The Rich Man’s House

by Andrew McGahan

  The suit was certainly big, looming over her with arms akimbo like an outsized wrestler, made even more ominous by the gold mesh screen of the helmet hiding the emptiness within. Richman himself was tall, at least six-foot-two, and between the helmet and the thick-soled boots, the suit must add three or four inches to that. And it was bulkier than even the famous photos made it look, especially with the great rectangle of the combined battery pack, air compressor and tank on the back.

  Amazing to think that climbers had scaled all manner of cliffs and sheer slopes in such a get-up. It looked as if it would be difficult even to walk in, let alone to clamber up rock faces.

  ‘I’ve worn one of them myself, you know,’ the major-domo commented, as Rita completed her first lap. ‘Only a modern replica, of course. I was much too young to be any part of the original expedition. But it was a working copy.’

  Surprised—for she had all but forgotten that Clara had herself once been a professional mountain climber—Rita stared at the other woman in frank assessment a moment. The major-domo, though comparatively tall and fit, still appeared diminutive compared to the hulking HTF suit.

  ‘It was a smaller model than this one, of course,’ Clara added, aware of the meaning of Rita’s stare. ‘They do come in different sizes. And it was only to walk around in, I didn’t climb in one.’

  ‘What was it like?’ Rita asked.

  ‘Well, they’re more flexible than they look. Certainly an improvement on the NASA suits of only a few years earlier. But I won’t kid you, I wouldn’t much like to try a difficult ascent in one. Your centre of gravity is all off; your peripheral vision is poor; you get very little tactile feedback from your hands and feet, which can be vital in climbing. In fact, you feel cut off from the whole world, almost like you’re trapped in there. It’s hard to get into, and harder to get out of, especially with any speed. I’ll confess, I got a little claustrophobic. And occasionally they do fail, depressurising catastrophically. They were very brave people, those expedition climbers, to tackle a mountain like the Wheel in these things.’

  Yes, Rita mused. Whatever else she might think about Richman and his wealth, it could not be denied that there was courage and daring in him. Self-interest, certainly, but bravery too.

  She was still studying the suit. It had obviously been cleaned and polished since its days of use, but even so, signs of wear were visible: subtle dents in the backpack, scratches upon the glass of the helmet, faded stains and marks on the fabric of the torso, and notches worn in the heels of the boots—boots, she reminded herself, which had stood upon the Hand of God, on the black airless edge of space.

  Was this what Clara thought so important for her to see? Was the point of this visit to impress upon Rita the courage and character of the major-domo’s employer? Had Clara sensed Rita’s … well, disgust, with the billionaire last night? And set herself the task of proving to Rita that Richman had other and better qualities?

  She glanced at Clara, but in fact the major-domo had already turned away from the suit and was staring off towards the rest of the exhibits, a guide waiting politely but eager to move on.

  ‘What next?’ Rita asked.

  All manner of cabinets and displays waited in the dim reaches of the room, but Clara nodded to an object placed in the centre of the chamber, the largest installation of all. In another setting, Rita might have thought it was an old-fashioned caravan, one of the curved silver types, with its wheels and axel stripped off so that it sat flat on the ground.

  But she knew it was no caravan. ‘Is that a real hut? One used on the mountain?’

  ‘It’s the hut,’ the major-domo replied. ‘Hut Number One Twenty-Two. The one Richman and the rest of his team set out from to reach the summit, and the one they came back to when it was done. It was on loan too, not to the Smithsonian, but to the Australian National Museum in Canberra. They were sad to give it up, because they couldn’t find a replacement. The huts are rarer than the suits. They were dismantled as the expedition withdrew from the mountain, and the parts and panels were thrown away or recycled—that skin is a titanium alloy and worth quite a bit of money. As far as I know, only six fully complete huts still survive in museums around the world.’

  Rita had moved to the hut. The hatch-like door bore the number 122 in faded paint. Through a small thick window, little was visible.

  ‘It’s open,’ added her guide. ‘You can go in. It’s allowed. Just pull the latch.’

  Rita did so; the door was surprisingly light. Stepping in over the sill, she found herself in a narrow chamber that took up about a third of the structure, a second hatch leading to an inner room. The room was filled with paraphernalia: pumps and filters of various sorts; a collection of crates and bagged supplies; a chemical toilet and washbasin, and finally, two high-altitude suits, the same as the one outside, but hanging limp, like human carcasses, from cradles on the wall, charging cables attached to their battery backs. Two further cradles, empty, suggested that the room was in fact intended to host four such suits. This antechamber was, in short, a multifunction porch—part disrobing room, part utility room, part storeroom and part toilet.

  Carefully, Rita took a few steps inwards and peered through the inner hatch. Here, obviously, were the living quarters of the hut. One wall bore a rudimentary kitchen, with an oven and sink, another wall bore communications devices and weather-observation readouts. There were fold-out tables and shelves, and everywhere cabinets of all shapes in sizes were jammed in corners and across the low ceiling. On the floor, there was plentiful room for the four thin, narrow mattresses that had been spread out there.

  Fascinating. Everything was cramped, yes, but in other ways it seemed absurdly large and luxurious for a structure that had perched on a cliff twenty thousand metres high.

  She retreated through the doors. ‘How did they ever get this up the mountain?’

  ‘Piece by piece,’ said the major-domo. ‘It demounts. If you look at the skin, you can see it’s made of panels bolted together. Each hut breaks down into roughly one hundred loads, with even the biggest—the main air compressor—still small enough to be carried by one climber. It took a lot of trips, but when it was all done and assembled you had a pressurised environment with heating, electricity and water, where four climbers could rest and relax overnight while their HTF suits recharged in the docks.’

  Rita was circling the hut now. On the side and at the rear there were valves and couplings protruding through the walls, to which were attached lengths of thick insulated hoses or cables.

  ‘Those are the power lines,’ Clara went on, ‘and the water lines, the latter jacketed and heated to prevent freezing. Both lines ran all the way back down to Bligh Cove where the support ships generated the power and pumped the water. In effect, the expedition built a town on the mountain—but instead of the buildings being collected together in a square or a circle, they were strung out in two parallels streets, each twenty-five kilometres long. Well, only twenty kays actually. The hut system only began properly from the Plateau onwards. But you get the idea.’

  ‘Amazing,’ Rita observed faintly.

  Clara shrugged. ‘It was brute force. Against that kind of logistics, no mountain stands much of a chance. Not even a mountain like the Wheel.’

  Rita looked at her. ‘You don’t approve?’

  The major-domo repeated the shrug. ‘It’s not my kind of climbing, that’s all.’ She inclined her head towards the next exhibit along the aisle. ‘This is more in my line, if you want to know.’

  Rita turned to the display in question. It consisted of two glass cabinets. In one, set on a metal frame, there was an old-fashioned looking climbing axe. The other cabinet contained only a tattered black leather-bound notebook.

  ‘Do you know what these are?’ Clara enquired, and her tone caught Rita’s attention, for it was tinged now with a certain Germanic awe.

  ‘No,’ she answered.

  ‘The axe belonged to George Mallory. You can see his name scratched
on the shaft. And the notebook belonged to Edmund Hillary.’

  The names echoed in Rita’s memory. The same two men were memorialised in the marble busts in the Library, at the entrance to Richman’s private domain. She said, ‘They’re climbers who died on the Wheel, right?’

  A solemn nod. ‘They were pioneers, both of them. Mallory wanted to be the first man to climb above thirty thousand feet. Everyone talked in feet then. Thirty thousand feet is about nine thousand two hundred metres. Higher than any other mountain on Earth, even though it’s not even halfway up the Wheel. Hillary came later, in the fifties, and his aim was to go beyond ten thousand metres. By then, people were starting to use metres more.

  ‘Of course, either figure is just a number. But as it happens, there is a band of black rock that runs right across the Wheel, starting at just above nine thousand two hundred metres, and reaching up to just over ten thousand metres. It’s not really black, but it’s distinctive—I can show you later, back outside—and it gave them a target. Mallory knew that if he could reach the bottom of the Black Band, he would have achieved his goal. And twenty years later, Hillary knew that if he could reach the top of the Band, then he would have achieved his.’

  ‘And did they?’ Rita asked. Her knowledge of the history of the Wheel did not extend beyond Richman’s expedition, apart from knowing that there had been a litany of failed attempts previously.

  The major-domo shook her head. ‘That’s just it. No one is sure. Both men were lost in storms on the final days of their attempts, along with their climbing companions, and none of the bodies were ever found. All that ever turned up of Mallory was his axe, found just short of the Band, just short. But was he heading up when he lost it, or heading down? No one can say. As for Hillary, some years after he was lost a notebook was found fixed in the ice high up on the Band, wrapped tightly in oilskin. It turned out to be his climbing journal, the book in which he jotted down his notes every day, and the final entry says—well, look, you can read it for yourself.’

  The book was open, and across the two visible pages was scrawled a single word in pencil, the letters large and jagged, as might be formed clumsily by a heavily gloved hand.

  Success???

  ‘Those question marks are the problem,’ said Clara. ‘What do they mean? Did Hillary reach his goal, before the storm took him? Or not? Was he confused about where he was? Or do they mean something else entirely? We’ll never know, and in a way it doesn’t matter. Whether or not Hillary or Mallory reached their targets, the truth is they failed, both of them. A climb is only successful if you make it back down alive.’

  Rita stared at the scrawled word, trying to imagine the conditions in which it had been written, in what kind of howling winds or blizzard, and in what state of mind by the writer, with death threatening all the while. But it was impossible to grasp, there in the safety and warmth of the Museum.

  She glanced at the major-domo, caught her eyes intent upon the relics of the lost climbers. ‘You admire these two men particularly?’

  Clara’s nod was unembarrassed. ‘They were pure climbers. They had few of the advantages and comforts that later climbers used, though Hillary did employ oxygen. They climbed only in small parties, not in teams of hundreds, and they climbed against a mountain they knew they could never beat. Its summit was forever beyond their skills, yet they climbed all the same. They set themselves targets that were essentially meaningless, just lines on the mountain, but they were prepared to die in the attempt to reach them. Yes, I admire them. Oh, I acknowledge what the Richman expedition did, but that wasn’t climbing, that was an industrial process against which even the Wheel was helpless. But men like these two—they fought bare-handed against giants.’

  Rita blinked. ‘Did you ever attempt the Wheel, when you used to climb?’ And how was it that she had never thought to ask this before?

  ‘Oh yes,’ Clara answered.

  ‘How high did you go?’

  ‘To the top of the Black Band. With just one other climber, alpine style, which means no pressure suits, and with oxygen assistance only for the last thousand metres or so. It’s where I got all this.’ She lifted her hand briefly to display the lost finger, then touched the frostbitten blur of her nose, and finally gave a glance down to her feet, enclosed as ever in calf-high sturdy boots. ‘A storm caught us. Truth be told, we nearly died for our troubles. But they were the most magnificent days of my life.’

  Rita stared in fascination. ‘Has anyone climbed higher than that without a suit?’

  ‘Not much higher. Beyond ten thousand metres, it’s simply not practical, above thirteen thousand it’s a scientific impossibility. To go further would need another huge Richman-style effort with suits and huts, and all the money and manpower that includes. So these days, the top of the Black Band is about as far as any climbers go, if they even make it that far. Indeed, since the Richman expedition, only seventy people have beaten the Band, and made it back alive. Another fifty and more have died trying.’

  Rita shook her head in wonder. ‘No wonder you came to Richman’s attention.’

  Clara nodded, and yet frowned minimally, as if the accolade was not entirely a happy one.

  They had moved on again, to the last of the exhibits in the main aisle. Richman was the subject once more. It was a piece of relief artwork, cut from wood, a series of peaks shown in silhouette—seven of them, the greatest obviously the Wheel in the centre, with three lesser mountains represented on either side.

  At the tip of each mountain was an inset photo, each an image of Walter Richman standing upon that mountain’s summit. The photo for the Wheel was the same iconic image as usual, the others however showed different versions of Richman, mostly a younger man, wrapped only in climbing gear, not in a pressure suit, much more human, his face bare, other than snow goggles perhaps, and his smile white and triumphant, his hands in several shots bare to the cold, giving a thumbs up.

  ‘It’s the Seven Summits,’ Clara explained. ‘Richman is the only one to complete the set.’

  ‘The Seven Summits?’

  ‘It’s not the seven highest mountains in the world, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s the highest mountain on each of the seven continents.’ The major-domo touched each mountain in turn with a single finger. ‘The Wheel, obviously, is in Australian territory. Then there’s Mount Everest for Asia, Kilimanjaro for Africa, Mount Vinson for Antarctica, Denali for North America, Aconcagua for South America and finally Mount Elbrus for Europe—though he did Mount Blanc as well, as there’s argument over whether Elbrus is really Europe, seeing as it’s in Russia.’

  ‘Richman climbed them all?’

  ‘He’d climbed most of them by the time he was twenty-three and began the Wheel expedition. He only had Kilimanjaro and Vinson left to do. They were his last two climbs.’

  ‘Is it such a big deal? You can just walk up Kilimanjaro, can’t you?’

  ‘True, although it’s no stroll. But most of the seven are much tougher climbs. It’s not as hard as climbing the seven actual highest mountains in the world, which are all in the Himalayas, apart from the Wheel, but the Seven Summits is still considered quite an achievement. Indeed, Richman was already famous before the Wheel for having done the likes of Everest and Denali and Aconcagua at such a young age. Only people like Messner and few other stars of that era were more highly regarded.’

  And yet, there was not the tone of admiration in Clara’s voice as had been there when she’d spoken of Mallory and Hillary.

  ‘How do you rate him, honestly?’ Rita asked. ‘Purely as a climber, I mean. On his own. Not as leader of a huge expedition team.’

  The major-domo gave another shrug. ‘I’ve never climbed with him, so I can’t say with any fairness. Self-evidently, he was very good.’

  ‘But?’

  A sigh. ‘But from what I’ve heard and read, he was never … popular … with other climbers. I don’t mean during the Wheel expedition, when he was the boss. No one is ever all that ha
ppy with the boss of such climbs. No, I mean earlier, when he was climbing with small teams in the Himalayas.’

  ‘People didn’t like him? Why?’

  Clara had become reluctant but answered all the same. ‘When selfishness puts lives at risks, or costs lives, then the mountaineering community is not very forgiving.’

  ‘Lives?’

  Another reluctant pause. ‘There was a story told about his Everest climb. I don’t suppose you’ll have heard of it, Everest accounts never seem to get beyond the climbing world, as compared to stories about the Wheel. Anyway, this was in 1971. Richman was the only climber to summit Everest that year, and only the twenty-first person to do it ever, which for so young a man, just a youth really, was an astonishing achievement.

  ‘It should have made him a hero. But within a few months rumours began to circulate, stories about a tragedy that accompanied his climb. The expedition was a small one, four Western climbers and eight Sherpas, very lightweight compared to most parties that had tackled Everest at that stage. They took the southern route. On summit day the first assault team, Richman and the Sherpa Nawang Tsering, set out from their high camp on the South Col, with the second assault team in waiting to try the next day, if Richman and Tsering failed.

  ‘Well, Richman stumbled back into the South Col camp thirty-six hours later only half alive. When his companions finally got some sense out of him, it emerged that Richman had indeed summitted, but alone, and that Tsering was dead.

  ‘As you approach the summit of Everest along the south ridge, the last barrier for a climber is a low cliff called the Bourdillon Step, named after the first climber to scale it, and indeed the first climber to summit Everest, back in the fifties. According to Richman, he and Tsering reached the Step in good time, and managed to ascend it, and from there it’s usually only a half-hour slog uphill to the summit. But apparently Tsering was exhausted by this point, and couldn’t go any further. Sitting down, he told Richman to press on, saying he would wait for Richman’s return, so that they could descend together.