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Hale's own eyes were blinded by frozen tears. Even though he was not looking down into the pit, he could feel the attention of the thing down there stretching his identity.
What was down there would unmake him, though afterward the stuff that had been him would fly away into the sky here, into the upper air, perhaps to trouble radio broadcasts with idiot recitations of nursery rhymes.
Pot's right, no more bets, showdown.
The Destroyer of Delights, the Sunderer of Companies, "he who layeth waste the palaces and peopleth the tombs"-call it Death, call it the Devil who had brought Death to Adam and Eve. I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself. He would never be found, if he hid here. He needn't fire the derringer at all.
Lay down your losing hand, he told himself, and forfeit everything.
A line from Rupert Brooke echoed in his head: And I should sleep, and I should sleep. How much longer could he have been expected to keep on being Andrew Hale, alone?
It would be easy to free himself from the rope and plummet down to what waited; and in this vertiginous instant it seemed to be inevitable. I've lost my father, I've lost Elena-I can save Theodora the trouble of verifying me, and lose myself, at last. Already one of his hands, without his volition, had shucked its mitten and crawled to his waist, and was clutching the carabiner snap-ring. One squeeze of the spring-loaded gate, and then all he would have to do would be shift his weight to one side or the other.
He had been aware of Mammalian's voice shouting at him, as if from the other side of the sky, but now he heard a phrase-for God's sake, man!
And it seemed as if he could hear him because Hale had surfaced from deep, cold water. His throat could now open at last in surrender to the insistence of his lungs, and he was breathing in great gasps while his lips formed unvoiced syllables; and when he made himself listen to what he was saying, he heard, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done...
Hale strained to raise his head, blinking and squinting to see around the frozen tears. He was just able to lift his head high enough to make out Mammalian, sitting twenty feet away in the snow on the far side of the fissure. "What?" shouted Hale to him, in a rusty voice.
"Do you want to live, or die? Please be honest."
One more bet, after all. Double or nothing.
Hale bared his teeth at him before letting his head drop back down. "To live, Hakob." He could feel that his innermost shirt was slick with sweat.>West of the tents the white slope climbed toward the tumbled chunks of ice at the foot of the Abich I glacier wall, and down here at the level of the tents one of the Russian commandos had begun axing out a square, yard-wide step in the snowpack. Another was lashing three snap-link carabiners at fifteen-foot intervals on a long white rope, and when he had finished he beckoned to Philby, Hale, and Mammalian.
He clicked the carabiners one by one onto similar links at the fronts of their climbing harnesses, so that the three men were attached to the rope.
The Russian muttered something, and Mammalian laughed and translated: "Our borscht-blooded friend says we are three babies that must be leashed."
Neither Philby nor Hale had any funny rejoinders.
The Russian who had chopped out the step in the slope was now crouched in front of it, digging at the vertical wall of snow he had exposed. When he stood up and began speaking to one of his fellows, Hale could tell by the man's tone that he was not happy. Hale peered at the exposed surface of snow, and saw that the Spetsnaz had scooped loose snow and ice out of several horizontal layers-apparently the snowpack was not uniformly dense.
Hale was the last man on the rope, and he walked up to where Philby stood, dragging the slack behind him. "Is that bad, do you suppose?" he whispered to Philby.
"This is all bad," Philby muttered. "Our father has doomed us both."
The Russian was speaking, and Mammalian waved backward at the two Englishmen; then he turned and said, "The ice is subject to shearing, sliding. Avalanche is a-real possibility."
"Well, we knew that, for heaven's sake," snapped Philby.
"Uh," Mammalian went on, translating, "it will be more dangerous when we are moving across the slope, above-rather than straight up it, as here. Make no noise-tread lightly, not stomping-and-don't speak."
One of the Spetsnaz, whose white machine gun was equipped with a folding stock and a collapsible bipod at the muzzle, walked downhill past Hale and knotted a lighter line onto the trailing end of the rope and clicked his own harness carabiner onto the bight of the knot. The three amateurs were now bracketed at either end. The rest of the Spetsnaz had attached their harnesses along the far half of the long rope with similar knots, and now the procession had begun to move up the white slope, in single file.
After Mammalian and then Philby had begun plodding forward, Hale took up the pace, hearing the crunch of the Spetsnaz's boots start up behind him.
Hale could feel the grade of the hill in his calves, for with the crampon-spiked boots it was not possible to walk on his toes; but the mild ache was pleasant for now.
Soon the men at the front of the rope had stopped at the foot of the thirty-foot glacier wall, and after Mammalian and Philby and Hale had walked close enough for the rope to lie slack on the ground between them they halted too. The Abich I glacier was gray-white in cross-section, and Hale was staring up at the overhanging cornices of snow and ice when he noticed that the leader had begun to climb the bumpy, gullied wall.
The man moved upward in a contorting but graceful series of moves, like slow-motion bullfighting; at one point he would stretch out a leg to hook an outcrop with his instep, at another he would wedge his forearm or elbow into a gap in order to reach higher with the other hand, and once he simply pulled his whole weight up a yard like a man doing chin-ups. He paused near the top to hang a loop of slung rope on the face, and then after climbing up another yard he stopped below a gap in the overhanging cornice, unslinging his ice-axe to reach up and prod the surface with the pointed butt end of it.
At last he climbed up to the gap and jackknifed through it and out of sight; and a moment later another man was moving up the face, in rapid scrambles, and the line had begun moving again.
Hale was dizzy at the thought of making that ascent himself. There wasn't enough slack between himself and Philby for him to hope that the men at the crest could simply lift them up like sacks of coal-clearly some climbing, some supporting of his own weight, would be required. Under all his clothing he could feel sweat on his chest, and suddenly his mittens seemed as clumsy as the fins of a fish. Was one supposed to take them off?-they were thonged together through a loop at his collar.
But when Mammalian went flexing and reaching away up the face, Hale saw that although the man was climbing, he was at the same time giving some of his weight to the rope, which was being tugged up from the top-and his mittens were off, swinging loosely behind his belt. I can do that much, Hale thought, shucking off his own and flexing his hands in the liner gloves; and when Mammalian had disappeared over the cornice and even Philby was halfway up the face, puffing and grunting and scrabbling with his crampon spikes at the ice, Hale stepped gamely up to the face and found that it was not difficult. With the rope taking his weight at his waist and tugging upward, he even found several times that he had to pause before stepping up to the next hand-hold to allow the rope to come taut again.
