However, at the moment he was unable to see any other way to go about
it.
He went to the sixteenth floor.
Connie pulled on the heavy cord and drew back the office draperies.
Graham unlatched the center window. The two rectangular panes wouldn't
budge at first, then abruptly gave with a squeal, opened inward like
casement windows.
Wind exploded into the room. it had the voice of a living creature; its
screams were piercing, demonic. Snowflakes swirled around him, danced
across the top of the conference table and melted on its polished
surface, beaded like dew on the grass-green carpet.
Leaning over the sill, he looked down the side of the Bowerton Building.
The top five floors-and the four-story decorative pinnacle above
them-were set back two yards from the bottom thirty-seven levels.
just three floors below, there was a six-foot-wide ledge that ringed the
structure. The lower four-fifths of the building's face lay beyond the
ledge, out of his line of sight.
The snow was falling so thickly that he could barely see the street
lamps on the far side of Lexington Avenue. Under the lights, not even a
small patch of pavement was visible.
In the few seconds he needed to survey the situation, the wind battered
his head, chilled and numbed his exposed face.
'That's damned cold! ' As he spoke, breath pluming out of him, he
turned from the window. 'We're bound to suffer at least some
frostbite.'
'We've got to go anyway,' she said.
'I know. I'm not trying to back out.'
'Should we wrap our faces?'
'With what?'
'Scarves-'
'The wind would cut through any material we've got handy, then paste it
to our faces so we'd have trouble breathing.
Unfortunately, the magazine didn't recommend any face masks in that
buyer's guide. Otherwise, we'd have exactly what we need.'
'Then what can we do?'
He had a sudden thought and went to his desk. He stripped off his bulky
gloves. The center drawer contained evidence of the hypochondria that
had been an ever-growing component of his fear: Anacin, aspinn, half a
dozen cold remedies, tetracycline capsules, throat lozenges, a
thermometer in its case ... He picked up a small tube and showed it to
her.
'Chap Stick?' she asked.
'Come here.'
She went to him. 'That stuff's for chapped lips. If we're going to be
frostbitten, why worry about a little thing like chapped lips?'
He pulled the cap off the tube, twisted the base to bring up the waxy
stick, and coated her entire faceforehead, temples, cheeks, nose, lips
and chin. 'With even a thin shield of this, the wind will need more
time to leech the warmth out of you. And it'll keep your skin supple.
