light and motion as the train swayed and clattered through a tunnel. Ben's face rippled into focus, and Jonathan complained thickly, 'I can't feel anything from the waist down.'
Ben mumbled some reassuring sounds and dissolved.
When Jonathan next contacted the world, Dante had given way to Kafka. A brilliant ceiling was flying past above him, and a mechanized voice was paging doctors by name. A starched white upside-down female torso bent over him and shook its dumpling head, and they wheeled him on more quickly. The ceiling stopped its giddy rush, and male voices somewhere nearby spoke with grave rapidity. He wanted to tell them that he could feel nothing from the waist down, but no one seemed interested. They had cut away the laces of his boots and were taking off his pants. A nurse clicked her tongue and said with a mixture of sympathy and eagerness, 'That may have to be amputated.'
No! The word rushed to Jonathan's mind, but he passed out before he could tell them that he would rather die.
Ultimately, they saved the toe in question, but not before Jonathan had endured days of pain, strapped to his bed under a plastic tent that bathed his exposure-burnt extremities in a pure oxygen atmosphere. The only relief he got from the bone-eroding immobility was a daily sponging down with alcohol and cotton. Even this respite carried its calculated indignities, for the mannish nurse who did the job always handled his genitals like cheap bric-a-brac that had to be dusted under.
His injuries were widespread, but not serious. In addition to the exposure and frostbite, his nose had been broken by the impact of Jean-Paul's corpse; two of his ribs had cracked when the lasso snapped tight; and his collision with the face had resulted in a mild concussion. Of all of these, the nose bothered him longest. Even after the physical restrictions of the oxygen atmosphere tent had been lifted and the ribs had mended sufficiently to make the adhesive tape more troublesome than the pain, the broad bandage across the bridge of his nose continued to torment him. He could not even read, because the visual distraction of the white pad tempted him to stare strabismically.
But boredom was the greatest plague of all. He received no visitors. Ben had not accompanied him to Zurich. He stayed at the hotel, paying off bills and attending to the retrieval and transportation of the dead. Anna remained too, and they made love a few times.
So great was the boredom that Jonathan was driven to finishing the Lautrec article. But when he read it over the next morning, he growled and tossed it into the wastebasket beside his bed.
The climb was over. The Eiger Birds flew south to their padded nests, sated with sensation for the moment. Newsmen waited around for a couple of days, but when it became apparent that Jonathan would survive, they left the city in a noisy flutter, like carrion disturbed at their cadaver.
By the end of the week the climb was no longer news, and soon the attention of the press was siphoned off to the most publicized event of the decade. The United States had deposited two grinning farm boys on the moon, by which achievement the nation aspired to infuse into the community of man a New Humility in the face of cosmic distance and American technology.
The only letter he received was a postcard from Cherry, one side of which was covered with stamps and postal marks that showed it had gone from Long Island to Arizona to Long Island to Kleine Scheidegg to Sicily to Kleine Scheidegg to Zurich. Sicily? The handwriting was oval and large at first, then regularly smaller and more cramped as she had run out of space.
'Wonderful news!!! I have been released from that burden (hem, hem) I carried for so long! Released and released! Fantastic man! Quiet, gentle, calm, witty—and a lover of
Flip.
Jonathan lay looking up at the ceiling.
The first day after restrictions against visitors were lifted, he had the company of a man from the American Consulate. Short, plump, with long hair crisscrossed over the naked pate, raven eyes blinking behind steel-rimmed glasses, he was of that un-dramatic type CII recruits specifically because they do not fit the popular image of the spy. So consistently does CII use such men that they have long ago become stereotypes that any foreign agent can pick from a crowd at a glance.
The visitor left a small tape recorder of a new CII design that had the 'play' and 'erase' heads reversed, both operative in the 'play' mode, so that the message was destroyed as it was played. The model was considered a marked improvement over its more secretive predecessor, which erased before playing.
As soon as he was alone, Jonathan opened the lid of the recorder and found an envelope taped to the underside. It was a confirmation from his bank of the deposit of one hundred thousand dollars to his account. Confused, he pushed the 'play' button, and Dragon's voice spoke to him, even thinner and more metallic than usual through the small speaker. He had only to close his eyes to see the iridescent ivory face emerging through the gloom, and the pink eyes under tufted cotton eyebrows.
My dear Hemlock... You have by now opened the envelope and have discovered—with surprise and pleasure, I hope—that we have decided to pay the full sum, despite our earlier threat to deduct your more outrageous extravagances... I consider this only fair in light of the discomfort and expense your injuries have cost you... It seems obvious to us that you were unable to make the sanction target reveal himself, and so you took the sure, if grimly uneconomical, path of sanctioning all three men... But you always were extravagant... We assume the killing of M. Bidet was accomplished during your first night on the mountain, under cover of dark... How you contrived to precipitate the other two men to their deaths is not clear to us, nor does it interest us particularly... Results concern us more than methods, as you may recall.
Now, Hemlock, I really ought to rebuke you for the shopworn condition in which you returned Clement Pope... You escape my wrath only because I had all along planned to bestow some deserved punishment on him... And why not at your hands?... Pope had been assigned to the Search task of locating your target, and he failed to identify his man... As an eleventh-hour expedient, he came up with the notion of setting you up a decoy... It was certainly second-rate thinking and the product of a frightened and incompetent man, but there were no viable alternatives open to us... I had faith that you would survive the admittedly tense situation, and, as you see, I was correct... Pope has been removed from SS and has been assigned to the less demanding task of writing vice-presidential addresses... After the beating you gave him, he is quite useless to us... He suffers from what in a good hunting dog would be called gun-shyness.
It is with great reluctance that I place your file among the 'inactives,' although I will confide in you that Mrs. Cerberus does not share my melancholy... To tell the truth, I suspect in my heart of hearts that we shall be working together before long... Considering your tastes, this money will last no more than four years, after which—who can say?
Congratulations on your ingenious solution to the crisis, and good luck to you in your Long Island shrine to your self-image.
The end of the tape flap-flap-flapped as the take-up reel spun. Jonathan turned the machine off and set it aside. He shook his head slowly and said to himself helplessly, 'Oh, God.'
'Let me see now. It was forty-two down by—one, two, three, four...'
Ben had difficulty getting in the door. He swore and kicked at it viciously as he stumbled in, a huge cellophane-wrapped basket of fruit in his arms.
'Here!' he said gruffly, and he thrust the crinkling burden toward Jonathan, who had been laughing uncontrollably since first Ben burst in.
'What is this wonderful thing you bring me?' Jonathan asked between racks of laughter.
'I don't know. Fruit and such shit. They hustle them down in the lobby. What's so goddam funny?'
'Nothing.' Jonathan was limp with laughing. 'It's just about the sweetest thing anyone's ever done for me, Ben.'
'Oh, fuck off.'
