Deathwatch

by Robb White

  Without looking back, Ben inched forward until the front pads of his feet were over the edge of the ledge and only half his arches and his heels still touched the stone.

  Then he let himself fall.

  Holding his body stiff, his arms out ahead of him, his hands flat open, he fell toward the far wall of the V.

  Something was wrong, something was happening that he had not expected. It was all wrong.

  And there was nothing he could do about it now.

  Then he realized that he had fallen out of the sunlight and was in the darkness of the V.

  His hands struck the far wall with much more force than he had expected, and even as his palms and finger pads strained to grip the smooth wall, the weight of his falling body came against them. He felt his hands skidding down and could not stop them.

  Ben tried desperately not to let his body sag, to keep his back straight and flat so that he could ram power against his feet, which were still on the cut of the ledge. His hands against the far wall, Ben hung there, slowly sliding down, his body stretched out at full length, the muscles of his stomach gradually loosening and breaking the rigid bridge his body formed as he lay straight across the open end of the V.

  He could not hold it, his stomach muscles were jerking again, giving up and letting his body sag downward to add its sliding weight to the thin pressure on his hands.

  Below him he could see the exact cutoff line of the sunlight, the stones in it sharp and strongly marked by shadow, the stones directly below him only dim shapes in the shade.

  Somehow, never knowing how he did it but knowing he could never do such a thing again, Ben flung himself in toward the angle of the V and as his body moved he turned it, rolling over in the air, his feet scampering along the stone on one side, his outreaching hands scrabbling against it on the other.

  He wound up five feet below the ledge, on his back, suspended from his hands and feet which were pressed against the stone, his little bundle of leaves and the slingshot lying on his belly. He arched his back, putting more pressure against the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet.

  Moving only one hand or one foot at a time and moving them only an inch or so before slamming the pressure back against them, he edged deeper into the angle of the V, moving until the top of his head scraped the stone and on, his head hard against his chest as his shoulders touched stone, and on until he was compressed into the V, his back against one wall, his knees up against the other.

  Ben did not look either up or down as he began working his way higher, the rock face cruel against the skin of his back as he ground his way up.

  All of his flesh hurt so that he could not even tell whether the stone grinding the skin off his back was more painful than the skin being ground from his knees and shins and the tops of his feet.

  His tongue was now so swollen that it filled his mouth and overflowed, a huge, purple blob of throbbing, peeling meat outside his mouth, half-clogging his nose. His lips had shreds of flesh hanging from them.

  It seemed to him that somebody with a little blowtorch was shooting a tip of flame into the corners of his eyes, and he kept trying not to blink, for there was no moisture to ease the lids across his eyeballs and so they scraped across them, dry and dusty.

  What air he could draw in through his half-clogged nose felt like flowing flame going up past his eyes and down his throat, burning away the skin.

  He wanted desperately to look up, to see how much farther he had to go, but he forced himself not to raise his head, fearing that the distance left would defeat him.

  After a while he seemed to be wrapped in a hard casing of pain. There was no sound anywhere except the sound of his choked breathing; there was no light any more; there was no distinct feeling, no reaction of hands and fingers against rock; there was nothing but pain. Time stopped, and distance became meaningless.

  He thought of nothing, for it now took no thought to move what had to be moved to advance his body up the stone; it was a slow rhythm, one muscle after another, one bone and then the next, over and over, on and on. Forever.

  Ben was not even aware that, for some inches now, his shoulders had been touching nothing, and he almost fell when the pressure of his legs pushed his bare butt out on the level and the change of pressure pitched him forward so that he was hanging, head down, teetering and rocking on the upper end of the V, two hundred feet of emptiness below him.

  It was the sunlight that finally made him stop his automatic weak pushings and gropings.

  The light burned his eyes when at last he opened them and looked around, his sight blurred and hazy.

  Half-rolling, half-sliding along, he moved out of the sun and into the shade, and there he collapsed, lying awkwardly on a flat area of stone, some birds coming down close to look at him.

  8

  THE SUN WAS the most fearsome thing Ben had ever seen. He could not believe that it could be so high in the absolutely cloudless sky, could not believe that it had taken him so long to get up that chimney of stone.

  He looked down at himself, and it made him sick. His feet were just bloody lumps of torn flesh half-covered with the dirty, bloody shreds of cloth.

  Where the rock had abraded him, the blood stood like a watery red dew.

  And in this juice of his blood the sun, looking small and mean, was frying him.

  It was at least eleven o’clock in the morning and, as he pushed himself up, he knew that he could not survive much longer. The itching had started all over his body. He resented most the fact that the itch was the most intolerable where his flesh had already been torn away.

  He was very sick and weak and saw now where he had vomited, small shreds of food in a thick, drying slime. He could also see that his hands and feet were jerking and shaking as though being moved by something invisible to him.

  Forcing his eyes to stay open and to focus instead of rolling helplessly and dizzily in their dry sockets, Ben saw that he was sitting at one end of a wide, upward-sloping ledge of stone. Above him the face of the butte went straight up, apparently to the top, some hundreds of feet above. The surface of the rock was as smooth as a tombstone.

  Looking along the ledge he saw that it ended abruptly, not fading back into the mass of the butte, but cut off sharply.

  Other than the ledge and the cliff face there was nothing, no depressions in the stone, no fissures forming shallow baskets. There was nothing in sight that could interest even the birds.

  And there was no shade. There would be shade late in the afternoon but, by then, it would be too late to do him any good.

  It required a great effort for him to get up on his feet and when he took a step out along the ledge, the pain almost drove him back to his knees.

  Doing what he could to support himself with his hands on the cliff face, Ben hobbled along the edge until he came to the end of it.

  It was like a knife in the back; it was a meanness; he had been cheated, he had been robbed.

  The ledge ended as though it had been cut off by an enormous bandsaw, the edge of it perfectly straight. And from the edge it dropped straight down, all the way, right to the breccia; there was not a break or flaw in the straight wall.

  Something, the cold of the glacial ages, or the violence of earthquakes, or the temperature of a certain upflow of magma, had formed in the stone of the butte a shape almost like a funnel standing on end which had been cut in half from top to bottom. The ledge intercepted this stone funnel about halfway up the cup of it. High above him Ben could see the rim of the funnel, very wide there, perhaps a hundred feet across. Below him the spout was a chimney such as the one he had climbed, but instead of being vee-d this one was round, a cylinder cut in half.

  From where he stood, it was at least fifty feet across open space to the other side of the bisected funnel, farther than that if you measured across the curved stone face of the funnel itself.

  On the other side he could not make out exactly what the formation was, for a thin wall of basalt, a slab w
hich had not broken off stood straight up at the outer edge of the butte, apparently unconnected to the mass except at the base. This thin wall and the solid wall of the butte formed a narrow corridor which lay in deep shade, the slab wall between it and the sun.

  It didn’t really matter what was in that dark corridor, for he could not get over there.

  He could, in fact, go nowhere. He was too close to death now to make it back down that long, vee-d chimney and, even if he had been in his best physical condition, there was no way, without ropes and pitons and hammers, spiked boots and heavy gloves, to climb the sheer face of the butte.

  And without someone on the other side to anchor a rope bridge for him, there was no way across that curved bank of stone which formed the cup of the funnel.

  Ben was standing there helplessly staring at the stone wall when something struck his arm, forcing it back against the rock, and then the sound of the shot cracked the silence.

  With the sound still echoing, Ben shuffled back into the protection of the slab and stood plastered against it.

  Moving his arm only a little, he stared in amazement at a small, purplish hole in it halfway between his wrist and his elbow.

  Slowly turning his arm over, he saw the other hole, this one more ragged and with a little stream of bright blood flowing out of it and down into the palm of his hand.

  There was no pain at all.

  Ben put his thumb on one hole, his forefinger on the other and pressed gently. Now there was pain, but nothing compared to the aching of his mouth, or the burning of his eyes, or the sun on his raw flesh.

  He moved his arm slowly from the elbow, raising and lowering it and then turning it from side to side. These movements caused no more and no less pain in the wounds.

  He drew his hand into a fist, watching his fingers moving easily and normally.

  He had been shot. But it did not hurt him, and it had not damaged him. Even the blood had stopped flowing.

  Ben had not thought about Madec for a long time. Now he did.

  Madec was shooting now to kill him.

  And Ben’s body falling from this high cliff, smashing down against the ledges and finally into the breccia would be so mangled and broken that no one would suspect that he was dead before he fell.

  Faintly, as though from another world, he heard the Jeep engine start.

  Madec was trying to find a position where he could see Ben again.

  It would not, Ben realized, be hard to do.

  Somehow the sound of the Jeep set his mind adrift and he was suddenly thinking of a thing called a Velo-Drome that he had seen at a county fair when he was a boy. A girl with a long red scarf trailing in the wind had ridden a motorcycle up from the bottom of a wooden pit, going around and around until she left the sloping wooden sides and the motorcycle was traveling on the perfectly vertical wall of the thing. He had stared at this, not believing it could be done, but she was doing it, the red scarf trailing straight behind her, as she lay, flat out in space.…

  In a few minutes, Madec would have maneuvered into position to shoot him again.

  Ben knew that he had only until that Jeep motor stopped.

  Reaching behind him, he pulled the bundle of sotol leaves and the slingshot around to his stomach. He lashed them all into a compact bundle and then worked the whole thing around to his back again, tying it against his backbone.

  Lifting one foot and then the other, he ripped the shreds of his shorts from his feet.

  Ready, he stood a second longer, looking out across the ledge at the hot, smooth, slanting face of the funnel.

  Far below him the Jeep appeared and braked to a stop, the dust settling around it. Madec got out, moving in the dust.

  Ben had an odd, clear thought: I don’t want to die here. Not here, on this barren piece of stone.

  He came out on the ledge.

  He came out fast, pushing himself out with his hands against the wall and, as he ran, he tried to block off the pain which pounded up from his feet.

  Whether Madec shot at him or not he would never know, for he seemed to have come into a bright, hot, tiny world, filled with sunshine, stone and silence. He did not hear his own breathing, or the thudding of his feet, or the increasingly hard beat of his heart.

  He did not feel anything, not the wind of his movement, or the heat of the sun, or the gentle rubbing of the bundle against his ragged back. All he felt was the soles of his feet, his whole attention moving down to those two areas of flesh and concentrating there.

  He ran straight off the end of the ledge, straight out into the sloping stone funnel.

  Now the areas of his feet touching hot stone changed. He was no longer running flat-footed; the left outer sole of his left foot and the inner sole of his right were all that touched.

  Every sense of feel he had he concentrated there in his feet, feeling every tiny roughness, his skin seeming to grasp it and let it go, feeling every smooth area, his skin sucking itself against it. His toes felt as sensitive as fingers, touching, gripping, pushing, letting go.

  As he ran, his left hand brushed the wall at his side with delicate, gentle caresses, not grasping, not pushing, not holding, his fingertips just flitting along the stone.

  He held his right arm out, only slightly bent, his fingers open and spread as though to find assistance in the air itself.

  Focusing his mind on the touch of his feet against the stone, he drove power down into them when he felt that he had some tiny grasp; did not force it when he felt that there was no grip, only smooth, steep stone.

  He ran and ran, touching, flying, fingering, balancing, floating, as the curved wall of the funnel seemed to spin beside him.

  He was trending down. He had planned to make this passage straight across the funnel from the wide ledge to the dark corridor on the other side, it, too, ending with a sharp edge at the face of the funnel.

  But he was going slowly down the steep slope, each step a fraction lower than the last.

  When he had left the ledge he could look across empty space and see into the dark corridor, see the small stones lying on its floor, see the walls where they touched it.

  Then he could not see the floor any longer, for the opening was moving slowly, slowly upward.

  If, when he reached the narrow opening of the corridor he could not get into it, all he could do was to run on, on to the edge of the funnel and then into space for there was nothing else.

  The corridor was a black rectangle in the reddish-brown wall on which he ran. It was coming closer—and rising higher.

  Ben flung his arms up, his fingers curled and reaching.

  They found the sharp edge and locked themselves to it.

  Everything stopped, the movement, the feel of air, the light touching of his feet, and he hung, his body flat against the steep wall, his arms stretched to their limits, his fingers curled over the edge of the corridor’s floor.

  The stone against him felt strange. It was as though, in all the time he had been running he had not been in contact with the earth, the fleeting touches of his fingers and the small areas of the soles of his feet not really touching the stone.

  This stone was solid and warm and felt soft, as though he were lying on a warm, stiff-fibered carpet. It was a sleepy, delicious feeling and there was no reason to end it; just hang here on this warm carpet and sleep.

  The fingers of his right hand had slipped steadily, nerve by nerve, but he had not noticed it.

  Only the snapping movement of his little finger, as it slid off the edge, brought his attention to his hands and made him feel the growing strain coming down his arms in tight strings of pain.

  He worked his body upward, and at last rolled over into the darkness of the narrow corridor.

  His muscles trembled, jerked, shivered as he crawled on his hands and knees into what was not a corridor but a tunnel, the outer wall solidly curving over at the top and becoming a part of the butte itself.

  Sometime, a million years ago when the desert was a s
ea, waves had formed this tunnel, wearing the sides and floor smooth, rounding the sharp edges of the stone.

  Ben crawled on toward where light showed a slight bend in the tunnel. The floor here began to slope downward and was very smooth, the stone almost gleaming in the subdued light coming from the far end.

  He got around the bend slowly.

  And there lay the lake. A great lake of dark, sparkling, clear water, held there by the stone.

  9

  A CURIOUS THING has been noticed about people who are dying of thirst. The dehydration of their bodies is so extreme and the loss of salt so serious that the consistency of their blood changes radically. Sweating eventually ceases and the mucous membranes, usually moist and full of fluid, dry up and peel off. There is no saliva in their mouths or throats, and even the corners of their eyes, always flowing with moisture in normal times, become so dry that any speck of dust in their eyes causes excruciating pain.

  And yet, if these people are rescued before they die, even people in the last moment of life and completely dehydrated, they almost always cry. From some mysterious storage, real tears flow from eyes that, a moment before, were bone dry and painful. No one knows where these tears come from.

  Ben sat on the floor of the tunnel, his back against the curved wall of it.

  It was not a lake.

  It was a puddle of water about fifteen feet in diameter and not more than two feet deep in the deepest part. All around this puddle bird droppings had caked the floor, and the water itself was not, as it had seemed, sparkling and clear. It was murky and had a stale, almost dusty taste.

  It was delicious.

  Lying on his stomach, Ben had drunk as much as he could. Then he had rested and drunk again.

  It was as though he had actually felt this water flowing straight through the walls of his intestines and being taken up by his blood, and distributed through his body.

  He had drunk once more and then, asleep almost before he rolled away from the puddle, he had lain there beside the water.