The Eiger Sanction

waste on talk. Ben prayed that Jonathan would not succumb to that emotional collapse so common to climbers once the end was almost within grasp.

The three young men could not move quickly. The face was almost vertical with only an iced-over ledge three inches wide for toehold. If they had not been experienced at executing tension traverses against the line, they would not have been able to move at all.

Then Jonathan stopped in mid-descent. He looked up, but could not see over the lip of the overhang.

'What's wrong up there?' Ben called.

'Rope...!' Anderl's voice had the gritting of teeth in it. '...Jammed!'

'Can you handle it?'

'No! Can Jonathan get on the face and give us a little slack?'

'No!'

There was nothing Jonathan could do to help himself. He turned slowly around on the line, six hundred feet of void below him. What he wanted most of all was to sleep.

Although he was far below them, Ben could hear the voices of Karl and Anderl through the still frigid air. He could not make out the words, but they had the sound of an angry conference.

The three young men continued to move out, now halfway to Jonathan and starting to take chances, knocking in fewer pitons to increase their speed.

'All right!' Anderl's voice called down. 'I'll do what I can.'

'No!' Karl screamed. 'Don't move!'

'Just hold me!'

'I can't!' There was a whimper in the sound. 'Anderl, I can't!'

Ben saw the snow come first, shooting over the edge of the overhang, a beautiful golden spray in the last beam of the setting sun. Automatically, he pressed back against the face. In a flash, like one alien frame cut into a movie, he saw the two dark figures rush past him, veiled in a mist of falling snow and ice. One of them struck the lip of the window with an ugly splat. And they were gone.

Snow continued to hiss past; then it stopped.

And it was silent on the face.

The three young men were safe, but frozen in their stances by what they had witnessed.

'Keep moving!' Ben barked, and they collected their emotions and obeyed.

The first shock knocked Jonathan over in his harness, and he hung upside down, swinging violently, his mind swirling in an eddy of semiconsciousness. The thing hit him again, and blood gushed from his nose. He wanted to sleep, and he did not want the thing to hit him again. That was the extent of his demands on life. But for a third time they collided. It was a glancing blow, and their ropes intertwined. Instinctively, Jonathan grasped at it and held it to him. It was Jean-Paul, hanging half out of his bedroll shroud, stiff with death and cold. But Jonathan clung to it.

When Anderl and Karl fell, their weight snapped the line between them and the corpse, and it tumbled over the edge and crashed down on Jonathan. It saved him from falling, counterbalancing his weight on the line that connected them and passed through a snap link and piton high above. They swung side by side in the silent cold.

'Sit up!'

Jonathan heard Ben's voice from a distance, soft and unreal.

'Sit up!'

Jonathan did not mind hanging upside down. He was through. He had had it. Let me sleep. Why sit up.

'Pull yourself up, goddamit!'

They won't leave me alone unless I do what they want. What does it matter? He tried to haul himself on Jean-Paul's line, but his fingers would not close. They had no feeling. What does it matter?

'Jon! For Christ's sake!'

'Leave me alone,' he muttered. 'Go away.' The valley below was dark, and he did not feel cold any longer. He felt nothing at all. He was going to sleep.

No, that isn't sleep. It's something else. All right, try to sit up. Maybe then they'll leave me alone. Can't breathe. Nose stopped up with blood. Sleep.

Jonathan tried again, but his fingers throbbed, fat and useless. He reached high and wound his arm around the rope. He struggled halfway up, but his grip was slipping. Wildly, he kicked at Jean-Paul's body until he got his legs around it and managed to press himself up until his rope hit him in the forehead.

There. Sitting upright. Now leave me alone. Stupid game. Doesn't matter.

'Try to catch this!'

Jonathan squeezed his eyes shut to break the film from them. There were three men out there. Quite close. Tacked on the wall. What the hell do they want now? Why don't they leave me alone?

'Catch this and slip it around you!'

'Go away,' he mumbled.

Ben's voice roared from a distance. 'Put it around you, goddamit!'

Mustn't piss Ben off. He's mean when he's pissed off. Groggily, Jonathan struggled into the noose of the lasso. Now that's it. Don't ask any more. Let me sleep. Stop squeezing the goddamned breath out of me!

Jonathan heard the young men call anxiously back to Ben. 'We can't pull him in! Not enough slack!'

Good. Leave me alone, then.

'Jon?' Ben's voice was not angry. He was coaxing some child. 'Jon, your axe is still around your wrist.'

So what?

'Cut the line above you, Jon.'

Ben's gone crazy. He must need sleep.

'Cut the line, ol' buddy. It'll only be a short fall. We've got you.'

Go ahead, do it. They'll keep at you until you do. He hacked blindly at the nylon line above him. Again and again with mushy strokes that seldom struck the same place twice. Then a thought slipped into his numb mind, and he stopped.

'What did he say?' Ben called to the rescuers.

'He said that Jean-Paul will fall if he cuts the line.'

'Jon? Listen to me. It's all right. Jean-Paul's dead.'

Dead? Oh, I remember. He's here and he's dead. Where's Anderl? Where's Karl? They re somewhere else, because they're not dead like Jean-Paul. Is that right? I don't understand it. It doesn't matter anyway. What was I doing? Oh, yes. Cut the fucking rope.

He hacked again and again.

And suddenly it snapped. For an instant the two bodies fell together, then Jean-Paul dropped away alone. Jonathan passed out with the pain of his ribs cracking as the lasso jerked tight. And that was merciful, because he did not feel the impact of his collision with the rock.

ZURICH: August 6

Jonathan lay in bed in his sterile cubicle within the labyrinthine complex of Zurich's ultramodern hospital. He was terribly bored.

'...Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen down; by one, two, three, four, five...'

With patience and application, he discovered the mean number of holes in each square of acoustic tile in the ceiling. Balancing this figure on his memory, he undertook to count the tiles across and down, then to multiply for the total number of tiles. This total he intended to multiply by the number of holes in each tile to arrive at the grand total of holes in his entire ceiling!

He was terribly bored. But his boredom had lasted only a few days. For the greater part of his hospitalization, his attention had been occupied with fear, pain, and gratitude at being alive. Once during the trip down from the Gallery Window he had risen foggily to the surface of consciousness and experienced the Dantesque confusion of