Phases of Gravity

by Dan Simmons

Despite the food consumed, the pack seemed heavier at first than it had the previous day. The canyon continued to narrow and so did the trail, winding along the canyon wall above the stream. Here and there a mudslide or fallen tree had the three of them moving carefully on a steep slope of rock or grass sixty feet above the water. At first Baedecker was convinced that the hang glider group could not have come this way, but then he began noticing bootprints in the soft dirt and furrows in the mud where the poles had been dragged. Baedecker shook his head and continued on.

  By nine A.M. the direct sunlight was burning on the rock and filling the air with the scent of heated pine and fir trees. Baedecker poured sweat. He wanted to stop and change from his jeans into a pair of shorts, but he was afraid that if he fell behind the other two he might never catch up. There was no sign of Deedee or Tom Jr. on the trail behind them, but Deedee had been cheery enough when they said good-bye after striking camp. Tom Gavin never really rested, he just stopped moving for a few seconds, fidgeted from foot to foot while squinting ahead up the trail, then only to say "Ready?" and be off and moving before either Maggie or Baedecker could reply.

  After the first hour it was not so bad. By the second hour Baedecker had fallen into a rhythm of pain and panting, which seemed tolerable enough. Sometime before noon they came around a bend of rock, and two tall peaks were visible ahead, the summits still holding pockets of snow despite the hot summer just past. Gavin identified the tiered, flat-topped peak as Uncompahgre and the sharper one as the Wetterhorn. A third summit was just visible above the ridgeline. "Uncompahgre looks like a wedding cake, the Wetterhorn looks a little like the real Matterhorn, and the Matterhorn doesn't look at all like the real Matterhorn," said Gavin.

  "Gotcha," said Baedecker.

  They continued up the deteriorating trail past spires of red rock and occasional waterfalls. The Douglas firs were eighty feet tall in places, rising high above any area flat enough for them. They passed through a thick cluster of ponderosa pine and Maggie had them all sniffing the trees, explaining that the sap of the ponderosa smelled like butterscotch. Baedecker found a recent scar, sniffed the sap, and announced that it was definitely chocolate. Maggie called him a pervert. Gavin suggested that they all move a little faster.

  They had lunch where Silver Creek ran into the Cimarron River. The trail had been completely eroded away, and it had taken the three of them half an hour to pick their way down the last few hundred yards of scree to the floor of the canyon. Baedecker looked back down the canyon, but there was still no sign of Deedee or Tommy. To the south the trail resumed on the opposite side of the river, but Baedecker could see no easy way across the twenty-five feet of water. He wondered how Lude and Maria and the others had managed to cross.

  Maggie wandered away up Silver Creek and came back a minute later to lead Baedecker to where a dozen violet columbines grew near a fallen log. A ring of Engleman and Blue Spruce enclosed a small clearing carpeted with grass and ferns. A tiny stream bubbled through it, and scores of white-and-purple flowers spotted the grass despite the lateness of the season. Somewhere nearby a woodpecker was tapping out a frenzied code.

  "Great place to camp," said Baedecker.

  "Yes," said Maggie. "And a great place not to camp, too." She took out a Hershey bar and broke it in half, offering Baedecker the half with more almonds.

  Gavin strode into the clearing. He had reshouldered his heavy pack and had binoculars dangling around his neck. "Look," he said, "I'm going to ford the river down there above where the creek comes in. I'll leave a line across it. Then I'm going to reconnoiter the trail up the west side there. It should be about a half mile to that final set of switchbacks. I'll wait for you above tree line, okay?"

  "Okay," said Baedecker.

  "The map says that the old Silver Jack Mine is up this creek," said Maggie. "Why don't we take a few minutes to hike up to it? Deedee and Tommy should be along pretty soon.

  Gavin smiled and shrugged. "Suit yourself. I want to get up on that plateau to find a campsite so we can scout the south ridge before nightfall."

  Maggie nodded and Gavin strode away. Baedecker accompanied him down to the river to make sure there were no problems when he forded the quick current. When Gavin reached the other side, he waved and secured his rope to a tree near the bank. Baedecker returned the wave and walked back to the clearing.

  Maggie was lying on her red shirt. Her midriff and shoulders were darkly tanned, but her breasts were white, the nipples a delicate shade of pink.

  "Oh," said Baedecker and sat down on a log.

  Maggie lifted her hand to shield her eyes and looked at him. "Does this make you uncomfortable, Richard?" When Baedecker hesitated, Maggie sat up and pulled on her shirt. "There, decent again," she said with a smile. "Or at least covered up."

  Baedecker plucked two long strands of grass, peeled the ends, and offered one to Maggie.

  "Thanks." She looked up toward the west wall of the canyon. "Your friends are interesting," she said.

  "Tom and Deedee?" said Baedecker. "What do you think?"

  Maggie returned his level gaze. "I think they're your friends," she said. "I'm their guest."

  Baedecker chewed on his stem of grass and nodded. "I'd like your opinion," he said after a while.

  Maggie smiled and looked up at the sun. "Well, after last night's numerology sermon, I was tempted to say that these folks have their porch light on but nobody's home." She chewed off a bit of grass. "But that's not fair. It's unkind. I guess Tom and Deedee just represent a certain type that I have strong reservations about," she said.

  "Born-again Christians?" said Baedecker.

  Maggie shook her head. "No, people who trade their brains in for sacred truths that can be boiled down to poster slogans."

  "It sounds like we're still talking about Scott," said Baedecker.

  Maggie did not deny it. "What do you think of Tom?" she asked.

  Baedecker thought a minute. "Well," he said at last, "there's a story from our early training days that I've been reminded of recently."

  "Great," said Maggie. "I'm a sucker for stories."

  "It's a long one."

  "I'm a sucker for long stories," said Maggie.

  "Well, we were out on two weeks of survival training," said Baedecker. "For the grand finale they broke us into teams of three—crews actually—flew us out into the New Mexico desert somewhere northwest of White Sands, and gave us three days to find our way back to civilization. We had our Swiss army knives, some booklets on edible plants, and one compass between us."

  "Sounds like fun," said Maggie.

  "Yeah," said Baedecker, "NASA thought so too. If we didn't show up in five days, they would've started a search pattern. They weren't too keen on losing any of their second-generation astronauts. So anyway, our team was the same as the crew we had later—me, Dave Muldorff, and Tom. Even then, Tom always worked harder than anyone else. Even after he made the cut . . . getting into the astronaut corps, crew selection, whatever . . . he still would work twice as hard as he had to, as if he was always on the verge of washing out. Well, all of us felt like that some of the time, but it never seemed to let up with Tom.

  "Our other teammate was Dave Muldorff—we sometimes called him Rockford back then—and Dave was just the opposite. Dave once told me that the only philosophy he adhered to was Ohm's Law—find the path of least resistance and follow it. Actually, Dave was a lot like Neil Armstrong . . . they'd give a thousand percent and come out on top when they had to, but you'd never see either one of them up at dawn running laps. The main difference between Muldorff and Armstrong was that Dave had a weird sense of humor.

  "So anyway, our first day in the boonies went all right. We found a water source and figured out a way to carry some with us. Tom caught a lizard before nightfall and wanted to eat it raw, but Dave and I decided to wait a bit on that. We had our course set to cross a road we knew ran into the mountains, and we were sure we'd find it sooner or later. On the second day, Tom was ready to h
ave the lizard for lunch, but Dave convinced us to get by on plants for a while longer and save the main course for dinner. Then, about two o'clock that afternoon, Dave began acting strange. He kept sniffing the ground and saying that he could smell the way to civilization. Tom suggested sunstroke and we both got pretty alarmed. We tried to tie a T-shirt around Dave's head, but he just howled at the sky and took off running.

  "We caught up to him within a quarter of a mile; when we came over a rock ridge, there was Muldorff in the middle of this desolate arroyo sitting in a lawn chair under a beach umbrella, drinking a cold beer. He had a transistor radio going, a cooler full of ice and beer under his feet, and a swimming pool—one of those little inflatable ones that kids use—a pool a few feet away with an inflatable raft and a couple of rubber ducks in it. And you have to remember that we were in the middle of nowhere—still about sixty miles from the nearest road.

  "After he got through laughing, Dave told us how he did it. He had a WAF clerk at the base commander's office get into the files and find the proposed drop points for the various NASA teams. Then Dave vectored our probable route back and got a friend of his who was flying choppers out of White Sands to ferry the junk out to this arroyo. Dave thought it was funny as hell. Tom didn't. He was so mad at first that he turned his back and walked away from Dave and his beach umbrella and his rock music. At first I sort of agreed with Tom. Dave's stunt was the kind of thing that used to drive NASA absolutely apeshit. The agency had no sense of humor at all as far as we could tell. Our whole team could've been in big trouble.

  "But after a beer or two, Dave packed all the stuff in behind a boulder and we got back to survival training. Tom didn't speak to him for twenty-four hours. Worse than that, I don't think Tom ever completely forgave or forgot for the two years we worked together after that. At first I thought it was just that he was angry about Dave screwing up our training and jeopardizing Tom's perfect record. Then I realized that it was more than that. Dave had broken the rules and Tom could never quite get around that. And there was one other thing . . ."

  "What's that?" asked Maggie.

  Baedecker leaned forward and whispered. "Well, I think Tom was really looking forward to eating that damned lizard and Dave had taken some of the flavor out of it."

  Deedee and Tom Jr. showed up when Baedecker and Maggie were preparing to cross the river, and the four forded together. Tommy looked pale and somewhat subdued but remained as sullen as before. Deedee was chipper enough for both of them. The river was never more than knee-deep, but the current was swift and the water was ice-cold. Baedecker waited until the others were across, untied the rope from the east bank, and brought it across with him.

  Forty-five minutes later they passed a waterfall, crossed the stream again—on a fallen log this time—and soon after that they were climbing switchbacks. The summit of the Matterhorn loomed above them and each time they paused to rest, more of Uncompahgre Peak had become visible to the southeast. They were within a few miles of the mountain now, and Baedecker began to realize how large the massif actually was. It reminded him of the huge mesas and buttes he had seen in New Mexico and Arizona, but this one was sharper, steeper, and it rose not from the desert but from a ten-thousand-foot plateau.

  By midafternoon they had completed the last series of switchbacks and emerged onto the high tundra. The transformation was startling. The thick pine forests of the canyon had given way to a few aged and stunted fir trees, often weathered to the point there were no branches at all on their western and northern sides, and then to tall clumps of ground juniper, and then even these had disappeared and only grass and the low, red-and-tan gorse covered the rocky tundra. To Baedecker, coming up over the last ridge from the canyon was like stepping from the top rung of a ladder onto the roof of a tall building.

  From the high pass they were now traversing, Baedecker could see dozens of greater and lesser mountain peaks and a seemingly endless vista of passes, ridges, high meadows, and softly undulating tundra. Patches of snow mottled the landscape. Overhead, a scattering of fluffy cumulus stretched to the serrated horizon, the white against blue above almost blending into the white against brown below.

  Baedecker paused, panting, feeling the sweat pour from him, his lungs still demanding more oxygen than they could supply. "Fantastic," he said.

  Maggie was grinning. She removed a red kerchief she had been using as a headband and mopped her face. She touched Baedecker's arm and pointed to the northeast where sheep were grazing along a rolling stretch of alpine meadow several ridges away. The gray bodies mixed with the clouds and snowfields and cloud shadows to give a sense of dappled movement across the entire panorama.

  "Fantastic," Baedecker said again. His heart was pounding at his ribs. He felt as if he had left some dark part of him behind in the shadows of the canyon. Maggie offered him her water bottle. He was aware of her arm touching his as he drank.

  Tommy slumped down on a rock and poked at a clump of moss campion with his walking stick. Deedee smiled and looked around. "There's Tom," she said and pointed to a small figure far across the pass. "It looks like he's setting up the tent already."

  "This is marvelous," Baedecker said softly to himself. For some reason he felt light-headed in the cool, thin air. He gave the water bottle to Maggie and she drank deeply, throwing her head back so that her short, blond curls caught the sunlight.

  Maggie offered the water bottle to Deedee, but the older woman took her hand instead. With her other hand she seized Baedecker's fingers. The three stood in a rough circle. Deedee bowed her head. "Thank you, O Lord," she said, "for allowing us to witness the perfection of Your Creation and for sharing this special moment with dear friends who will, with the help of the Holy Spirit, come to know the truth of Thy Word. In Jesus' name we ask. Amen."

  Deedee patted Baedecker's hand and looked at him. "It is marvelous," she said. There were tears in her eyes. "And admit it, Richard," she said, "don't you wish Joan were here to share this with us?"

  Their campsite had three tents arranged around a tall, flat-topped boulder that stood alone at the locus of a great circle of tundra. There was no firewood at that altitude except for the branches of the low shrubbery that grew between the rocks, so they set their two backpack stoves on a flat rock next to the boulder and watched the blue propane flames as the stars came out.

  Before dinner they had reconnoitered their route as the shadows of the Wetterhorn and the Matterhorn covered the plateau and moved up the terraced sides of Uncompahgre. "There," said Gavin and handed the binoculars to Baedecker. "Right at the base of the south ridge."

  Baedecker looked and could make out a low, red tent set back in the shadows of the rocks. Two figures moved around it, storing equipment and working over a small stove. Baedecker handed back the binoculars. "I see two of them," he said. "I wonder where the girl and the guy carrying the hang glider are."

  "Up there," said Maggie and pointed toward the high ridge just at the point where sunlight still struck the massif.

  Gavin focused his binoculars. "I see them. That idiot is still dragging the kite along."

  "He can't be planning to fly it tonight, can he?" asked Maggie.

  Gavin shook his head. "No, he's still hours from the summit. They're just getting as high as they can before nightfall." He handed the binoculars to Maggie.

  "The early-morning conditions would be best for what he wants to do," said Baedecker. "Strong thermals. Not too much wind." Maggie gave him the binoculars and Baedecker swept the ridge twice before finding the small figures high on the jagged spine of the mountain. Sunlight illuminated the red-and-yellow carrying bag as the little man bent under the burden of the aluminum and Dacron bundle. The woman followed several paces behind, bent under her own load of a large frame pack with two sleeping bags. As Baedecker watched, the sunlight left the mountain and the two struggling silhouettes became indistinguishable from the tumble of spires and boulders along the ridge.

  "Uh-oh," said Maggie. She was looking towa
rd the west. The sun had not set, but along the horizon lay a band of blue-black clouds that had swallowed the last light of day.

  "Probably miss us," said Gavin. "The wind is to the southeast."

  "I hope so," said Maggie.

  Baedecker turned the binoculars back on the south ridge, but the two human figures there were too insignificant to stand out as storm and nightfall approached.

  Stars continued to burn overhead, but in the west all was darkness. The four adults huddled near the stoves and drank hot tea while Tommy sat four feet above them on the boulder and stared off to the north. It was very cold, and there was no hint of wind.

  "You've never met Dick's wife, Joan, have you, Maggie?" asked Deedee.

  "No," said Maggie, "I haven't met her."

  "Joan's a wonderful person," said Deedee. "She has the patience of a saint. Her personality is perfectly suited to a camping trip like this because nothing phases her. She takes things in her stride."

  "Where are you going after Colorado?" Gavin asked Baedecker.

  "Oregon. I thought I'd stop and see Rockford."

  "Rockford?" said Gavin. "Oh, Muldorff. It's too bad about his illness."

  "What illness?" asked Baedecker.

  "Joan was the most patient of all the wives," Deedee said to Maggie. "When the men would be gone for days . . . weeks . . . all of us would get a little cranky . . . even me, I'm afraid . . . but Joan never complained. I don't think I once heard Joan complain in all of the years I knew her."

  "He was hospitalized last June," said Gavin.

  "I know," said Baedecker. "I thought that was for appendicitis. He's all right now, isn't he?"

  "Joan was a Christian then, but she hadn't really given herself to Jesus," said Deedee. "Now she and Phillip . . . he's an accountant . . .? I understand that they're very active in an evangelical church in Boston."

  "It wasn't appendicitis," said Gavin. "I talked to Jim Bosworth who lobbies on the Hill in Washington. He says that Muldorff's friends in the House know that he has Hodgkin's disease. He had his spleen removed last June."