Ethan looked at his watch. It was only ten-thirty A.M. If those dots in the snow were coming from the peak, then they were climbing at near-record pace.
He frowned. “Did the Germans send an early summit party?”
Dominic shook his head. “That has to be Tilt and Sneezy. I’ll bet they made it.”
“Probably,” Ethan agreed. “Tilt never did take no for an answer.” He grinned. “I guess that means I’m not important anymore.”
As the ascending and descending pairs closed the gap, Dominic could see that the lead climber above — probably Tilt — was moving strongly. His partner was having a much tougher time. Every two or three steps, Sneezy would slump on his ice ax to snatch a few seconds of rest. He wasn’t in danger, exactly. But he wasn’t doing well.
Half an hour later, the two teams passed. Dominic pretended to lean forward into his climb, keeping his face averted. He didn’t want Sneezy to recognize him and alert Cicero. He needn’t have worried. The cameraman was so exhausted that he never moved his gaze from the narrow path in front of him.
Tilt, too, seemed content to let Dominic keep his secret. He confirmed their summit success with a single thumbs-up, and exchanged a high five with Ethan — the new record holder accepting the torch from the old.
Ethan put an arm around Sneezy and hugged the older man briefly. “One foot in front of the other, Lenny. That’s all you have to do.”
The guide could only grunt his acknowledgment and plod on.
Powering past, Tilt felt a pang of guilt. Zaph and the shrimp seemed genuinely happy for him. He almost turned around to warn Dominic that he was about to run out of oxygen, but fought the impulse down. Tilt was only in this generous mood because he now held the record. If the shrimp somehow managed to get his hands on a spare bottle of gas, and made it to the top, Tilt’s time in the spotlight was going to be very short.
He reached out an arm to steady Sneezy, who was wobbling.
“Thanks,” the cameraman panted. “Hey, was that Zaph?”
“That was him,” Tilt confirmed. “The second youngest kid ever to summit Everest.”
“Climbing with Pasang, right?” Sneezy persisted, trying to create order out of his jumbled thoughts.
“Yeah, Pasang. Right.”
The ridge grew steeper as the sun rose in the sky. Ethan and Dominic slogged on, feeling the weariness as never before. Most Everesters agreed that this was the make-or-break section of the summit assault, the crucial second act of a three-part drama. The euphoria of reaching the Balcony has worn off, yet the next milestone, the South Summit, is a dangerous, oxygen-starved marathon away — more than one thousand vertical feet of unbreathable air, unbearable cold, and overpowering wind.
It was easy to despair at 28,300 feet. Here, higher up than all of the world’s lesser peaks, the summit still seemed distant.
Don’t think, Dominic commanded himself. He immersed his mind in the lore of history’s great alpinists. All had doubted themselves on this jagged, inclined proving ground. Yet all had prevailed by following a credo that was so simplistic that it bordered on the childish: Just keep moving.
Suddenly, he was on his knees in the snow, struggling for his next breath. Desperately, he yanked off his mask and searched the plastic breathing tube for any sign of blockage. It was clear.
Ethan was at his side instantly. The older boy’s eyes went straight to the tiny gauge on the oxygen cylinder. “You’re out of O’s!”
“That’s impossible!” Dominic gasped. “I took a full bottle at the Col!”
“This thing’s open to maximum!” Ethan exclaimed. “Of course it didn’t last!”
“But — ” The reply was fully formed in Dominic’s head. He had personally set his oxygen to two liters per minute. Yet his brain could not communicate the words to his mouth. Confusion — that was another sign of hypoxia — oxygen starvation. The symptom that came next was even more alarming — a deep, whole-body chill that began in his fingers and toes and spread inward.
Ethan detached his own cylinder of gas and hooked it into Dominic’s regulator.
Dominic took two deep breaths and then pushed the mask away. “You need this! I won’t take it from you!”
Ethan shook his head. “I summited Lhotse without gas.”
“We’re higher than Lhotse!” Dominic argued. “And we’re not done yet! We’ve got to descend to the Balcony and get our spare bottles!”
“No!” Ethan wheezed. He hyperventilated for a moment as he adjusted to the thinner air. “If we go down, our summit bid is finished!”
Despairingly, Dominic knew it to be the truth. They were more than seven hundred feet above the Balcony. If they descended, every inch of that ground would have to be climbed again en route to the pinnacle. They would not have the strength. But mostly, they would not have the time.
“Let me go down,” Dominic insisted. “This is my problem, and it shouldn’t cost you your chance.”
“This is my chance,” Ethan countered. “The minute I hit the top last year, I knew one day I had to try this mountain without O’s. I chickened out after what happened on Lhotse, but this is my wake-up call. If I don’t give it my best shot, I’ll be asking ‘what if’ for the rest of my life.” And he hunched into the wind and continued up the corniced ridge.
Dominic watched for an uncertain moment and fell into line behind him.
He may not be the record holder anymore, Dominic thought to himself, but he’s already one of the all-time greats. I’m proud that he wants to climb with me.
The wind shifted. Now it seemed to be blowing straight down from the top of the ridge, directly in their faces. Dominic found himself drifting ahead of Ethan. It was not so noticeable at first, but as they fought onward and upward, it became obvious that Ethan was losing ground. Without oxygen, the older boy was experiencing cold and fatigue much more acutely than Dominic. And every step drew them into even lower temperatures and even thinner air.
Dominic tried to slow his own pace to match Ethan’s. It was easier said than done. In these conditions, movement and exertion were warmth and life; slowing down seemed as unnatural as the stately choreographed march of a wedding procession. Their progress dwindled to a snail’s pace. It took them over two hours to get to the bottom of the steep slope of unstable snow that led up to the South Summit.
“Where are the ropes?” asked Dominic.
Ethan barely had the strength to shrug. “I’ll lead.”
It was like watching slow motion — Ethan, half buried in powder, wriggling up the fifty-foot pitch. He was about halfway to the top when it appeared to Dominic as if he had come to an abrupt halt. A moment later he was sliding down, his mitts still reaching for handholds. Had it not been for the sheer danger of their surroundings, it would have been comical — a scene from a Road Runner cartoon.
Dominic made the decision quickly. He shrugged out of his oxygen system and placed the mask over Ethan’s mouth and nose.
Ethan recovered quickly. “Give me a minute!” he croaked.
Dominic shook his head. He fought off the feeling of strangulation and struggled to settle his own breathing. You can do this, he told himself. You’re acclimatized.
He set himself to the slope. The first burst of effort brought on a head rush that very nearly flattened him. But it passed. He began to inch his way up, and as he ascended without oxygen, he gained confidence that it really was possible.
Breathe. Breathe.
Partway up, he paused and lowered a rope to Ethan, who secured it at the bottom with an ice screw. The coil of line seemed abnormally heavy, and threw off his balance. But he caught himself and did not slip.
Breathe. Breathe.
The half tunnel that led to the South Summit seemed close now. He moved toward it, climbing, wading, crawling. The nylon line paid out as he ascended, roping the slope. But he didn’t allow himself to think about that. The key to climbing without gas, he was finding, was pure focus. The South Summit above wasn’t just the most i
mportant thing in the world; it was the world.
And soon he was on it, dizzy and gasping, but there. He fixed the rope to another screw. Fifty feet below, Ethan clipped on his jumar and moved up to join him.
It was one-forty P.M.
* * *
Poised on the wooden rail of the Terrace Bridge, Sammi Moon peered down between the toes of her sneakers at the rushing river of the gorge below. She didn’t hesitate. She was off the bridge headfirst, dropping like a stone. The acceleration was even better than she’d expected, and she hurtled toward the water with spectacular speed.
When she felt the bungee cord begin to stretch, she knew a moment of disappointment. No! Faster! Don’t let it stop!
The water was only a few feet away. But the full elastic resistance was pulling her back now, and would soon yank her up again. She longed to dunk her head in that ice-cold river, but the line wasn’t long enough. Just a few inches short …
“Sammi!”
She turned around to complain to the manager about not getting her head wet, and found herself staring into the concerned features of Babu Pemba. An arctic blast reminded her of where she was — hanging by the teeth of her jumar off a rope fixed to a notch in the southeast ridge above twenty-eight thousand feet. Mount Everest, Nepal, Asia.
“It’s two o’clock,” said Babu gently. “We go down.”
“No!” She hauled herself up the line, sliding the jumar along. It was an explosion of energy, a Herculean effort, the best she could muster. It gained her a grand total of eight inches against the mountain. The summit was still a thousand vertical feet away.
“We’re at least five hours from the top,” Babu explained patiently. “That’s if the weather holds out.” He gazed to the south. To the left of the pinnacle of Lhotse, now actually below them, the peak Ama Dablam was wreathed in overcast that hadn’t been there that morning. “I don’t like the look of those clouds.”
“Five hours is nothing up here!” Sammi complained. “You can spend five hours melting a liter of water! We can make it!”
“We can make it up,” Babu agreed. “Not down. Not in the dark. We turn around.”
Sammi was outraged. “You don’t come nine thousand miles and climb twenty-eight thousand feet just to turn around!”
“That’s exactly what you do,” Babu countered. “I’ve been on seventeen expeditions; I’ve summited nine times. What do you think happened on the others? I turned back.”
“Tilt made it,” she offered defiantly.
“Tilt was lucky. Nothing happened to slow him down. What about Cap? His attempt ended before the Balcony. Does that make him a lousy climber? Sammi, you’re good enough to bag this mountain. But things happen.”
“Not to me!” she exclaimed bitterly. “When I do stuff, I do it till it’s done! I live life to the extreme!”
“Not here, you don’t,” Babu said firmly. “There’s only one kind of extreme on Everest — extremely dead. I don’t know — maybe it’s possible to stand on that summit at nightfall and climb all the way down in the dark. I’m never going to find out, because I’d have to bet my life on it. And I don’t bet that high. What we need to settle now is — do you?”
Tears stung Sammi’s eyes behind her goggles. It was not her failed bid that upset her. It had taken this man from an alien world to teach her something that she should have known all along — that these pursuits she considered extreme were not really extreme after all. Skydiving, snow-boarding, bungee jumping — they were games, hobbies. But when presented with something truly life-and-death, Sammi Moon said no thanks.
She didn’t doubt that this was the correct choice. But right now, the idea made her very sad.
She looked off to the south. “Yeah, you’re probably right about those clouds.”
And they started down.
Sammi carried her disappointment like an extra burden as they slogged along the ridge. Not summiting certainly didn’t make the descent any easier, only shorter. It still called for exhausting effort. Supposedly, the air was thickening with every step. Ha! she thought. That’s a laugh.
Babu was in the lead. He clipped onto a fixed rope and rappelled down a twenty-foot drop, expertly steering clear of the soft cornice below.
Sammi swung a leg over the lip and paused. To the left of the route, a pristine, forty-five-degree snowfield stretched downhill for almost two hundred feet. There, the ridge curled around, cutting it off and containing it. There must have been dozens of similar places in the Himalayas. But this one had come at exactly the right time.
She descended about halfway down the drop. Then, “Hey, Babu!” She cut the rope with her ice ax, pushed off from the step, and swung out over the expanse of white. Letting go of the rope, she dropped to the snowfield, landing on the seat of her wind suit. The slide began on impact. She sailed down the slope in a blizzard of powder, shrieking in sheer delight all the way. As she had known it would, the ridge stopped her glissade, wiping her out at the bottom.
Awestruck, Babu watched her emerge from the billowing cloud, scramble up through the cornice, and rejoin the ridge far below. As his heart slowly began to beat again, he realized that the mountain the Sherpas called Jongmalungma had not defeated Sammi Moon.
Cap Cicero climbed from Camp Four and met up with Tilt and Sneezy a short way above the Col.
The cameraman was uninjured, but so physically weary that an extra arm to lean on was welcome indeed. “I’m fine,” he kept repeating, over and over. “Just a little out of steam.”
“And look at you.” The team leader turned his attention to Tilt. He had never been a Tilt Crowley fan, and still wasn’t. But he had to be impressed by the boy’s achievement today. “You look like you’re ready to tackle K2.”
“I’m dead,” Tilt admitted happily. “I’m just so psyched — I don’t think I can sleep!”
“You’ll sleep,” Cicero assured him. “But I want two liters of liquid in both of you first.”
The descent to the Col was steep and nerve-racking. Tilt found himself taking timid steps, as if he were made of delicate crystal.
What am I? he thought in disgust. A wimp like Perry Noonan?
The truth was that Tilt was uneasy because he now had so much to lose. His future was in the bag. He couldn’t afford to be reckless.
At Camp Four, he and Sneezy downed steaming mugs of Sherpa tea while Cicero E-mailed the video footage of their summit bid to Colorado.
Then the new Tilt Crowley jammed himself into a warm sleeping bag and plunged into a dreamworld where every climbing magazine had his face on its cover.
He awoke three hours later, still exhausted, but too excited to stay in his bedroll. He had waited fourteen long years to be somebody. He wasn’t going to miss a minute of this.
As he ducked from his tent to the guides’, the blast of wind seemed almost bearable to him, compared with the howling gale of the summit ridge.
Inside, he found Perry and Sneezy, both fast asleep. Otherwise, the shelter was deserted. He picked up the sat phone from Cicero’s gear and hustled it back to his own tent. There was a very important message to be sent.
Part of his secret agreement with the National Daily stated that, if he made it to the top, all fees would be doubled. It was time for the youngest summiteer in Everest history to start seeing some cash.
He booted up his computer and began to type.
E-mail Message
TO:
[email protected] Subject: Did it!
Hit the summit today with guide Lenny Tkakzuk at 9:07 A.M. Perry fell and slid halfway to the Col on his butt. He’s fine if you don’t count broken ribs and gutlessness. Sammi and Dominic both quit before the top. Yeah, Dominic climbed after all with another team, but equipment problems stopped him around 28,000….
The tent flap opened briefly, and Sammi dragged herself in, utterly spent from her climb. “Hey, Tilt, way to go!”
Startled, he slammed the computer closed to hide the incriminating E-mail. “Get out of here
!”
She snorted. “I’m happy to see stardom hasn’t done anything to change your sunny personality.”
Tilt was chagrined. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “You just kind of snuck up on me. How far did you get?”
“Not far enough,” she groaned. “You know, you and Sneezy will probably end up the only ones to summit this season. Everybody else is turning around, too. The Germans never really got their act together. And the This Way Up teams are all heading down.”
“How about that,” chuckled Tilt. “The great Zaph turns out to be human after all.”
Sammi frowned. “I didn’t see Ethan. Are you sure he’s climbing today?”
“He was going up the ridge when I was coming down! Him and — this other guy! But they had oxygen trouble. They should be at the Col by now.”
She shrugged. “All I said was I didn’t see him. He could be here.” She yawned hugely. “I just wanted to say congrats. I’ve got to go get yelled at some more. I had a little fun on the descent, and Babu got all bent out of shape about it.” And she wandered out.
It was a good thing that Sammi had been too bone weary to notice that Tilt had gone white to the ears. Ethan and Dominic not back yet? How could that be? The shrimp would have run out of oxygen eight hours ago! They could have crawled back by now!
A numbing dread growing in the pit of his stomach, he burst out of the flap and rushed over to the This Way Up camp, trying his best not to run. He found the returning climbers limp and disheveled, chugalugging vast amounts of tea and soup in an effort to hydrate themselves so they could lie down and pass out.
A few recognized him and called out their congratulations.
Tilt tried to sound casual. “When did Ethan get back?”
He got blank looks. No one could recall having seen This Way Up’s most celebrated climber, either at camp or on the mountain.
Heart pounding, Tilt went from tent to tent. No Ethan, no Dominic.
“Ethan sleep red tent there,” one of the Sherpas told him.