Jack groaned quietly and turned his attention to Schaffer’s computer screen. It was a standard Microsoft Windows setup, the same as the one he had on his PC back home in Danville. But trying to access Schaffer’s files from the File Manager, he discovered that they were all protected by a code word. He stared hard at the Program Manager and its many coloured icons resembling objects in a doll’s house, hoping that one of them might provoke an idea about what to do next. One of them did. The CompuServe icon. Jack wondered if Schaffer had bothered to protect his e-mail files. If Brad was anything like himself, the messages just piled up until he could be bothered to delete them.
He clicked on the CompuServe icon and checked the In Box for recent messages. Right away he realized that one of these was exactly what he had been looking for. The message was from someone named Bryan Perrins, and there was even an e-mail address for any reply. Jack made a note of it for later investigation.
‘Dear Brad, Thanks again for your cooperation in this matter. Dunham has told me how helpful you have been. Under the circumstances, the least I can do is put you completely in the picture. Since this situation developed, the Nepalese have been trying to hang on to their neutrality. So this represents our best chance of dealing with our little problem. This really is a very low-risk assignment. About the only real compensation of any fail situation is that if our man doesn’t succeed, then the chances are very slim that anyone else can pull this off. The man we’re sending has already established an excellent threshold of accomplishment in this kind of situation. Given the nature of the expedition, it will be Dr. Swift who chooses who goes along. I’m pretty sure that when she speaks to him, she’ll want to have our man on her team. He is well qualified in his particular scientific field and a natural choice for an expedition of this kind. Despite recent political developments, however, there is in our perception still a need for urgency. Thus the insistence on their going to the area ASAP. Finally, let me reassure you that beyond the obvious hazards of where they’re headed, they’ve got nothing to fear from our man, and I doubt they’ll even be aware of what he’s up to.’
Reading the message. Jack smiled grimly.
‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that,’ he whispered, and headed back upstairs, toward his exit window.
Back at the hotel, the concierge was nowhere to be seen. Jack reclaimed his jacket, shoes, and socks and went straight up to the room where Swift greeted his appearance with horror.
‘What the hell happened to you? You look like you’ve been crawling along the street.’
Jack looked at himself. It was true. He was filthy.
‘I had a bit of an accident,’ he said vaguely. ‘I slipped on the sidewalk.’ He went into the bathroom and pulled off his turtleneck. ‘It’s getting icy out there.’
‘Too much to drink, more like,’ she said, coming up behind and hugging him warmly.
‘I’m sorry we quarrelled. But don’t you see? This expedition means everything to me. It’s the chance of a lifetime. The chance to give my professional life some meaning. You can see that, can’t you?’
‘Yeah. I can see that it’s important to you.’
‘But you’re the boss. Jack. The expedition leader. You know the logistics of going somewhere like this.’
Swift squeezed him affectionately and tried to convey an impression of having to struggle to say what she was about to say. She had been preparing her little speech while he was gone and hoped it would convey the right combination of acquiescence and seductiveness.
‘If you think there’s some reason we should delay,’ she said, kissing his bare shoulder, ‘some reason we should tell Mister Beinart, and Semath, and the National Geographic people that we’ll find the grant money from somewhere else, then that’s fine with me. Okay?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s no reason at all.’ Perhaps it wasn’t necessary that she knew what he knew. Besides, he only half understood it himself. He would just have to be on the lookout — but for what, he wasn’t sure.
Part Two: The Expedition
‘What does the mountain care?
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?’
Nine
‘The great end of life is not knowledge hut action.’
It was an alien, separate world, like something cast adrift in outer space, some asteroid or comet, hostile, unfastened from the rest of earth, a frozen place of snow and rock. In this lost, abstracted place, time and space had different meanings, and sometimes no meaning at all. Ten minutes or ten kilometres — these measurements signified nothing. The Himalayas made the clock run more slowly than in the rest of the world, and all that mattered was how far could be walked or climbed from one sunrise to its setting. Mountains made everything relative.
On every side Swift felt their arcane and unsettling presence, like ancient holy men, their bodies shrouded from pointed head to massive toe in long white robes of snow, as if their faces might be too old, too wrinkled, and too terrible to behold.
Like the rest of the expeditionary team on the six-day trek up from Chomrong, she seldom spoke, and amid a mountainous silence that felt unnatural, she began to rediscover the quiet privacy of her own mind. It was like entering a walled garden, long neglected and overgrown.
Small wonder, she thought, that the Himalayas were regarded as a holy place, for in such icy, frigid silence, where the only noise was the sound of your own footsteps as, quietly growling, they sank into the tight-packed snow, it was easy to mistake the still, small voice of consciousness as the actual spoken word of some immanent being.
Walking slowly up the ever steepening trail that led to the Annapurna Sanctuary, Swift reflected on how much louder that unspoken voice must have sounded to ancient man. Was this how it had been? From where else but mountains did the gods speak to men? The Himalayas, being much higher than the highest mountains of vision found anywhere else in the religious and mythical world, were endowed with a silence that much more profound, with voices that much clearer, and with a sense of epiphany that much more sacred. For a scientist in the late twentieth century, this sense of the eternal and the numinous was both exhilarating and a little frightening.
The Annapurna Sanctuary, a glacier basin as protected and holy as the name suggested, was a natural amphitheatre created by ten of the world’s highest mountain peaks. It was Jack’s fourth time to the Sanctuary, but he never passed by the northwest face of Machhapuchhare, the seven-thousand-metre-high mountain and symbol of Shiva that marked the entrance to the Sanctuary, without feeling like a kind of grave robber intent on desecrating the pyramid of some antique king and stealing something precious.
Annapurna Base Camp, or ABC as it was more easily known, lay at the head of a valley filled with deep snow. This had been the site of the successful 1970 expedition to climb one of the Himalayas’ great walls, although now as he looked up at the solid mass of rock and reflected upon his own failure to climb it, Jack thought it almost inconceivable that anyone choosing that route should actually have made it to the top.
Perhaps that was why he had failed after all? Any kind of doubt could be fatal on a mountain like Annapurna.
It was like standing in front of an enormous tidal wave of rock and snow that threatened to come crashing down upon his head at any second. But as far away from the foot of the mountain as it was, ABC was reasonably safe from all but the most cataclysmic collapse of snow and ice.