'Hey, are we a team, or what? Turn to where the paper clip is, Doc. That's where he talks about it.'
Gideon opened the folder and spread it so that both he and Julie could read.
Even now, writing in comfort and security during the twilight of my life, it stands out in my mind with a real and terrible clarity. Not the great cataclysm itself; not the endless day and night I lay, crushed and broken, locked in the freezing, blue-white embrace of the ice; not even the miraculous, dimly perceived appearance of my rescuers the next day, long after I had given up hope and longed only for oblivion from pain.
No, what I need only close my eyes to call up in harrowing detail is an image rooted not in the great forces of nature, but in the equally ungovernable passions of men. In the blinking of an eye, everything—the sexual jealousies and antipathies of the last several days; the exasperation over Walter's costly errors; the natural tensions that arise in any isolated group which has been in too-intimate contact for too long under too-trying circumstances—all of it came to an explosive, tragic head over an incident so trivial as to be absurd.
Until that moment the day had gone well, due, I think, to my one-more-fight-and-you-flunk warning before we started. James was affecting his brooding-genius mood: quiet, aloof, darkly contemplative—and wisely keeping his distance from both Steven and Jocelyn. For his part, Steven was doing his Zorro imitation: all handsome, flashing smiles, cavalier unconcern, and graceful bounds from boulder to boulder, Jocelyn was...well, Jocelyn was Jocelyn: vague, placid, and off somewhere in her own thought-free world. Thus far, our excursion had produced nothing more traumatic than Walter's gallant but ultimately unsuccessful battle with a fierce mosquito, which had cost us the pleasures of his company.
The tragic incident to which I refer occurred a little before 2:00 P.M., as we made our slow way back across the glacier, having successfully concluded our resampling in the area beyond its eastern lateral moraine. I should explain that our pace was slowed not by massive obstacles or yawning abysses (despite the pompous and officious warnings of the Park Service); on the contrary, we proceeded slowly because we were tired and warm—even on a glacier, the temperature in late July can reach the sixties—and because walking across the surface of Tirku is something like walking on a colossal natural garbage heap. No smooth, pristine ice field, this. One has constantly to pick one's way among the litter of “erratics'—boulders scraped from the flanks of the mountains above. It is all gritty black ice and debris, rocks and bumps, depressions and ruts.
In summer, things are at their worst because of the meltwater rivulets that cut shallow, meandering furrows into the grimy ice, necessitating numerous leaps (the streams are seldom wider than four feet) or tiresome deviations. It was at one of these rivulets that the trouble occurred; an inconsequential V-shaped channel two or three feet wide, with perhaps eight inches of water flowing along its bottom. Leaping it would have been an easy matter except that the far bank rose some four feet higher than the near one and overhung it like a protruding upper lip. Making it up that bank without getting our feet wet was the problem.
Steven, always ready to demonstrate his physical abilities, clambered up with the aid of his ice ax. Then he knelt while the rest of us, one at a time, extended our own axes to him, grasping the handle while he held firmly to the head, providing support while we scrambled up the bank. It was neither a dangerous nor a difficult maneuver. Jocelyn went first, then I did, both without incident. Then it was James's turn. Steven held out the handle. James grasped it, stretched one leg across the stream to prop his foot against the opposite bank, and began to haul himself up.
Whether by accident or design I cannot say—no one can say—but just as James's back foot came off the ice the ax slipped from Steven's hand. James dropped straight into the stream. There was no danger—the fall was a matter of a foot or two—and although getting wet during glacier travel is not generally a laughing matter, James had barely been moistened, having landed on his elbows and knees in only a few inches of water. In any case, hypothermia was hardly a problem with the temperature where it was and the plane due to pick us up in an hour.
'Sorry about that,” Steven said, choking down his laughter.
James crouched on all fours, still holding the ice ax, his black hair tumbling over his forehead, glowering up at Steven from under dark eyebrows.
It was an uneasy moment, but I think we would have gotten through it had Jocelyn not giggled. An innocent, genuinely amused giggle to be sure; but understandably it stung James. He swiped hotly at Steven's legs with the wooden handle of the ice ax, Steven grabbed it, James tugged, and Steven went tumbling down the bank head-over-heels, missing the stream but landing squarely and surely painfully—on the seat of his pants. He was on his feet at once, his face stiff with anger. James brandished the ice ax in warning, but I could see his heart wasn't in it. He was already regretting his impulsive act of a moment before. By nature a sulker and not a fighter, he'd been thoroughly cowed by Steven in their brief altercation a few days earlier and he hardly wanted another one.
Steven was another story. His eyes were glittering with pugnacity.
'That's enough!” I said forcefully. “Steven, stop there. James, put down the ax.'
I might have been speaking to the wind, for all the good it did. Steven thrust the palms of both hands violently against James's upper chest, as bellicose young males do, and James staggered back a few steps. He lifted the ax again. “I'm warning you,” he said in a strangled voice.
Steven sneered, or perhaps it was a snarl, and moved forward. I jumped down from the bank and made swiftly for them. “Gentlemen—!'
Too late. Steve's big fist smashed into James's face with a strange, flat sound. Blood spurted from his nose. His orange sunglasses hung briefly from one ear, then dropped to the ice. I managed to leap between them, grabbing for the ax, but one or the other—they both outweighed me by sixty pounds—sent me sprawling.
