exhilarated at the thought of trying that fine savage again. This perverse dialogue between the flinching mind and the boisterous body is one every climber has experienced at one time or another. It was a pity that his sanction target would be nominated before the climb started. Maybe after it was over...

A long-limbed blond with a mountain tan squeezed between the close-set tables (although there was no one else on the terrace) and nudged Jonathan with her hip, causing some wine to spill from his glass.

"I am sorry," she said, willing to allow this accident to open a conversation.

Jonathan nodded a curt acceptance of her apology, and she passed on to use the coin-operated telescope that was in a direct line between him and the mountain (although there were six others available to her). She bent over the instrument, directing her excellent bottom toward him, and he could not help noting that her suntan must have been acquired in those very shorts. Her accent had been British, and she had the general look of the horsey type, the long taut legs developed from gripping the animal between her knees. He noticed that her shoes, however, were not British. Since the advent of mini, English women had gotten away from those remarkable clogs that once identified them on sight. It used to be said that British women's shoes were made by excellent craftsmen who had had shoes carefully described to them, but who had never actually seen a pair at first hand. They were, however, comfortable, and they wore well. And those were also the principal virtues of the women who wore them.

He followed the line of her telescope and rested his eyes again on the Eiger.

The Eiger. Appropriate name. When the early Christians came into these high meadows, they bestowed benign labels on the two higher mountains of the massif: Jungfrau, the Virgin; and Monch, the Monk. But this most malicious promontory was named for an evil pagan spirit. Eiger: the Ogre.

Before the turn of the century, all the faces of the Eiger had been climbed, except one, the north Eigerwand: the Ogre's Wall. Experienced mountaineers had listed it among the "impossible" faces, and so it was in the days of pure climbing, before sportsmen armed themselves with piton and snap ring.

Later, under the ring of the hammer, the "impossible" faces fell to the record books one by one, but the north face of the Eiger remained virgin. Then, in the mid-thirties, the Nazi cult of mountain and cloud sent wave after wave of young German boys, filled with a lust to accrue glory to their dishonored Fatherland, against the Eiger's defenses. Hitler offered a gold medal to whomever made the first ascent; and in neatly regimented sequence the flaxen-haired romantics died. But the mountain retained its hymen.

In mid-August of 1935 came Max Sedlmayer and Karl Mehringer, two lads with considerable experience in the more difficult climbs and a searing desire to chalk up the Eiger on the German scoreboard. Tourists watched their ascent through telescopes from this very terrace. These voyeurs of death were the ancestors of the modern "Eiger Birds," those carrion crows of the jet set who flock to the Kleine Scheidegg Hotel and pay exorbitant sums to titillate to the vicarious thrill of the climbers facing death, then return to their lives of musical beds refreshed and reinspired.

Sedlmayer and Mehringer moved up the first 800 feet which is not especially difficult, but totally exposed to falling rocks. To observers below it seemed that the climb was going well. Rope length after rope length, they skillfully belayed each other up. At the end of the first day they bivouaced at 9,500 feet, well above the windows of the Eigerwand tunnel of the Jungfrau Railway, a remarkable bit of engineering that cuts right through the massif, bringing trains full of tourists to the Bernese highlands. These windows were originally designed to jettison rubble and to ventilate the tunnel, but they have figured dramatically in attempts to rescue climbers.

Throughout the next day, Sedlmayer and Mehringer enjoyed uncommonly benevolent weather, and they made the upper rim of the First Ice Field, but they were moving very slowly. The vultures at the telescopes could see that the climbers had to hold their knapsacks over their heads to get some protection from the falling rocks and ice with which the Ogre greeted them. Time and again they were forced to stop and take refuge under some scanty overhang to avoid the more determined salvoes from above. Just as they got to the rim of the Second Ice Field, a curtain of mist descended, and for a day and a half they were obscured from the view of the grumbling tourists. During that night a storm raged around the Eiger, crashing such huge boulders down the face that several of the hotel guests complained that their sleep had been interrupted. It is possible that Sedlmayer and Mehringer slept poorly too. The temperature in the valley sank to -8°. Who can guess how cold it was up there on the face? The fine weather with which the White Spider had lured the boys into its web was over. Eiger Weather had begun.

When the clouds lifted on Sunday, the climbers were sighted, still moving up. The hotel guests cheered and toasted one another, and bets were placed against the time the young Germans would reach the top. But experienced climbers and guides glanced embarrassedly at one another and walked away from the crowds. They knew the lads had no chance and climbed only because avalanches had cut off their retreat, and anything was better than simply hanging from their pitons awaiting death.

They moved up slowly toward the Flatiron (the highest point Jonathan's party had reached during his first attempt at the Ogre). The clouds descended again, and the tourists were cheated of the thrill of watching them die.

That night a gale lashed the face.

There was a half-hearted attempt to organize a rescue team, but more in response to the desire to do something than to any hope of reaching them alive. In manifestation of typical Swiss compassion, the Bernese Oberland guides haggled over wages until it was too late to bother with the rescue. An intrepid German flyer dared the treacherous air currents to fly close to the face and search. He spotted the boys, frozen to death, still hanging from their harnesses.

With this, the Eiger began its nomenclature of human tragedy. To this day that spot on the point of the Flatiron above the Third Ice Field is called Death Bivouac. The game between the Eiger and Man was begun.

Score: Ogre—2; Man—0

Early in 1936 two Germans came to reclaim the bodies of their countrymen from where they had stood frozen against the wall for a year, a target for the prying telescopes on clear days. If possible, they were also going to attempt the summit. They decided to take a training climb first. An avalanche caught one up and broke his neck against a rock. Ogre—3; Man—0

In July of that same year German Youth challenged the Ogre again. This time it was a team of four: Rainer, Angerer, Kurtz, and Hinterstoisser. Again the tourists watched and placed bets. The young men, suffused with the Zeitgeist of Hitler's early days, made such melodramatic statements to the press as: "We must have the Wall, or it must have us!"

It had them.

The most experienced of the party, Hinterstoisser, discovered a tricky traverse across the face that turned out to be the key to subsequent climbs. But so confident were they of victory that they pulled in the rope after the last of the party had crossed. This gesture of cocky confidence killed them.

The party climbed well, although Angerer appeared to be injured, probably by falling rock, and the others had to slow down to help him along. Their first bivouac was just above the Rote Fluh, that red rock crag that is one of the more salient landmarks of the face. In one day they had gone more than halfway up the Eiger!

The next day, with the injured man becoming steadily weaker, they gained the Third Ice Field and tied off to camp just below Death Bivouac. When dawn allowed the rubbernecks at the corn-operated telescopes to enjoy the drama, the party had begun a descent. Obviously the condition of the injured man prevented them from continuing.

Smoothly and with remarkable speed, considering the incapacitated climber, they descended the first two ice fields. But night caught them, and they were forced to make a third bivouac. That night, with Eiger Weather freezing their soaked clothes into clanging armor of ice, must have been brutal. Their reserves of strength were sapped by the cold, and through all of the next day they managed only 1,000 feet.

For a fourth time, and now out of food, they had to bivouac on the inhospitable face.

Some novices at the hotel opined that the team had a good chance. After all, they had only the Hinterstoisser Traverse and the Difficult Crack before them, then the going would be relatively easy.

But the team had overconfidently retrieved their rope from the traverse.

And the next morning it was completely iced over. Again and again, with a growing desperation that never overwhelmed his skill, the gifted Hinterstoisser attempted to make the verglas and slime of the traverse, and each time he was stopped by the hungry Ogre.

The mists descended, and the tourists could hear the roar of avalanches all through the night. Another name was attached to the Eiger: The Hinterstoisser Traverse.

Ogre—7; Man—0

Throughout 1937 team after team attacked the Eiger, only to be driven back. The mountain came close to claiming more victims during the remarkable retreat of Vorg and Rebitsch from Death Bivouac.

But the score remained the same.

In June of 1938 two Italians (there were national movements afoot in Italy too) fell to their deaths near Difficult Crack.

But rope and piton techniques were steadily perfected, while the natural defenses of the mountain remained as they had been since the memory of man, so in July of that year a German team finally removed the north face of the Eiger from the list of "impossibles." Ogre—9; Man—1

Throughout the war years, the Eiger was free from incursions into its privacy. Governments provided young men with other ways to inscribe their names on the roles of glory—ways that converted suicide into murder, and soothed all with the balm of patriotism.

But directly these avenues to danger were sealed off by peace, the vertical snare of the Eiger beckoned again. In recent years, more than thirty men have slogged up the last snow slope, panting and crying and promising never to touch the stone of the Ogre again. But most of the attempts are still driven back by weather and avalanche, and the death toll continues to rise regularly. The critical ice field of the White Spider has played the antagonist role in most of the recent tragedies, like the one in 1957 in which three men died and a fourth was rescued only after hunger and thirst had driven him to splinter his teeth on glacier ice in an attempt to get something into his stomach.

Jonathan stared ahead, his mind unrolling the death record of the Eiger.

"Is there something wrong?" the English girl at the telescope asked.

He had forgotten her.

"Why are you staring at me like that?" She smiled, anticipating the reason.

"I wasn't staring at you, dear. I was staring through you."

"How disappointing. May I join you?" She interpreted his silence as invitation. "You've been looking at that mountain with such concentration that I couldn't help noticing you. I do hope you're not thinking of climbing it."

"Oh, no. Never again."

"You've climbed it before?"

"I've tried."

"Is it awfully fierce?"

"Awfully."

"I have a theory about mountain climbers. By the way, my name's Randie—Randie Nickers."

"Jonathan Hemlock. What's your theory, Randie?"

"Well... may I have some wine? That's all right. I'll just use your glass, if you don't mind. Well, my theory is that men climb mountains out of some kind of frustration. I think it's a kind of sublimation of other desires."

"Sexual, of course."

Randie nodded earnestly as she swallowed a sip of wine. "Yes, probably. This wine's half fizzy, isn't it?"

He put his feet upon an empty chair and leaned back to receive the sun. "It has the giggling sparkle of Swiss maidens, blushed but pleased by the attention of rural swains, but these high spirits do not eclipse the underlying tartness of the petulant Oberland peasant that resides largely in the wine's malolactic fermentation."

Randie was silent for a moment. "I do hope you're teasing."

"Of course I am, Randie. Don't people usually tease you?"

"Not men. They typically try to make love to me."

"How do they do? Typically."

"Well, of late they've been doing very well indeed. I'm in Switzerland for a sort of holiday before I go home and settle down to a most proper married life."

"And you're spreading the blessings of your body around while there's still time."

"Something like that. Not that I don't love Rodney. He's the dearest person, really. But he is Rodney."

"And he's rich."

"Oh, I imagine so." Her brow clouded over for an instant. "I certainly hope he is. Oh, of course he is! What a fright you gave me. But the nicest thing about him is his name."

"Which is?"

"Smith. Rodney Smith."

"And that's the nicest thing about him?"

"It's not that Smith is all that grand of itself. I believe it's actually a fairly common name. But it will mean that I shall finally be rid of my name. It's been a plague to me all my life."

"Randie Nickers sounds all right to me."

"That's because you're an American. I could tell that from your accent. But 'knickers' is British slang for panties. And you can imagine what the girls at school did with that."

"I see." He took his glass back and poured himself some wine. He wondered what it was about him that attracted the nutty ones.

"You see what I mean?" Randie asked, forgetting that she had been thinking, rather than speaking.

"Not exactly."

"Oh, I have this theory that strangers gravitate immediately to the topics of their greatest mutual interest. And here we are talking about panties. It rather tells on us, doesn't it?"

"You ride horses, don't you," he said, succumbing to the rule of non sequitur Randie's mind demanded.

"Yes, as a matter of fact! I show for my uncle. How on earth did you know?"

"I didn't know, really. I more hoped. Do you have a theory about women who delight in having strong beasts between their legs?"

She frowned. "I hadn't really thought about it. But I imagine you're right. It's something like your mountain climbing, isn't it? It's always delightful to have something in common." She looked at him narrowly. "Don't I know you from somewhere. The name's familiar." She mused, "Jonathan Hemlock... Ah! Aren't you an author?"

"Only a writer."

"Yes! I have it! You write books about art and everything. They're very keen on you at Slade."

"Yes, it's a good school. What would you rather we did, Randie? Take a walk through the village? Or shall we rush directly to bed."

"A stroll through the village would be grand. Romantic, actually. I'm glad we're going to make love. I have a theory about lovemaking. I view it as a first-rate icebreaker. You make love with a man, and the first thing you know you're holding hands and calling each other by first names. I prefer first names. Probably because of my own family name. Did I tell you what knickers are in England?"

"Yes."

"Well then, you can appreciate my attitude toward names. I have this theory about attitudes..."

Jonathan was not disconsolate when he discovered that Randie would be returning to London the following morning.

KLEINE SCHEIDEGG: July 6-7

It had been necessary to dress twice that morning, and they nearly missed the train. The last Jonathan saw of Miss Nickers as the train began to move away from the platform, she tugged down her compartment window and called, "You really have smashing eyes, you know, Jonathan!" Then she settled into her seat next to a homeward-bound skier and began animatedly explaining one of her theories to him.

Jonathan smiled as he remembered her tactic of self-excitation which consisted of calling parts, places, and postures by their most earthy names.

He turned up the steep cobblestone road that connects the village to the hotel. He had arranged to take a training climb with a local guide up the west flank of the Eiger. Although a far cry from the North Face, this west route had been blooded often enough to demand respect.

Beyond the training and acclimatization, there was another reason prompting him to stay away from the hotel as much as possible. Somehow, as always, despite the greatest precautions, the management of the hotel had sensed there was an attempt at the Eigerwand pending. Discreet telegrams had been sent out; the best suites were being held vacant for rich "Eiger Birds" who would soon begin to descend on the hotel. Like all climbers, Jonathan resented and detested these excitement-hungry jet setters who seek to titillate their callused nerve ends by vicarious thrill. He was glad that Ben and the other members of the climbing team had not yet arrived, because with them the carrion would descend in force.

Halfway up the cobblestone road, Jonathan stopped off at an outdoor cafe for a glass of Vaudois. The fragile mountain sun was pleasant on his cheek. "Do you ever buy wine for girls you meet in bars?" She had approached from behind, from the dark interior of the cafe. Her voice hit him like a palpable thing. Without turning around, and with fine command of his feelings, he reached over and pushed out a chair for her. She sat looking at him for a time, sadness balanced in her eyes.

The waiter came, received the order, returned with the wine, and departed. She slid her glass back and forth over a small puddle of water on the table, concentrating on it, rather than on his cool, uninviting eyes. "I had this whole speech worked out, you know. It was a good one. I could say it quickly, before you interrupted me or walked away."

"How did it go?"

She glanced up at him, then away. "I forget."

"No, come on. Let's hear it. I'm easily conned, as you know."

She shook her head and smiled faintly. "I surrender. I can't handle it on this level. I can't sit here and swap cool, mature words with you. I'm..." She looked up, desperate at the paucity of words in the face of human emotions. "I'm sorry. Really."

"Why did you do it?" He was not going to melt.

"Try to be a little fair, Jonathan. I did it because I believed—I still believe—you have to take this assignment."

"I've taken the assignment, Jemima. Things worked out just fine."

"Stop it! Don't you know what it would mean if the other side had a major biological weapon before we did?"

"Oh, of course. We have to keep it out of their hands at all costs! They're the kind of heartless shits who might drop it on some unsuspecting Japanese city!"

She glanced down. "I know you don't think it makes any difference. We talked about it that night. Remember?"

"Remember? You're not a bad in-fighter."

She sipped her wine, the silence heavy on her. "At least they promised me that you wouldn't lose your painting."

"They kept their promise. Your conscience is clear."

"Yes." She sighed. "But there's still this problem I have."

"What's that?'

She said it matter-of-factly. "I love you."

After a pause, he smiled to himself and shook his head. "I've underrated you. You're a great in-fighter."

The silence grew denser, and she realized that she must abandon this heavy line of talk lest he simply walk away. "Say, I saw you walking around yesterday with a most un-Jemima type—blond and Anglo and all. Was she good?"

"Adequate."

"As good as—"

"No."

"I'm glad!"

Jonathan could not help smiling at her frankness. "How did you know I was here?"

"I studied your file in Mr. Dragon's office, remember? This assignment was detailed in it."

"I see." So Dragon had been so sure of him that he had included this sanction. Jonathan despised being predictable.

"Will I see you tonight, Jonathan?" There was bravery in her voice. She was willing to be hurt.

"I have a date to climb a hill today. We'll be up there overnight."

"What about tomorrow?"

"Please go away. I have no intention of punishing you. I don't want to hate you, or love you, or anything. I just want you to go away."

She folded her gloves in her lap. She had made up her mind. "I'll be here when you come down from the mountain."

Jonathan rose and dropped a bill on the table.

"Please don't."

Her eyes brimmed suddenly with tears. "Why are you doing this, Jonathan? I know this isn't a one-way thing. I know you love me too."

"I'll get over it." He left the cafe and walked to the hotel with vigorous strides.

True to type, the Swiss guide grumbled and complained that they should have started with the first light of dawn. As it was, they would have to pass the night on the mountain. Jonathan explained that he had all along intended to pass the night there, for the conditioning. The guide classified himself: At first he did not understand (genus, Teutonic), then he refused to budge (species, Helvetic). But when Jonathan offered to double the fee, there was a sudden comprehension coupled with the assurance that the idea of spending a night on the mountain was a splendid one.

Jonathan had always found the Swiss to be a money-loving, dour, religious, money-loving, independent, well-organized, money-loving people. These men of the Bernese Oberland are fine mountaineers, always willing to face the rigors and risks of rescuing a climber trapped on the face of a mountain. But they never fail to send a carefully itemized bill to the man they have saved or, that failing, to his next of kin.

The climb was rigorous enough, but relatively uneventful. Jonathan would have resented the guide's interminable complaining about the cold during the overnight bivouac, had it not served to keep his mind from Jemima.

Back at the hotel the next day, he received his bill. It seemed that, despite the double fee there were many little items still to be paid for. Among these were medical supplies they had not used, food for the bivouac (Jonathan had brought his own to test the freeze-dried rations), and a charge for "1/4 pair of boots." This last was too much. He called the guide to his room and questioned him. The guide assumed an attitude of cooperation and weary patience as he explained the obvious. "Shoes wear out; you would not deny that. Surely one cannot climb a mountain barefooted. Agreed? For Matterhorn I usually charge half a pair of shoes. Eiger is more than half the altitude of Matterhorn, and yet I only charged you for a quarter pair. I did this because you were a pleasant companion."

"I'm surprised you didn't charge me for wear on the rope."

The guide's eyebrows lofted. "Oh?" He took up the bill and scanned it minutely. "You are perfectly right, sir. There has been an omission." He drew a pencil from his pocket, licked the point, and painstakingly wrote in the neglected item, then corrected and checked the total. "Can I be of further service?" he asked.

Jonathan pointed to the door, and with a curt bow the guide left.

Jonathan's undefined sense of tension and anticipation was exacerbated by the depression Switzerland always brought upon him. He considered the placement of the magnificent Alps in this soulless country to be one of nature's more malevolent caprices. As he wandered around the hotel aimlessly, he came upon a group of lower-class Eiger Birds playing the fondue-kirsch-kiss game and giggling stupidly. He turned back toward his room with disgust. No one really likes Switzerland, except those who prefer cleanliness to life, he thought. And anyone who would live in Switzerland would live in Scandinavia. And anyone who would live in Scandinavia would eat lutefisk. And anyone who would eat lutefisk would...

He paced up and down in his room. Ben would not arrive until the next day, and Jonathan would be damned if he would spend an unnecessary day in this hotel, among these people, an object of curiosity for the early-arrived Eiger Birds. His telephone rang. "What!" he snapped into the receiver.

"How did you know it was me?" Jemima asked.

"What do you have planned for tonight?"

"Making love with you," she answered without hesitation.

"Dinner first at your cafe?"

"Great. Does this mean everything is all right between us?"

"No." He was surprised at her assumption.

"Oh." The line was silent for a moment. "See you in twenty minutes."

"Fifteen?"

Night had fallen quickly around the cafe terrace, as it does in the mountains, and they sipped in silence the last of their brandy. Jemima had been careful to make no allusions to their time together in Long far away, and he failed to notice the inset of cool air slipping down from the flanks of Eiger.

"Jonathan?"

"Hm-m?"

"Am I forgiven?"

He shook his head slowly. "That isn't the point. I would never again be able to trust you."

"And you would want to?"

"Sure."

"Then you're really saying we might have made something of it."

"I'm pretty sure we could have."

"And now no chance? Ever?"

He did not answer.

"You're a warped man. And you know something else? You haven't kissed me yet."

He corrected the oversight. As their faces drew slowly apart, Jemima sighed, "Corn in Egypt, man. I didn't know lips had a memory of their own."

They watched the last yellow light desert the ragged crests surrounding them.

"Jonathan? About that business at your home..."

"I don't want to talk about it."

"It wasn't really the money that hurt you, was it? I mean—we were so good together. All day long, I mean. Not just in bed. Hey, you want to know something?"

"Tell me."

She laughed at herself. "Even after taking your money, I had to overcome an impulse to go back and make love to you again before I left. That would really have made you angry when you found out, wouldn't it?"

"Yes. Really."

"Say, how's the crazy one? What's his name?"

"Mr. Monk? I don't know. I haven't been back for some time."

"Oh?" She knew that bode poorly for her.

"No." Jonathan stood up. "I assume your room has a bed."

"It's pretty narrow."

"We'll work it out."

She knew better than bring up the past again that night.

KLEINE SCHEIDEGG: July 8

He took a late supper in the hotel dining room at a table somewhat apart from the thin scattering of patrons.

He was not pleased with himself. He felt he had handled the Jemima business badly. They had risen early, taken a walk through the tilted meadows, watched the dew make the tips of their shoes glisten, taken coffee on the terrace of her cafe, chatted nonsense, made jokes at the expense of passersby.

Then they shook hands, and he left for his hotel. The whole thing was unclean. Particles of emotion clung to their relationship. She was a presence down there in the village, waiting, and he was annoyed with himself for not making a clean break. He knew now that he would not punish her for her perfidy, but he also knew that he would never forgive her for it. He could not remember ever having forgiven anyone.

Several of the guests had dressed for dinner—early-arrived Eiger Birds. Jonathan noticed that half of the terrace telescopes had been roped off for the private—and costly—use of people nominated by the hotel management.

He pushed food around his plate without appetite. There were too many unsettled things churning at the back of his mind. There was Jemima, and the sanction assignment, and the knowledge that Mellough might have alerted his target, and the despised Eiger Birds. Twice he had noticed himself being pointed out by men in tuxedos to their young/pretty/dumb companions. One middle-aged ogler had waved him a tentative semaphore of greeting with her napkin.

It was with relief that he heard a familiar voice booming through the dining room from the lobby beyond.

"Goddam my ass if this ain't something! What the hell you mean you ain't got a room for me?"

Jonathan abandoned his coffee and brandy and crossed the dining room to the desk. The hotel manager, a tight little Swiss with the nervous propriety of his class, was attempting to calm Big Ben down.

"My dear Herr Bowman—"

"Dear Herr's ass! Just stick your nose back in that book and come up with my reservations. Hey, ol' buddy! You're looking good!"

Jonathan gripped Ben's paw. "What's the trouble?"

"Oh, this rinky-dink's screwed up my reservations. Says he can't find my telegram. From the looks of him, he couldn't find his tallywhacker with a six-man scouting party."

Jonathan realized what was going on. "The Eiger Birds are starting to fly in," he explained.

"Oh, I see."

"And our friend here is doing everything he can to create vacancies he can sell to them at inflated prices." Jonathan turned to the listening manager. "Isn't that it?"

"I didn't know this person was a friend of yours, Dr. Hemlock."

"He's in charge of the climb."

"Oh?" the manager asked with extravagant innocence. "Is someone going to climb our mountain?"

"Stop it."

"Perhaps Herr Bowman could find a place in the village? There are cafes that—"

"He's going to stay here."

"I am afraid that is impossible, Herr Doctor." The manager's lips pursed tightly.

"All right." Jonathan drew out his wallet. "Make up my bill."

"But, if you leave..."

"There will be no climb. That's correct. And your incoming guests will be very angry."

The manager was the essence of agonized indecision.

"Do you know what I think?" Jonathan said. "I think I saw one of your clerks sorting a batch of telegrams in your inner office. It's possible that Mr. Bowman's was among them. Why don't you go back and look them over."

The manager grasped at the offer to save face and left them with a perfunctory bow.

"You met the others yet?" Ben asked, looking around the lobby with the undisguised distaste of a competitor.

"They haven't arrived."

"No shit? Well, they'll be in tomorrow then. Personally, I can use the rest. My hoof's been acting up the last couple of days. Gave it too much workout while you were at the place."

"How's George Hotfort?"

"Quiet."

"Is she grateful that I didn't turn her over to the authorities?"

"I guess. She ain't the kind to burn candles."

The manager returned and performed a masque of surprised delight. He had found Ben's telegram after all, and everything was in order.

"You want to go directly to your room?" Jonathan asked as the uniformed bellhops collected Ben's luggage.

"No. Guide me to the bar and buy me some beer." They talked late into the night, mostly about the technical problems of the Eigerwand. Twice Ben brought up the Mellough incident, but both times Jonathan turned him back, saying they could talk about it later, maybe after the climb. Since he had arrived in Switzerland, Jonathan had come more and more to believe that he would make the climb. For long periods of time, he forgot what his real mission was. But this fascination was too expensive a luxury, so before turning in for the night he asked to borrow again all the correspondence between Ben and the climbers who would arrive the next morning.

Jonathan sat up in his bed, the letters arranged in three stacks on the blankets, one for each man. His concentration circumscribed by the tight pool of his bedside lamp, sipping at a glass of Laphroaig, he tried to fashion personalities from the scant evidence of the correspondence.

Jean-Paul Bidet. Forty-two years old. A wealthy manufacturer who had by dint of unsparing work expanded his father's modest shop into France's foremost producer of aerosol containers. He had married rather late, and had discovered the sport of mountain climbing while on his honeymoon in the Alps. He had no climbing experience outside Europe, but his list of Alpine conquests was formidable. He had made most of his major climbs in the company of famous and expensive guides, and to a degree it was possible to accuse him of "buying" the peaks.

From the tone of his letters, written in a businessman's English, Bidet seemed congenial, energetic, and earthy. Jonathan was surprised to discover that he intended to bring his wife along to witness his attempt at the meanest mountain of them all.

Karl Freytag. Twenty-six years old. Sole heir to the Freytag industrial complex specializing in commercial chemicals, particularly insecticides and herbicides. He had begun climbing during college holidays, and before he was twenty he had formed an organization of German climbers over which he presided and which published a most respectable quarterly review of mountaineering. He was its editor-in-chief. There was a packet of offset reprints from the review that described his climbs (in the third person) and accented his capacities as a leader and route-finder.

His letters were written in a brittle, perfect English that did not admit of contractions. The underlying timbre suggested that Freytag was willing to cooperate with Herr Bowman and with the international committee that had sponsored the climb, but the reader was often reminded that he, Freytag, had conceived of the climb, and that it was his intention to lead the team on the face.

Anderl Meyer. Twenty-five years old. He had lacked the means to finish his medical studies in Vienna and had returned to earning his living as a carpenter with his father. During the climbing season he guided parties up his native Tyrolean Alps. This made him the only professional in the team. Immediately upon being forced to leave school, Meyer had become obsessed with climbing. By every means from scrimping to begging, he had managed to include himself in most of the major climbs of the last three years. Jonathan had read references to his activities in the Alps, New Zealand, the Himalayas, South America, and most recently in the Atlas Range. Every article had contained unreserved praise for his skill and strength (he was even referred to as a "young Hermann Buhl") but several writers had alluded to his tendency to be a loner and a poor team man, treating the less gifted members of his parties as anchors against his progress. He was what in gambling would be called a plunger. Turning back was, for him, the ultimate disgrace; and he would make moves on the face that would be suicide for men of more limited physical and psychic dispositions. Similar aspersions had been cast on Jonathan, during his years of active climbing.

Jonathan could form only the vaguest image of Meyer's personality from the letters. The veil of translation obscured the man; his English was stilted and imperfect, often comically obtuse because he translated directly from the German syntax, dictionary obviously in hand, and there were occasional medleys of compounded nouns that strung meaninglessly along until a sudden terminal verb tamped them into a kind of order. One quality, however, did emerge through the static of translation: a shy confidence.

Jonathan sat in bed, looking at the piles of letters and sipping his Scotch. Bidet, Freytag, Meyer. And whoever it was might have been alerted by Mellough.

KLEINE SCHEIDEGG: July 9

He slept late. By the time he had dressed and shaved, the sun was high and the dew was off the meadow that tilts up toward the north face of Eiger. In the lobby he passed a chatting group of young people, their eyes cleansed, their faces tightened by the crisp thin air. They had been out frolicking in the hills, and their heavy sweaters still exuded a chill.

The hotel manager stepped around the desk and spoke confidentially. "They are here, Herr Doctor. They await you."

Jonathan nodded and continued to the dining room entrance. He scanned the room and discovered the group immediately. They sat near the floor-to-ceiling windows that gave onto the mountain; their table was flooded with brilliant sunlight, and their colorful pullovers were the only relief from the dim and sparsely populated room. It looked as though Ben had assumed, as the natural privilege of his experience and age, social command of the gathering.

The men rose as Jonathan approached. Ben made introductions.

"Jonathan Hemlock, this here's Gene-Paul Bidette." He clearly was not going to have anything to do with these phony foreign pronunciations.

Jonathan offered his hand. "Monsieur Bidet."

"I have looked forward to meeting you, Monsieur Hemlock." Bidet's slanted peasant eyes were frankly evaluative.

"And this is Karl Freytag." Amused, Jonathan matched the unnecessary force of Freytag's grip. "Herr Freytag?"

"Herr Doctor." He nodded curtly and sat down. "And this here's Anderil Mayor." Jonathan smiled professional approval into Meyer's wry, clear blue eyes. "I've read about you, Anderl," he said in German.

"I've read about you," Anderl answered in his soft Austrian accent.

"In which case," Jonathan said, "we have read about each other." Anderl grinned.

"And this lady here is Missus Bidette." Ben sat down immediately his uncomfortable social duty was discharged.

Jonathan pressed the offered fingers and saw his reflection in her dark sunglasses. "Madame Bidet?" She dipped her head slightly in a gesture that was, at one time, a greeting, a shrug at being Madame Bidet, and a favorable evaluation of Jonathan—a gesture altogether Parisienne.

"We just been small-talking and eyeballing the hill," Ben explained after Jonathan had sent the waiter after a fresh pot of coffee.

"I had no idea this mountain Jean-Paul has been talking about for a year now would be so beautiful," Madame Bidet said, taking off her sunglasses for the first time that morning and letting her calm eyes rest on Jonathan.

He glanced up at the Eiger's cold, shadowed face and the long wisps of captured cloud at the summit. "I would not say beautiful," Bidet offered. "Sublime, perhaps. But not beautiful."

"It is the possibility of conflict and conquest that is beautiful," Freytag clarified for all time and for all people.

Anderl peered at the mountain and shrugged. Obviously he had never thought of a mountain as beautiful or ugly: only as difficult or easy.

"Is that all you are having for breakfast, Herr Doctor?" Freytag asked as Jonathan's coffee was served.

"Yes."

"Food is an important part of conditioning," Freytag admonished.

"I'll bear that in mind."

"Meyer here shares your peculiar eating habits."

"Oh? I didn't know you were acquainted."

"Oh, yes," the German said. "I contacted him shortly after I organized this climb, and we have made several short climbs together to attune him to my rhythms."

"And you to his, I assume."

Bidet reacted to the cool tone of the exchange by inserting a hasty note of warmth and camaraderie. "We must all use first names. Don't you agree?"

"I'm afraid I don't know your wife's first name," Jonathan said.

"Anna," she offered.

Jonathan said the full name to himself and repressed a smile that only a native English speaker would understand.

"How are the weather reports?" Karl asked Ben officially.

"Not real good. Clear today; maybe tomorrow. But there's a bunch of weak fronts moving in on us that makes it pretty dicey after that."

"Well, that settles it," Karl announced.

"What does that settle?" Jonathan asked between sips of coffee.

"We must go now."

"Have I time to finish my coffee?"

"I mean, we must go as soon as possible." Ben squinted at Karl incredulously. "With the possibility of a storm in three days?"

"It has been climbed in two." Karl was crisp and on the defensive.

"And if you don't make it in two? If you're pinned down up there in heavy weather?"

"Benjamin has a point there," Jean-Paul interposed. "We must not take childish risks."

The word "childish" rankled Karl. "One cannot climb without some risk. Perhaps the young face these risks more easily."

Jonathan glanced from the mountain to Ben, who turned down the corners of his mouth, closed his eyes, and shook his head heavily.

Anderl had not been a part of this discussion. Indeed, his attention was fixed on a group of attractive young girls out on the terrace. Jonathan asked his opinion on the advisability of climbing with a two-day weather limit. Anderl thrust out his lower lip and shrugged. He did not care whether they climbed in good weather or bad. Either would be interesting. But if they were not going to climb today or tomorrow, he had other things he might give his attention to.

Jonathan liked him.

"So we reach an impasse," Karl said. "Two in favor of climbing right now, and two opposed. The dilemma of the democratic process. What compromise do you suggest? That we climb halfway up?" His voice was heavy with Teutonic wit.

"It's three opposed," Jonathan corrected. "Ben has a vote."

"But he will not be climbing with us."

"He's our ground man. Until we touch rock, he has more than a vote; he has complete control."

"Oh? Has that been decided upon?"

Anderl spoke without taking his eyes from the girls on the terrace. "It is always like that," he said with authority. "The ground man has the last word now, and the leader once we are on the face."

"Very well," Karl said to cut off discussion on a point he was losing. "That brings us to another issue. Who is to be leader?" Karl glanced around the table, ready to defend himself against any opposition.

Jonathan poured himself another cup and gestured with the pot; his offer of coffee was declined by Karl with a brusque shake of the head, by Jean-Paul who put his hand over his cup, by Anna with a movement of her fingertips, by Anderl who was paying no attention, and by Ben with a grimace, his beer mug still a quarter full. "I thought it was pretty much set that you would lead, Karl," Jonathan said quietly.

"And so it was. But that decision was reached before the American member of the team had his unfortunate accident and was replaced by a man of such international repute—up until a few years ago, at least."

Jonathan could not repress a smile.

"So that we start off with a firm understanding," Karl continued, "I want to make sure everyone is in agreement about who shall lead."

"You make a good point," Jean-Paul said. "It is true that Jonathan has climbed the mountain twice before."

Gallic reasonableness was countered with Teutonic exactitude. "A correction, if I may. The good doctor has failed to climb the mountain twice. I don't mean to offend you, Herr Doctor, but I am forced to say that I do not consider a record of failure automatically grants you the right to lead."

"I'm not offended. Is it all that important to you that you lead?"

"It is important to our group. I have spent months designing a new route that departs in significant ways from the classic ascent. I am sure that once I have gone over it with you, you will all agree it is well thought out and quite feasible. And taking the face by a new route will put us in the record books."

"And that's important to you?"

Karl glanced at him with surprise. "Of course."

Anderl had pushed his chair away from the table and was watching the power struggle with amusement in the folds of his thin, heavily tanned face.

Anna relieved her boredom by shifting her glance from Jonathan to Karl, the two natural leaders of the group. Jonathan sensed she was making a choice.

"Why don't we leave it at this," Jean-Paul said, moderating. "This afternoon we shall all go over the route you have planned, Karl. If it looks good to us, then you will be leader on the mountain. But until we are on the face, Benjamin will be in command."

Karl agreed, certain the appeal of his new route would convince them. Ben concurred with a glum glance at Karl. Jonathan agreed. And Anderl didn't care one way or the other.

"So!" Jean-Paul clapped his hands together to punctuate the end of what had been, for him, an unpleasant encounter. "Now we will take our coffee and become better acquainted with one another. Right?"

"Oh?" said Jonathan. "I had assumed that you and Karl were already acquainted."

"How so?" Jean-Paul asked, smiling.

"In a business way, I had imagined. Your company makes aerosol containers, his produces pesticides. It would seem natural that..." Jonathan shrugged.

Karl frowned at the mention of pesticides.

"Ah! I see," Jean-Paul said. "Yes, I can see that it would be a natural error. As a matter of fact, our meeting here is the first. It is sheerest coincidence that we are in related industries."

Anna glanced out the window and spoke to no one in particular. "In fact, I had assumed that every manufacturer of liquids in Europe had been to our house at one time or another."

Jean-Paul laughed and winked at Jonathan. "She finds some of my colleagues a little dull."

"Oh?" Jonathan asked, wide-eyed.

The conversation turned to social trivialities, and after fifteen minutes of this Ben rose and excused himself, saying he wanted to check over the equipment. Anderl decided to help him, and the two of them went off.

Jonathan watched Ben depart with his characteristic hyper-energetic hopping gait with which he compensated for his limp. A thought crossed his mind.

"I hear you were injured last month," he said conversationally to Karl.

"Yes. A fall. Nothing really."

"It was your leg, I believe."

"Yes. I cut it against a rock. I assure you it will not hamper my climbing in the least"

"Good."

Karl and Jean-Paul fell to chatting about mountains they had both climbed, comparing routes and events. Jonathan had an opportunity to sit back with his cup and examine the three of them at his leisure. There had been nothing in the behavior of any member of the team to suggest he knew what Jonathan was and why he was there.

Anna Bidet's thoughts had turned inward, hidden behind the long lashes which veiled her quick, intelligent eyes. For some time she had been withdrawn, quite content with the company of her own mind. From time to time she would focus out on the men around her and listen for a moment before deciding there was nothing to interest her in the conversation, then she would dissolve back into herself. Jonathan let his eyes rest on her. Her clothes, her rare comments, her glances occasionally flashing in question or amusement, then eclipsing with a sudden drop of the lashes—everything was studied and effective. She was at one time dignified and provocative, a combination that is the exclusive property of Parisian women of a certain class and age.

She emerged from her reverie with the feel of Jonathan's gaze upon her. She returned it frankly and with amusement.

"An interesting combination," she said quietly.

"What is?"

"Art critic, scholar, and mountain climber. And I'm sure there's more to you than that."

"What do you make of it?"

"Nothing."

Jonathan nodded and turned his attention to Jean-Paul, who obviously did not come from her world. His recent wealth fit him like his clothes, a little imperfectly because he lacked the panache to dominate them. He was over age for a major climb, but there was no fat on his sturdy agricultural body. One eye dropped down like a tragic clown's, but his expression was alive with intelligence and conviviality. His nose made a long, thin line starting rather too far up above the eyes and taking a capricious jog to one side about halfway down. The mouth was crooked and mobile enough to grant him that facial plasticity so intrinsic to a French peasant's communication. All in all, the face looked as though Nature had designed a perfectly nondescript mold, then had laid its palm against the muzzle while the clay was fresh and had given a slight twist to the left.

Jonathan appreciated his qualities. His dislike of conflict and his logical moderation made him the ideal lubricant among the dynamic and aggressive personalities common to climbing. It was a pity that he was a cuckold—at least an emotional cuckold. Jonathan pictured him with a nightcap, a candlestick in one hand, and a pispot in the other.

It was an unkind image, so he shifted his attention to Karl Freytag who at that moment was carefully and significantly advancing an argument proving that the route Jean-Paul had taken up the Dru the season before had been poorly chosen. When Jean-Paul laughed and said, "All I know is that it got me to the summit and back!" Karl shrugged, unwilling to continue reasoning with a man who took the matter so lightly.

Karl's face was broad and regular, but too immobile to be interesting; he was handsome without being attractive. His blond—really colorless—hair was fine and lank, and he combed it back in a flat pompadour from his wide, aggressively intelligent forehead. He was the tallest man in the party by two inches, and his excellent body tone enabled him to maintain his rigid sitting posture without appearing foolish.

"Well!" Jean-Paul said, breaking off his chat with Karl and turning to Jonathan and Anna. "You two don't seem to have been chatting."

"We were comparing silences," Jonathan said, "and hers turned out more interesting than mine."

"She's a remarkable woman." Jean-Paul looked at his wife with undisguised pride.

"I believe that."

"She was in ballet before her unfortunate marriage, you know." Jean-Paul was in the habit of protecting himself by beating others to the assumption that the union had been socially and emotionally morganatic. It was not only that he was a manufacturer; his company made a comically common household article.

Anna laughed softly. "Jean-Paul likes to think he snatched me from the stage at the height of my career. Actually, age and declining popularity were working toward the same goal."

"Nonsense!" Jean-Paul asserted. "No one could ever guess your age. How old do you think she is, Jonathan?"

Jonathan was embarrassed for both of them.

"My husband admires frankness, Doctor Hemlock. He considers tact to be a kind of deviousness."

"No but. Come on, Jonathan. How old would you say Anna is?"

Jonathan lifted his hands palms up in a gesture of helplessness. "I—ah—imagine a man would only consider her age if he were trying to decide whether the praise should go to Nature or to the lady herself."

It had not been very good, but Anna applauded mockingly, soundlessly tapping the tips of three fingers into her palm.

Sensing that nothing of consequence was going to be talked about here, Karl rose and excused himself. Jean-Paul moved down one chair to tighten the party.

"It is certainly magnificent," he said, looking dreamily out to the Eiger. "It's a perfect choice for my last mountain."

"Your last?"

"I am no longer young, Jonathan. Think of it! At forty-two, I shall be the oldest man to climb it. These two young men are fantastic climbers. We shall have our work cut out, you and I. You are—forgive me but—you are...?"

"Thirty-seven."

"Ah! Just my wife's age!"

She closed her eyes and opened them tiredly.

To change the subject, Jonathan asked, "Are you interested in climbing, Anna?"

"Not especially."

"But she will be proud of me when I return, won't you, dearest?"

"Very proud."

"I don't know when I've felt so good," Jean-Paul said, stretching his arms athletically and allowing one to drop across Anna's shoulders. "I feel I have achieved the best conditioning possible at my age. Each night for the past six months I have performed a complicated set of calisthenics. And I have been religious about them. I work so late that my poor wife is usually asleep when I join her." He laughed and patted her.

"By now she must be very eager," Jonathan said, "to see you make the climb."

Anna glanced at him, then looked away to the windows which were beginning to dapple with a light rain.

From habit Jean-Paul cursed the break in the weather, but his experience in these Bernese Alps told him that the preceding sunshine, not this rain, was the exception.

"This will bring fresh snow to the upper reaches," he said matter-of-factly.

"Yes, some," Jonathan agreed. He refilled his cup and excused himself to step out onto the terrace where he stood under an overhanging eave and enjoyed the smell of the rain.

The sky was zinc, and the color of the few gnarled evergreens that clung to the rocky soil of Kleine Scheidegg had been subtracted to olive drab by the loss of sunlight. There was no wind, and he sipped his coffee and listened to the rustle of rain in the meadow grass.

They were a cool lot. One of them, at least, was cool. He had met the possible sanction targets, but no gesture, no nervousness, no glance had given him a hint. Jonathan would be on dicey ground until Search contacted him with the target's identity.

Gray and listless mists concealed the upper third of the North Face. He recalled the ghoulish pun German sports writers resurrected each time a team attempted the Eiger. Instead of Nordwand, North Wall, they called it the Mordwand, Murder Wall. The days were past when German and Austrian youths threw their lives against the Eigerwand with reckless Wagnerian Todeslieb; great names had mastered the face: Hermann Buhl, Lionel Terray, Gaston Rebuffat; and dozens of lesser men had climbed it, each eroding, with his success, a fragment of the glory accruing to the task; but nonetheless, as he stood in the half-shelter sipping his coffee and looking across the meadow, Jonathan experienced an expanding desire to try again the face that had twice driven him back.

On his way up to Ben's room, he passed Anderl in the corridor, and they exchanged nods of greeting. He had taken an instant liking to this short, sinewy lad with his mop of dark hair so obviously unused to the comb, and his long strong fingers designed by nature for finding and clinging to the smallest indentations in the rock. It would be too bad if Anderl turned out to be the sanction target.

His knock at Ben's door was answered by a booming, "Fuck off!"

Jonathan opened the door and peeked in.

"Oh, it's you, ol' buddy. Come on in. And lock the door behind you."

Jonathan moved a coil of nylon line off the spare bed and stretched out. "Why the fierce greeting?"

Ben had been packing the haversacks, evenly distributing the weight, but making sure each pair of kits contained every necessity for a good bivouac, should the team break into two climbing ropes. "Oh, I thought you were one of those reporters." He grumbled something to himself as he snatched tight a strap. Then, "Goddam my eyes if they ain't been pecking at my door every five minutes. There's even a newsreel team here. Did you know that?"

"No. But I'm not surprised. The Eiger Birds are here in force now. The hotel's filled up and they're spilling over into Alpiglen and Grindelwald."

"Fucking ghouls."

"But the fattest cats of all are right here in the hotel."

Ben tied off one of the haversacks with a grunt, "Like who?"

Jonathan mentioned the names of a Greek merchant and his recently-acquired American society wife. The management of the hotel had erected a large rectangular oriental tent that gave onto one of the telescopes on the terrace. The tent was hung in silk and equipped with heaters and a small refrigerator, and the telescope had been reserved for their personal use, after being scrubbed down carefully with disinfectant. Every social precaution had been taken to insulate them from the company of the lesser Eiger Birds, but the Greek's penchant for lavish waste and gross practical jokes had instantly attracted the attention of the press.

Jonathan noticed a powerful brass telescope in the corner of the room. "You bring that with you?"

"Sure. You figure I'm going to line up with a pocketful of coins to watch you on the face?"

"I'm afraid you're going to have to make your peace with the newsmen."

"Why?"

"It would be best if you kept them informed, once" we're on the hill. Just basic statistics: how high we are, the weather, our route—things like that."

"Tell 'em nothing, that's my motto. Fuck 'em."

"No. I think you should cooperate a little. If you don't, they'll make copy out of their imaginations."

Ben tied off the last of the kits and opened a bottle of beer from his supply on the dresser. "Whew! I've been busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. But I got you people ready to move out at a minute's notice. There's a report of a cone of high pressure moving in, and you know that bitch-kitty of a hill ain't going to give you more than two or three days of weather." He tossed a ring of ice pitons off his bed and stretched out.

Jonathan asked for his evaluation of the climbers, and Ben screwed up his face. "I don't know. Too much of a mixed bag for my taste. That German kid's too cocky-assed."

"I have a feeling he's a good climber, though."

"Could be. But he ain't many grins in a bivouac. He's got all the makings of a first-class snot. Doesn't seem to realize that we were making major climbs when he was still shitting yellow. Now that Austrian boy—"

"Anderl."

"Yeah, Anderl. Now, he's a climber. He's got the right look. Kinda looks like you did." Ben leaned up on one elbow and added pointedly. "Thirteen years ago."

"All right. All right."

"Hey, ol' buddy? Toss your poor crippled friend another can of beer?"

Jonathan grunted up and did so, noticing for the first time that Ben was drinking American beer, an extravagance in Switzerland. But like most big American beer drinkers, Ben had no taste for the relatively thick German product. Jonathan leaned against the window and watched the rain. He saw Anderl out on the meadow, his arm around a girl who had his jacket over her head. They were returning to the hotel. "What do you think about Jean-Paul, Ben?"

"Not so good. The way I peg it, you are just a gnat's ass inside the age limit for this kind of go. And he's on the other side of the line."

Jonathan did not agree. "He looks to me like he has a lot of staying power. There's generations of peasant endurance in the man."

"If you say so, ol' buddy." Ben swung his legs down and sat up, his tone changing suddenly, like a man who is finally getting to the point. "Back at my place you said that maybe you wouldn't be making this climb after all. Is that still the way it is?"

Jonathan sat on the windowsill. "I don't know. There's a job I have to do here. The climbing's really only side action."

"Pretty big league, for side action."

"True."

"What kind of job?"

Jonathan looked into Ben's laugh-lined face. There was no way to tell him. Out beyond the window there were islets of snow on the meadow being grayed and decayed by the ram. "The skiers must be cursing this rain," he said for something to say.

"What kind of job?" Ben persisted. "Does it have something to do with that Mellough guy?"

"Only obliquely. Forget it, Ben."

"Kinda hard to forget. After you left, all hell broke loose at the lodge. There were government men all over the place, talking tough and generally making asses of themselves. They were scouting out in the desert and getting themselves lost and organizing patrols and cutting around with helicopters. They had the whole county in an uproar before they were through."

Jonathan smiled to himself at the image of a CII operation of this type: all the coordination of a joint Arab/Italian invasion. "They call it undercover work, Ben."

"Is that what they call it? What happened out there anyway? When you brought back the shotgun, it had been fired. And no one ever saw Mellough and his boyfriend again."

"I don't want to talk about it. I have to do what I do, Ben. Without it, I would lose my house and things I have spent years collecting."

"So? You lose your house. You could still teach. You like teaching, don't you?"

Jonathan looked at Ben. He had never really thought about whether or not he liked teaching. "No, I don't think so. I like being around good heads that appreciate my mind and taste, but as for simple teaching—no. It's just a job."

Ben was silent for a time. He finished the beet and crushed the can in his hand. "Let's call off the climb," he said firmly. "We'll tell 'em you're sick or something. Trouble with hemorrhoids, maybe."

"My Achilles anus? No way, Ben. Forget it." Jonathan wiped the haze from the window with the back of his hand and peered out at the misted mountain. "You know what's weird, Ben?"

"You."

"No. What's really weird is that I want another shot at the hill. Even forgetting the thing I have to do here, it's something I really want to do. You understand the feeling?"

Ben fiddled for a moment with a coil of nylon line. "Of course I understand it. But I'll tell you something, ol' buddy. The sweet smell of decay is heavy in the air."

Jonathan nodded.

Conversation among the team at luncheon centered on the weather, which had settled to a steady, plump rain which occasional gusts of wind rattled against the windows. They knew it would bring fresh snow to the Third Ice Field and, higher, to the White Spider. Much depended on the temperature on the face. If it was cold, and the snow dry and powdery, it would slip off in regular hissing slides, leaving the glaciated perennial ice and neve clean enough for a climb. If, on the other hand, the temperature should rise and make the snow moist and cohesive, it would build up, poising on the 60° inclines of the ice fields, ready to avalanche at the slightest disturbance.

Ben knew Jonathan had studied the surface of the North Face during his conditioning climb up the west flank two days before.

"Could you see much?"

"Yes. The weather was clear."

"Well?" asked Karl.

"It looked fine, for Eiger. The snow was old and crusted. And the whole face was dryer than I've ever seen it." Jonathan was referring to the inexplicable "drying up" of the North Wall that had been in progress over the past thirty years. Pitches that had been expansive snowfields in the late thirties were wet and icy rock by the end of the fifties. "One good thing. The Hinterstoisser Traverse was almost clear of ice."

"That does not affect us," Karl announced. "My route does not include the Hinterstoisser Traverse."

Even the phlegmatic Anderl shared the general silence this statement generated. Jonathan's cup of chocolate hovered for an instant in its rise to his lips, but he recovered quickly and sipped without comment, denying Karl the pleasure of shocking him. That Traverse, to which a young German had given his name in death, had been the key to all successful ascents of the mountain. No team had ever bypassed that critical bridge and made the summit, and only one team that had dared returned alive.

"I shall detail my route after luncheon," Karl said, shunting away the negative silence.

With a gentle smile concealing his thoughts, Jonathan watched Karl over his cup for a moment, then he shifted his attention to the meadow and the mountain beyond.

The climbing team had reserved a table overlooking the meadow, and they generally sat with their backs to the restaurant, trying to ignore the presence of the Eiger Birds who, by now, had arrived en masse.

Several times during each meal, waiters had arrived with notes from the more affluent or aggressive Eiger Birds inviting the climbers to supper or to some evening entertainment which, if accepted, would have elevated the host in the eyes of his peers. These notes were always passed to Ben who took pleasure in slowly tearing them up unread in full view of the smiling, waving sender.

The discerning ornithologist would have distinguished three species of Eiger Bird among the flittering gathering that babbled in half a dozen languages.

The gratin of the Eiger Bird society were internationally famous idlers who had flown in from midsummer Stapes on their annual pleasure migrations to have their sensation-drained nerves tickled by the sexual stimulant of death. They had gathered from all parts of the world, but not one had come from those once-popular refuges that have been contaminated by middle-class imitators: the Riviera, Acapulco, the Bahamas, the Azores, and, most recently lost to upward social mobility, the Morocco coast. Their pecking order was rigid, and each new arrival stepped obediently into his place, more defined by who belonged beneath him than by who belonged above. The Greek merchant and his wife assumed as their fiscal right the apex of the social pyramid; fragile-blooded and thin-faced Italian nobility with limited means were at the bottom.

A lower subspecies of leisure necrophiles were much more numerous. They were easily distinguishable by the garishness of their plumage and the tense and temporary nature of their mating habits. There were paunchy men with purplish tans, cigars, thinning hair, and loud, awkward gestures designed to communicate youthful energy. They were to be seen during feeding time fumbling after their teatty, sponsored companions who giggled and went vacant in the face when touched.

The female of this subspecies were women of uncertain age, crisp of feature, monotonically dyed hair, skin tight at the temples from cosmetic surgery. Their alert and mistrusting eyes darted to follow the dark Greek and Sicilian boys they carried with them and used.

And on the fringes, virile lesbians protected and dominated their fluttering lace-and-mauve possessions. And male homosexuals bickered and made up.

The lowest order of Eiger Bird was the newspaper and television men who fed on the orts and droppings of the others. They were conspicuous by their clannishness and their inexpensive clothes, often rumpled as a badge of their romantic migratory lives. For the most part they were a glib and overdrinking lot who took cynical advantage of the reduced rates offered them by the hotel in return for the advertisement value of the Kleine Scheidegg dateline.

Film actors formed an interconnecting subculture of their own. Lacking the fiscal credentials to associate with the elite, they carried with them a communicable visibility that made them valuable to all who would be seen and read about. Actors were not treated as people, but as social possessions. In this way, they resembled Grand Prix drivers.

One exception to this general status of film personalities was a husband and wife team who, because of their accumulated wealth and personal brass, were a kind of gratin in their own right. Since their arrival at the hotel that morning, an arrival attended by great flutter and flap, loud greetings of casual acquaintances, and histrionic overtipping, they had made two overtures to the climbers, both of which had been parried. The actor had responded to the rejection with heroic resignation; the actress had been loudly miffed, but had recovered her aplomb when she heard that the Greek merchant's wife had done no better.

Different from the Eiger Birds, and alien to them, were a small group of young men who had been attracted to Kleine Scheidegg by the rumor of the ascent. These were the only people with whom the team had intercourse or sympathy. In shy twos and threes, young climbers had arrived by train and motorcycle from Austria, Germany, and Chamonix to set up their red or yellow tents on the meadow, or to rent rooms in the cheaper cafes of Alpiglen and Grindelwald. Feeling out of place among the rich hotel guests, they quietly sought out Ben to mumble good wishes and shake hands. Many of them slipped bits of paper into Ben's palm containing their addresses or the locations of their tents, then they departed quickly, always refusing offered refreshment. The scribbled notes were for Ben's use if it became necessary to form a rescue party. All these climbers knew the reputation of the Bernese guides, and they knew that a man on the face could freeze to death before necessary financial arrangements could be worked out. The more forward of these young men ventured to shake hands with Jonathan or Anderl, the two members of the party of whom they had read in mountain journals. This did not please Karl.

Throughout the meal, Anderl amused himself by eye-fencing with two little twits who had arrived with a merchant type with a loud voice and a penchant for prehensile attention. The merchant made clear his annoyance at the flirtation, and this amused Anderl the more.

Ben's eyes twinkled with paternal teasing as he said to Anderl, "Now you watch it, boy. You're going to need all your energy on the hill."

Anderl answered without looking away from the girls. "I climb only with my hands and feet."

Jonathan finished his coffee and rose, promising to meet the others in Ben's room in half an hour to go over Karl's proposed route. Anna got up too; she had no intention of boring herself with the forthcoming planning session. Together they walked to the lobby where Jonathan picked up his mail. One envelope had neither stamp nor postmark, so he tore it open first and glanced at the note. It was an invitation to an intimate supper with the Greek merchant and his American wife. Mentioned also (in the wife's round, plump hand) was the fact that they had recently purchased a lot of paintings through Sotheby's. She would be delighted to have Jonathan glance them over and make an evaluation. She reminded him that he had once performed a similar service for her first husband.

Jonathan stepped to the desk and hastily wrote a note. He mentioned that evaluation was a professional, not social, activity for him. He added that he had to decline the offer of supper as he would be involved in preparations for the climb and, anyway, he was suffering from a debilitating hangnail.

Anna looked at him quizzically from the other side of the elevator car, her habitual expression of defensive amusement crinkling her eyes.

"That must have given you pleasure."

"You read over my shoulder?"

"Of course. You're very like my husband, you know."

"Would he have declined an invitation from those people?"

"Never! His self-image would have driven him to accept."

"Then how am I similar?"

"You also acted without choice. Your self-image forced you to decline." She paused at the door to her suite. "Would you care to come in for a moment?"

"I think not, thank you."

She shrugged. "As you wish. Opportunities to decline seem to abound for you today."

"If I read the signs correctly, I am not the one you've selected anyway."

She arched her eyebrows, but did not respond. "I assume it's Karl," he continued.

"And you also assume it is any concern of yours?"

"I have to climb with both of them. Be discreet."

"I thought you were usually paid for your evaluations." She entered her room and closed the door behind her.

Jonathan sat in a deep chair beside the window. He had just finished a smoke and was in full relax. On his lap was a small bundle of mail that had, from the evidence of superimposed postal hieroglyphics, been chasing him for some time. The rain, mixed now with dancing pebbles of hail, drilled against the window in treble timpani, and the light filling the room was greenish-gray and chill.

He went through his mail listlessly.

From the chairman of his department: "...and I'm pleased to be able to announce a considerable salary increase for the next academic year. Of course, it is impossible to reflect in dollars the value..."

Yeah, Yeah. Flip. Into the wastepaper basket.

A bill on the house. Flip.

"The administration has granted a mandate to form a special committee on student unrest, with particular emphasis on the task of channeling this social energy into productive and..."

Flip. He missed the basket. It was his practice never to serve on committees.

A bill on the house. Flip.

The journal was in dire need of his article on Lautrec. Flip.

The last was a postage-free official envelope from the American Embassy in Bern. It contained a photocopy of a cryptogram from Dragon.

"Message starts... Hemlock... break... Search has had no success in designating your objective... break... Alternate plan now in operation... break... Have placed details in the hands of Clement Pope... break... Plan will crystalize for you tomorrow... break... Can anything be done to decrease the attention the news media have given to your proposed climb... question mark... break... Miss Brown remains outside our cognizance... break... best regards... break, break... Message ends."

Flip.

Jonathan relaxed into the depths of his chair and watched the hail pebbles ricochet up from the windowsill. Two basso rolls of thunder caused his attention to strain through the clatter of rain and hail. He wanted very much to hear the heavy rumble of an avalanche on the face, because if avalanches did not scrub the face clean of amassed snow and poised rubble...

He would have to do something definite about Jemima.

It was all piling up on him.

He rolled another smoke.

What was Dragon's purpose in putting Pope in charge of designating the target? Despite his mannerisms of the B-movie detective, Pope had had no very distinguished record with Search before Dragon had elevated him to number two position in SS Division.

This sudden infliction of Pope upon the scene was disturbing, but there was no unraveling the serpentine patterns of check and double check, of distrust and redundancy that substituted for security in CII, so Jonathan put it out of his mind for the moment.

He slumped down in his chair and closed his eyes while the smoke loosened him up. It was the first time he had had to himself since meeting the other climbers, and he took the opportunity to recall how each had reacted. Nothing had indicated the least suspicion or fear. Good. He was fairly sure that Miles Mellough had not had a chance to contact the target before the affair in the desert, but he was relieved to have the added evidence of their behavior.

The jangle of his telephone intersected his thoughts.

"Guess where I'm calling from?"

"I don't know, Gem." He was surprised at the fatigued sound of his own voice.

"From Bern. How about that?"

"What are you doing in Bern?" He was both relieved and oddly distressed.

"I'm not in Bern. That's just it. I'm in my cafe, just a pleasant fifteen-minute walk from your hotel. Which you may take as an invitation, if you have a mind to."

Jonathan waited, assuming she would explain.

"They routed my call through Bern. Isn't that weird?"

"Not really." Jonathan had experience with Swiss telephone systems, which rival only the French for efficiency. "The whole thing is based on the assumption that the shortest distance between two points is a cube."

"Well, I thought it was weird."

He suspected she had no real reason for calling him, and he could sense a tone of helpless embarrassment in her voice.

"I'll try to see you tomorrow, Gem."

"OK. But if you feel an irresistible urge to drop in on me tonight, I'll try to arrange my schedule to make..." She gave up on it. Then, after a pause, "I love you, Jonathan." The ensuing silence begged for a response. When none came, she laughed without foundation. "I don't mean to drip all over you."

"I know you don't."

Her pickup was artificially gay. "Right then! Until tomorrow?"

"Until then." He held the line for a moment, hoping she would hang up first. When she did not, he placed the receiver gently onto its cradle, as though to soften the end of the conversation.

The sun glinted through a rift in the clouds, and hail and rain fell in silver diagonals through shafts of sunlight.

Two hours later the five men sat around a table in the middle of Ben's room. They leaned over a large photographic blowup of the Eigerwand, the corners of which were held down by rings of pitons. Karl traced with his finger a white line he had inked on the glossy surface.

Jonathan saw at a glance that the proposed route was a blend of the Sedlmayer/Mehringer approach and the classic path. It constituted a direct climb of the face, a linear attack that met the obstacles as they came with a minimum of traversing. It was almost the line a rock would take if it fell from the summit.

"We take the face here," Karl said, pointing to a spot three hundred meters left of the First Pillar, "and we go straight up to the Eigerwand Station. The climb is difficult—grade five, occasionally grade six—but it is possible."

"That first eight hundred feet will be wide open," Ben said in objection. And it was true that the first pitch offered no protection from the rock and ice that rattles down the face each morning when the touch of the sun melts the frost that has glued the loose rubble to the mountain through the night.

"I am aware of that," Karl responded. "I have weighed all the dangers. It will be vital that we cover that pitch in the early morning."

"Continue," Jean-Paul urged, already seduced by the prospect of being one of the first to take the face on a direct line.

"If all goes well, our first bivouac should be here." Karl's finger brushed a dark spot on the snow-crusted face just above the Eigerwand Station. There was a long gallery cut through the mountain during the building of the Jungfrau railroad tunnel. The gallery had been drilled through for ventilation and for jettisoning rubble from the main tunnel, and it was a favorite stopping-off place for tourists who walked to its well-protected edge and gaped down over the breath-catching void.

"In fact, we might get as high as Death Bivouac on the first day." Karl's finger traced a rippled shadow of mixed ice and rock. "And from then on, it's a matter of following the classic route." Freytag was aware that he had elided past the hitherto un-climbed part of the face, so he looked around the circle of men, ready to face objections.

Anderl leaned over the enlarged photograph and squinted for several minutes at a narrow diagonal band below the Eigerwand Station window. He nodded very slowly. "That might go. But we would have to stay out of the ice—hold to the rock as much as possible. It's a chute, Karl. I'll bet water rushes through it all day long. And it's a natural alley for avalanche. I would not care to be standing in it directing traffic like a policeman when the avalanche comes roaring through."

The laughter that greeted the image petered out hollowly. Jonathan turned from the table and looked down at the hazy meadow below the window.

Ben spoke slowly. "No one's ever been on that part of the face. We have no idea what it's like. What if the rock doesn't go? What if you're forced down into the gut of the chute?"

"I have no interest in suicide, Herr Bowman. If the edges are not a go, we shall retreat and follow the Sedlmayer/Mehringer route."

"The route that brought them to the Death Bivouac," Ben clarified.

"The weather killed them, Herr Bowman! Not the route!"

"You got some deal with God on weather?"

"Please, please," Jean-Paul interposed. "When Benjamin questions your route, Karl, he is not attacking you personally. For myself, I find the route intriguing." He turned to Jonathan at the window. "You have said nothing, Jonathan. What do you think?"

The mist had lifted from the face, and Jonathan was able to address his statements to the mountain. "Let me make sure of a couple of things, Karl. Assuming we make the Third Ice Field as you plan, the rest of the ascent will be classic, am I right? Up the Ramp, across the Traverse of the Gods, into the Spider, and up the Exit Cracks to the Summit Ice Field?"

"Exactly."

Jonathan nodded and ticked off each of the salient features on the face with his eyes. Then his glance returned to Karl's diagonal chute. "Certainly you realize that your route would not do for a retreat, if we were blocked higher up."

"I consider it self-defeating to plan in terms of retreat."

"I consider it stupid not to."

"Stupid!" Karl struggled with his control. Then he shrugged in peevish accord. "Very well. I shall leave the planning of a retreat route to Doctor Hemlock. After all, he has had more experience in retreating than I."

Ben glanced at Jonathan, surprised that he allowed this to pass with only a smile.

"I may take it then that my plan is accepted?" Karl asked.

Jonathan nodded. "Under the condition that the weather clears and freezes the new snow on. Without that, no route would go for a few days."

Jean-Paul was pleased with the agreement and went back over the route step by step with Karl, while Jonathan drew Anderl aside and asked him how he felt about the climb.

"It will be fun to try that diagonal pitch," was Anderl's only comment.

Ben was clearly unhappy with the route, with the team, with the whole idea of the climb. Jonathan crossed to him.

"Buy you a beer?"

"No thanks."

"What?"

"I don't feel like a beer. I feel like getting out of this whole business."

"We need you."

"I don't like it."

"What's the weather report like?"

Ben admitted reluctantly that the three-day prediction looked very good indeed: a strong high and a drop in temperature. Jonathan shared this good news with the party, and in a general mood of confidence they broke up, promising to take supper together.

By supper the weather in the valley had healed up with a palpable drop in temperature and a sudden clearing of the air. There was moonlight on the snow, and the stars could be counted. This fortuitous change and certain orthographic errors in the menu constituted the common small talk at the beginning of dinner, but before long the six of them had divided into four islands of concentration.

Jean-Paul and Karl chatted in French, limiting themselves to the climb and its problems. Karl enjoyed displaying the thoroughness with which he had considered every facet of the problem, and Jean-Paul enjoyed understanding.

Anna focused her attention on Anderl, converting his native wry humor into wit, as women of experience can, by minute gestures of appreciation and attention, until he was performing at his social maximum. Jonathan recognized that she was using Anderl as an extramarital red herring, but he was pleased that the normally reticent Austrian was enjoying himself, whatever the reason.

Ben was in an undisguised funk. He pushed food around on his plate with neither hunger nor interest. Emotionally, he was through with the climb; he was no longer a part of the team, although he would perform his duties responsibly.

For a time, Jonathan was tangent to the rims of the two conversations, making comments only when a pause or a glance seemed to call for it. But soon he was able to withdraw into himself, unheeded and unlamented. He had been troubled by the tone of Dragon's communication. Search had not yet settled on the name of his target. What if they failed to nominate him until immediately before the climb? Could he do it on the face?

And which one? It would be hardest to kill Anderl, easiest to kill Karl. But not really easy. Always before, the sanction had been a name, a catalogue of habits and routines described in the arid Search tout. He had never seen the man's face until minutes before the sanction.

"...disinterest you so much?" Anna was speaking to him, amusement in her eyes.

"I beg your pardon." Jonathan focused out of his reverie.

"You have not said twenty words all night. Do we disinterest you so much?"

"Not at all. I simply haven't had anything pertinent or amusing to say."

"And that prevented you from speaking?" Karl laughed heartily. "How un-American!"

Jonathan smiled at him, thinking how terribly in need of a spanking he was. A trait of the Germans—a nation in need of a spanking.

Ben rose and mumbled his excuses. If the weather held—and they wouldn't know for sure until tomorrow—the climb would begin in twenty-nine hours, so he suggested that everyone get as much sleep as possible and run a final check of personal equipment. He left the table brusquely, and in his handling of the newsmen who spoke to him in the lobby he was especially curt and scatological.

Karl rose. "What Herr Bowman says is true. If the weather holds, we shall have to be away from here by three in the morning, day after tomorrow."

"So tonight is our last night?" Anna looked calmly at him, then bestowed her eyes on each of the company in turn for exactly equal time.

"Not necessarily our last night," Jonathan said. "We may get down again, you know."

"Bad joke," Karl pronounced.

Jonathan bade the departing party good-night, then sat down again to his coffee and brandy alone. He slipped again into umber thoughts. Dragon had only twenty-four hours in which to designate the target.

The mountain, and the target, and Jemima. And behind it all, his house and paintings—they were what mattered.

He found himself tightening up, so he sent little calming messages along his nerve system to sap and control the tension. But still his shoulders were stiff and it required muscular contraction to flatten the frown from his forehead.

"May I join you?" The phrasing was interrogative, but not the tone. Karl sat before Jonathan responded.

There was a short silence during which Jonathan sipped off the last of his brandy. Freytag was ill at ease, his normally rigid posture tightened to brittle. "I came to have a word with you."

"I assumed that, yes."

"I want to thank you for this afternoon."

"Thank me?"

"I had expected that you would oppose my route—my leadership. If you had, the others would have joined you. Herr Bowman is really your man, after all. And Bidet blows with the wind." Karl glanced down without altering his angular posture. "It is important to me, you know. Leading this party is important to me."