Then a cry: “The cloud’s moved away!”
Silence for an instant. Mr. Hallen’s telescope was trained on the tip of Chitna. He saw first what the others saw later.
The climbers had not moved. There was literally nowhere for them to move to. The face of the cliff was now coated with a hoary glaze that was sleet and hail combined. It would be uncertain footing on the smoothest of level ground. On a vertical cliff, with a rocky overhang above…
The four climbers were in view for almost half an hour. They made no movement of any sort that could be detected by the telescopes.
Clouds hid them from sight again. Voices raised in argument. The top of Chitna could be reached by a relief party, to be sure. There was an easy-chair route, past Baldy. But no relief party could conceivably get there in time. The four climbers hung on. But ultimately they must relax. When they relaxed, they died.
There was a crowd about the telescopes down the terrace. Mr. Hallen sat outwardly impassive, but he knew when Tommy Carteret led Mona away from the constantly enlarging morbid group that waited for evidence that the tragedy was complete.
“You look,” said Tommy Carteret fretfully, “as if the man were your best friend! It’s not my fault that he made a fool of himself and is paying for it! You’re making yourself conspicuous!”
“You—sent him up there,” said Mona. Her voice sounded as if her throat ached.
“I had damned good reason to send the fool somewhere!” said Tommy Carteret explosively. “The way he talked, and you let him—”
“You—heard us talking?” asked Mona drearily.
“I heard plenty!” snapped Tommy. “I had plenty of excuse to raise hell with you. But when Pudgy suggested what he did, I simply fell in with his suggestion and asked for proof!”
There was silence, save for footsteps and an uneasy shuffling down the terrace. Bright sunshine shone on the Valley Inn, but streaky, falling stuff misted half the columnar mass of Chitna, and the rest was blotted out entirely.
The storm cloud seemed to linger longest about the place where the climbers had been. When it drew away from there, though, it moved with a dramatic suddenness.
The cliff face was bare. There were no climbers on it. The east face of Chitna was empty.
A little awestruck murmur from down the terrace. Then a hum of half-hushed talk. Then he heard a sob. Then he heard Tommy Carteret’s voice, low-toned and waspish.
“You’re making a fool of yourself!” it said savagely. “The thing’s not my fault! Damn it, if you’d put him in his place when he tried to talk romance to you—why, I’d never have dreamed—”
Mona’s voice said fiercely, “You mean you asked him to climb Chitna because you were jealous? You hoped he’d be killed? You—”
“I had devilish good reason to be jealous,” said Tommy Carteret no less fiercely, “and I won’t stand being blamed for anything that’s happened to him. If anybody’s to blame, you are!”
Then, quite suddenly, there was a very peculiar sound. It was a sort of thud, and it was a sort of smacking sound, and it was followed by a gasp. Mr. Hallen turned his head and looked impassively at the source of the noise.
Mona Dale’s fist was still clenched. Despairingly, desperately, in a horrible, helpless rage, she had clenched her fist and struck Tommy Carteret in the face. The blow was unskilled. It did no great damage. But Tommy Carteret gasped in blank amazement and a vast, incredulous resentment.
Mona fled from him, sobbing without hope.
Mr. Hallen spoke suddenly: “Miss Dale!”
She ignored him, running blindly with utterly despairing sobs bubbling in her throat. She would pass him. He caught her arm. He looked acutely and horribly embarrassed, but resolved.
“Listen to me!” he said firmly. “Pudgy Green worships this young man Chips. He went with the climbing party to watch it start. And then he went around the regular, easy-chair route past Baldy, to get to the top to congratulate Chips, when he should reach it, on being the first man to climb Chitna’s eastern face.”
Mona’s sobs stopped. Her breath ceased. She stared, terrified, afraid to hope.
“He reached the summit a little while ago,” said Mr. Hallen calmly. “I saw him on the back route, almost at the top, the last time the clouds drew away. A few seconds ago I saw the entire party on the way down. On the regular route, not where anyone else would look. Pudgy Green went to the edge of the cliff to see how near Chips was to the top. He found him caught hopelessly within reach of a good long alpine rope. I imagine he dropped that rope and helped them over the edge.”
Mona caught her breath in heart-breaking relief and joy.
“It would be quite possible,” said Mr. Hallen remotely, “for you to get a car and go to meet him. That is for you to decide. I do not believe in meddling.”
Mona did not thank him. She could not. She said something incoherent and turned and ran again. This time she did not sob at all. And it was surely no more than two minutes before a car tore away from the Valley Inn and headed west on the road that led to the bottom of the ordinary trail up Chitna.
Mr. Hallen settled himself impassively in his chair again. He picked up his book and opened it. He did glance around him, once, but it was with a forbidding air of self-sufficiency. He looked impassive and completely aloof. He was magnificently remote from all other humans, though in the midst of them.
Nobody spoke to him. Nobody ever did. And Mr. Hallen lifted his book firmly to a comfortable reading position and, with an air of profound satisfaction, began to read.
HIGH JUSTICE
Originally published in Collier’s, June 3, 1939, as by “Will F. Jenkins.”
It was night in the world below, and the valleys were already in darkness. The climb had been a hard one, and the four men arrived at the shelter hut just before darkness reached the heights. They saw tiny twinkling lights, miles down and miles away. Houses and villages and hotels. Up here were only the hut—dark and bleak and glazed with ice—and a vast cold vacancy of snow. But, comfort aside, there were compensations.
The sun had set, and they made the last hundred feet up a gentle incline, with a thousand-foot precipice to their left, in the many-colored light of the afterglow. Also there was thin cold air like wine—refreshing to laboring lungs.
They reached the hut. Kettermann, the guide, put down his ice ax and worked to open the battered door. The others waited, their panting breaths growing gradually more even. The door creaked open. Kettermann went in. He produced a candle and lighted it inside. Young Hans—the other guide—crowded forward with the spirit lamp. He gathered icicles from the hut roof, to melt. They made loud bumping noises as they went into the little pan. The stove made a shuddering sound as it caught, and presently the pan sang unmusically while the ice fragments turned to water. One of the two American climbers—the younger—gazed out at the pinnacles.
“I still don’t believe what I’m seeing,” he said, staring.
The other man fumbled in his pocket. He got out a cigarette and lighted it.
“Very pretty, Sam,” he said uninterestedly. “Very pretty. But I’m going in the hut. Stay out here if you like. It’ll be cold presently, when the wind comes.” He paused and added: “Bruce fell from here, you know. This spot. Bruce was—there. He stepped back too far. That’s all there was to it. Watch out.”
He crowded into the hut.
* * * *
There was a sort of platform before the hut. It was made of mud and stone, and it stretched for quite ten feet from the hut door to the edge of the cliff. It was smooth and level. And it was amazing to find a level space here. This was two thirds of the way up to the summit. That anyone should have gone to the trouble of making a level platform here—where perhaps fifteen people in a whole climbing season might elect to pass a single night—was so extraordinary as to be unbelievable.
After a day o
f climbing, ten feet of level ground was so unfamiliar as to be intoxicating. Young Sam walked across it, and the absence of effort was startling. He found himself trampling high, lifting his feet absurdly, feeling actually dizzy with the sensation of level walking.
He almost went over the edge.
He stopped short with a jerk and a startled gasp. He stood rigid, pressing back with his toes to keep his own momentum from toppling him over. There was sheer black emptiness before him, only inches from his toes.
Voices murmured in the hut: Kettermann rumbling in his thick Swiss-German to young Hans. The other climber—Steve—did not speak. The young man outside moved cautiously backward. Bruce had walked off this place into nothingness. Now, a year later, he’d almost followed him.
Young Sam fumbled shakily in the earth at his feet. He found a small stone, perhaps a quarter-pound in weight. He tossed it out into the blackness into which Bruce had fallen. Then he counted, listening for the sound when it hit.
He did not hear that sound. The night was filled with a singing silence such as comes only among high peaks and glaciers. The silence was made up of a multitude of tiny happenings. Little cracklings, oddly resonant. Frost.
Sam was well away from the edge, now, but he backed still farther in a sudden startled caution.
His companion came out of the hut.
“Coffee’s ready, Sam,” he said tonelessly.
The younger man stammered: “I—threw a rock off,” he said foolishly, “and—and I didn’t hear it hit!”
Kettermann put his head out.
“There is no wind, chentlemen,” he observed professionally. “Maybe we eat where there is most room?”
He spoke gruffly and unintelligibly to Hans. Hans came out with the folding cups. They steamed fiercely in the thin, cold air. Kettermann moved his ice ax from where it leaned against the hut wall. He produced his pipe and filled it deliberately, resting with the assurance of one who though employed was nevertheless the leader of the party. Hans gave the coffee and food to the two Americans, and then squatted down himself.
“A good climb today, Kettermann,” said the American called Steve. “Just one ticklish place. Really ticklish, that is.”
“Ja, Mein Herr. Just one.” Kettlemann spoke with the precision of a man who has learned English for strictly business reasons. “The young chentleman showed much wisdom. He kept still. If he had moved—”
Young Sam was embarrassed. He’d been horribly scared, but right in the middle of his panic something coldly efficient had taken control of his muscles. Now he was glad it had happened. He could count on something efficient taking control in an emergency, hereafter. He had acquired confidence.
“I was frightened,” he said awkwardly, “but I’m glad…”
His voice trailed off. Kettermann nodded approvingly.
“It is no shame to be scared,” he said with heavy precision. “To be not scared is sometimes worse.”
The older American said slowly:
“In a way, Sam, it was lack of scare—overconfidence—that killed Bruce. He stepped backward right off the edge of the platform here. I saw it. It was terribly simple. He was one of the best climbers I ever knew. We’d come up here without guides, just the two of us, and we’d had a cup of coffee and something to eat, and we sat out here because there was an hour’s calm after sunset, just like tonight. But he was restless and presently he began to pace back and forth on the platform—this platform—because he wasn’t worn out even with the climb we’d made. Wonderful stamina, Bruce!” And he pulled out a cigarette, and struck a match to light it, and puffed.
“Then he looked up at something on the slope behind us, there. I don’t know what he thought he saw. He looked up in the starlight, and took a step backward, as if to get a clearer view of it over the hut rooftop. And there wasn’t anything to step back on.”
The younger American looked out in the starlight to the unguarded edge just ten feet from where he sat with his empty coffee cup. He closed his lips tightly, remembering that he’d almost stepped off that edge himself, a few minutes since. There was silence. It became burdensome. Sam broke it, awkwardly:
“It must have been pretty bad for you, Steve.”
Steve said heavily:
“It was bad.… That night especially, up here all by myself. When he fell, it was dead calm. But the wind blew later. It seemed to me that wind devils howled all night long. I thought the hut would go over, once or twice.”
Kettermann smoked impassively. Again it was Sam, the younger American, who broke the silence.
“And you couldn’t be sure, then, that he wasn’t just—injured,” he said sympathetically. “There wasn’t any way to find out until daylight. That must have been bad. But it must have been even worse, facing Bella.…”
Steve said grimly:
“That was very bad. And there were some people who whispered. I’d been in love with Bella before she met Bruce. Some people suspected that Bruce’s fall might not have been accidental, or that at least I might have gotten to him and rescued him. They didn’t know how far he fell! It’s a thousand feet sheer, here!” Then he added detachedly: “When Bella marries me next month, most of those whispers will turn up again.”
Young Sam said wryly :
“I didn’t tell you, but I nearly went over myself, just now. Just because the platform’s level. Maybe I can do some good, if any whispering starts up.”
Steve said evenly:
“That’s one reason I brought you here, Sam. In the morning I’ll show you something else.”
Kettermann smoked. The younger guide, Hans, had listened patiently, trying to piece together the occasional words he understood into a coherent discussion. Now he spoke, unintelligibly. Sam thought he said something about a bet, a wager. Kettermann rumbled to him in reply. His Swiss-German was hard to understand at best, and now it seemed as if he purposely mumbled so that he would be even less understandable than usual.
“Ach! Gott!” said Hans. He nodded soberly.
The candlelight streamed out the door across the platform. It made a spreading fan of yellow light that was cut off—and horribly—by the edge of the platform.
“But—er—nobody really believes anything wrong of you, Steve. Why, it would be silly to go around pushing people off cliffs! Nobody’d get away with it. Would they, Kettermann?”
Kettermann puffed twice, and let the smoke trickle from between his lips. “Sometimes, maybe,” he said.
“I mean,” said Sam, “they’d certainly be caught. You—er—you guides would know if a man had been killed by accident or not. You’d have a sort of feeling…”
Kettermann puffed again and said gruffly but precisely:
“Sometimes, yes. And it is bad for climbing if many people get killed. If somebody uses the mountains to kill somebody, he strikes at our bread and butter.” He added abruptly: “So we do not like it.”
He closed his lips in a tight line. Hans wiped his mouth and mumbled something humbly inquiring. Kettermann nodded.
Steve laughed. It was not at all humorous.
“You’re beginning to see,” he told his companion. “I was here with Bruce when he fell to his death. We were alone; without guides. You know what people whispered. I’d been in love with Bella, and he’d married her. Now Bella’s going to marry me next month. You’re her brother. And I’ve wondered if you didn’t come on this climb with me just to see if my story checked up with the spot where the thing happened!”
Young Sam said:
“Look here, old man. I damn near went over the edge myself. Of course I see why Bruce fell. Of course!”
“You didn’t answer me,” said the older man grimly. “But let it go. Even if Bella has a lingering doubt—which she hasn’t—what you’ll tell her will make her realize how idiotically reasonable it was for Bruce, good climber as he was, to topple a
thousand feet from a shelter hut. If you came along to check my story, it’s all right with me. If you didn’t, I’m still glad you made the climb.”
Sam squirmed.
“Your story’s checked. That is, it would be if I’d had any doubts.”
“I know,” said Steve. He spoke somberly. “But it’s looked bad all the way. Bruce is still down there, you understand. His body never was brought in. He’s under a disintegrating cliff face. It rains rock all day long. You saw some of that!”
The younger man nodded unhappily. He had seen what a rock face is like when the rock particles loosened by frost split off and fall. Every minute of every hour of daylight and most of the night, stones fall down the steep cliff faces. This party had come up a ridge, but they’d seen stones of all sizes from pebbles to monsters like locomotives go crashing and bouncing down into the valley below, from the cliff faces away from their route.
Climbing such a cliff face would be a form of suicide, and no slow one, either. No guide would attempt it. Even to arrange an attempt to recover a human body under such a bombardment from overhead would be difficult or impossible. Which was why, down below, there was still a tiny patch of storm-frayed cloth, with perhaps a white bone or two showing through: Bruce. It could be seen from the platform in the daylight.
“You see my idea,” said Steve heavily. “Tongues are going to wag when I marry Bella. I can’t stop them, but I did want somebody to see—”
The younger man said warmly:
“I never had the slightest doubt, Steve!” He believed it, now. “You’re oversensitive!”
“I wanted you,” said Steve doggedly, “to see where he fell from and where he fell to. When the whispers start, if you can’t offer proof that I didn’t throw him off, at least you’ll be able to testify that he must have been killed instantly. I didn’t go off and leave him to suffer while I saved my own neck! I owe it to Bella that people shouldn’t believe anything worse than that I murdered Bruce.”
The Third Murray Leinster Page 42
