He clawed his way out. Somehow, the snow had gotten packed behind the goggles. When he could see again, the round little lady with gray hair was beaming at him.
“You didn’t do it right, you poor boy. You have to let the cable slide through your hand, and then you slowly squeeze down on it. That starts you off without that horrible jerk.”
By the time he worked his way back up onto the skis she was out of sight up the slope. The second time it worked better. A few hundred hours of aquaplaning served their purpose. The skis moved steadily in front of him. He smiled confidently.
Ahead of him the cable disappeared in a hole in the side of a small frame structure. George let go of the cable but the terrain had flattened and he was speeding toward the boards. Both the poles were in his left hand. He set the points in the snow ahead of him, between the skis. The butt ends of the ski poles made an almost successful attempt to penetrate his stomach. He lay on his back and made small whinnying noises. He used the name of Zissman in vain.
When at last he got to his feet and moved over toward one side, he happened to glance down into the valley. The Crestrun Inn had shrunk to the size of a penny box of matches. It did almost the same thing to his stomach that the ski poles had done. The mountain wind turned perspiration to shale ice. A girl of not more than twelve swung away from the tow, shoving hard with her poles to get a good start, and dropped down over the rim out of sight. She appeared a few seconds later, ducking and bobbing, far below.
If a girl of twelve... George clenched his teeth and moved toward the brink. The uptilted points of the skis hung over empty space. He decided suddenly to back up. But this time the stubborn boards, eager to back up when he was in the inn yard, dug in behind him. When he turned around gently to stare back over his shoulder at them, he slid helplessly over the brink. Instinct bade him to sit down immediately. But he was leaning too far forward to be able to sit. By the time he could get his weight shifted, the speed of passage indicated sharply that it would be unwise to do anything except attempt to stay upright. The wind tore at his clothes, flapping his ski pants, numbing his teeth as he tried to yell.
The sunlit world tilted sideways, hung awkwardly in space for a moment, and then exploded. George Barker lay, head down the slope, and whispered, “Good-by, Mary Alice. We would have had fun, we two.”
He breathed deeply, waiting for the bubbling in his throat, for the acid pang of the broken rib end in the lung. Nothing happened. Probably the neck or back, then.
Slow amazement flooded through him as he found that he could sit up. Outside of feeling as though he had been thrown through the roof of a convertible, nothing seemed to be wrong.
He glanced back up the slope and saw that he had come only a hundred feet from the brink. Nobody was in sight. Guiltily he unsnapped the harnesses, snagged the skis as they were about to take off independently, and began to walk across the slope toward the shelter of a pine woods.
There was a shout from above. George looked up, and froze. A herd was swooping down at him. Two of them were headed for him. He shut his eyes. There was a whisking sound, a spray of snow in his face, and they were gone. He made better time toward the woods. In the shelter of the woods he could creep inconspicuously down to the flat land below, dragging his skis behind him.
He fumbled through the pines and came out onto a clear place. He jabbed the skis and poles into the snow, lowered himself onto a stump, and fished out his cigarettes. He snapped the lighter shut, and smiled as he saw the ski tracks on the trail. So some other fakers came down the easy way, too... He frowned. For somebody coming down the easy way, those skis had thrown up a lot of snow.
He stood up and walked over and looked down at the tracks. There was an angry roar yards away. An oversized citizen swooped down at him like a jet-engined gull. Even as George recognized the man as the Argus Studio agent and tried to dodge back, a heavy shoulder sent him spinning. The man wavered but kept his balance. George realized that he was flat across the tracks. As he tried to get up, he glanced back up the slope and saw her coming at him, that bronze-blond hair streaming out behind her, the gray eyes startled and bleak.
The twin shining points of the ski poles swung toward him. Spitted, he thought, in that last moment, like a marshmallow at a picnic. But somehow the points didn’t touch him, and Miss Christina Wiel soared up and over him. She landed beyond him. He watched her as he crawled backward off the track. She landed crouched and went into a long, sliding turn to make the corner looming up at her. She tried to twist her body by the pine trunk, but her shoulder hit it solidly. The impact threw her off the other side of the trail into the brush, and she lay still.
He plunged to her and dropped on his knees beside her, thinking even in that moment of guilty horror that here was one female athlete who couldn’t conceal, under the uniform of the sport, ample evidence of femininity.
He picked up her limp hand and said brokenly, “Christina! Speak to me!”
Gray eyes opened and focused. The accent was tiny and delicious: “You unutterable classification of clown! You... you maniac! Crawling around on your hands and knees in the middle of the fastest part of Thunderhead!” The other hand swung around and connected with the side of his face.
George sat down. “Thunderhead?”
“A ski trail, Mr. Barker. Ever hear of one? As if it wasn’t bad enough to hear you breathing on the back of my neck every moment I’m in the inn, you have to come up here on the slopes. Please, Mr. Barker, for the sake of the safety of innumerable people, why don’t you go back down to that nice, warm fire? The meet is in three days and I need my practice.”
“But I—”
“Bring my ski over here.”
He saw it, a dozen feet away. It had snapped out of the binding. He brought it back to her. She was standing on one ski, and there was an odd, strained look on her face, a blue-grayness around her mouth.
“Don’t stand there with it. Put it down!.. Oh, no! Would you mind turning it around so that it heads the same way as the other ski?”
He blushed, and did so. Her ski boots looked as small as a child’s. And there was something of a child’s sweetness about her lips and temples.
She shoved the boot into the binding and he fumbled with the clamp. He touched her ankle, and she made a small, harsh sound.
“Say! You hurt yourself!”
She ignored him. She snapped the harness herself, glanced up the trail, then pushed out onto the tracks. She went thirty feet, and fell heavily.
“This makes it dandy,” George thought. “Just fine! Please sign a contract, Miss Wiel. Right here on the dotted line.”...
Christina Wiel sat in a big leather chair half facing the fire in the main lounge of the Crestrun Inn. The bad ankle was propped up on a hassock. The Argus representative was named Stanley Sherman. Except for a few morose citizens in casts and on crutches, everybody was out on the slopes except George and Stanley and, of course, Christina. It had been this way for two days.
George sat glumly by the fire. In the beginning he had tried to follow Sherman’s conversation with Christina. But it jumped from a discussion of Tuckerman’s Ravine, which seemed to have a wall in it, to the Austrian school and tempo turns. Every time he heard Christina’s silvery laugh he winced and hunched his shoulders.
“So you’re going out tomorrow?” Stanley asked.
“He’s going to tape it and I can take the easy runs, but I can’t enter the competition.”