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and comfortable.
But when the wind came, the platforms creaked and scratched at the rock. Abe
was afraid as he drifted into sleep. He could feel the abyss under his back.
It was still dark and windy when Abe heard a yakherder's blatting call.
He wasn't dreaming  there wasn't enough oxygen to dip that low into the REM
levels  and yet for a moment he was disoriented and thought their
little herder, the monk, might have returned somehow. The yawp sounded
again, and this time Abe knew it was
Daniel in the other tent, waking them all.
By headlamp, Abe and J.J. readied themselves, dressing while the
stove flame roared blue under a pot of ice. It was three o'clock. The
mountain would be locked tight at this hour, frozen to its coldest
point of the night. Rockfall would be at a minimum. Also, Daniel
wanted to land at Four today. They had to ascend some eight hundred feet of
rope already fixed in the Shoot before they could finish off the last three
hundred feet of climbing. In J.J.'s thick, slurring SoCal, the day promised to
be a hump and a half. An early start meant everything.
Abe gave his straps and buckles a final tug. The super-gaiters, his helmet,
the pack flap and side pockets, his harness  everything got cinched snug.
'I'm on my way,' J.J. promised, but he was at best only half ready.
He had bad stomach cramps in the morning, and it took him longer than most
to gear up. J.J. had cavalierly diagnosed his distress as a side effect of the
anabolic steroids he used. Abe thought the problem was more likely aspirin. At
these elevations the red cells  the oxygen carriers  multiplied so thickly
the blood turned to syrup. The climbers who chewed aspirin to counter the
effect usually ended up with ulcers, bad teeth and epic constipation.
'See you there,' Abe said, wherever there was. He braced for the
cold air and unzipped the tent door. The cold lashed him across the eyes and
he flinched. Then he got a good look and said, 'God.' Outside the blackness
was perforated with a million stars. There were stars behind the start, a
solid carpet of lights. He looked up and where the carpet ended in a
raggedy line, the mountain pronounced its dark domain.
Abe saddled himself. He wanted to keep up with the gang today and had packed
for speed, a manageable but still respectable thirty pounds. Holding on to a
handline, he picked his way horizontally across forty feet of stone to the
base of the Shoot. Gus was already there, similarly burdened.
'Daniel's barfing,' she said to excuse her partner's absence.
'J.J.'s sour too,' Abe said.
Gus slugged Abe softly on one shoulder. 'Then it's you and me, Doc. We'll show
these wimps. They can straggle behind.' Abe felt warmed by her camaraderie.
She had read apprehension. For weeks people had been talking about the horrors
of the Shoot. Now he was about to be exposed to them for the first time. Gus
swept her headlamp back and forth across four ropes lying side by side in the
back of the Shoot. There was one rope for each of the expeditions that had
entered this corridor.
With one gloved hand, Gus plucked at the orange rope  the Ultimate Summit
stock
 but let it go and tried a second and a third rope. She seemed to be
shopping, though to Abe's mind there was no question, the newest was
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the best. Then he saw her dilemma. Overnight the ropes had become coated
with transparent ice. They were all sheathed with verglas.
'Heads up,' Gus said. She took the end of the new orange rope again and swung
it from the wall. Then she cracked it against the stone like a gigantic,
ponderous whip.
The ice fractured off and maybe twenty pounds of chandelier glass
came tinkling down, pattering on Abe's helmet and hunched shoulders.
'Dibs,' Gus said, grabbing the first place on the rope. She thumbed open the
metal jaws of her two jumars and clipped them onto the cleared
rope. She slid the uppermost jumar high, then tugged to see if it caught on
the downstroke and it did. As
the rope iced up, the jumars would slip now and then, but that was a nuisance,
not a hazard.
Abe didn't mind going second, even though it meant more work. With Abe beneath
Gus, the rope would be weighted and that always made jumaring the ropes 
jugging the line  much easier. But going first was a mixed blessing, because
if one of these ropes was abraded, it would break under her weight first.
Abe felt a twinge of something, shame perhaps, or guilt. The truth
was he appreciated Gus's making herself the guinea pig. He was scared. He
knew his nerves would smooth out eventually. Maybe in an hour or two he could
take over jugging the lead and spare Gus some of the risk.
Gus finished rigging her stirrups to the jumars, then headed up the line. The
rope creaked under her weight. Abe gave her a few bodylengths, then started up
behind her, walking his stirrups up a foot at a time.
The going was slow. Repeatedly the teeth in their jumars caked with rime and
the jaws missed their bite and slipped. Each time one of Abe's jumars fouled,
he had to unclip it and thaw the teeth with his warm breath and clip it back
on the rope.
At the top of the first ropelength  or pitch  they rested, standing in their
stirrups since there were no ledges here. Abe leaned his shoulder against the
cold rock. The corridor was only five feet across at this level, and its
boxlike sides channeled the wind straight up between their boots.
'One down, six to go,' Gus said. Shoulder to shoulder, Abe could smell the
coffee on her breath. He checked his watch. It was going on four-thirty. At
the rate of a half hour per rope, they could possibly reach the top of their
line by eight or nine.
Abe looked between his knees at the ground. Far below, almost a mile beneath
his boots, the glacier was giving off a phosphorescent glow. Closer in, a tiny
headlamp was bouncing white beams against the corridor's walls and Abe [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]