By 11:30 p.m., Delaney felt bone-weary and cruddy, wanted nothing more than a hot bath and eight hours of sleep. Yet when he lay down on his cold cot without undressing, just to rest for a few moments, he could not close his eyes, but lay stiffly awake, brain churning, nerves jangling. He rose, pulled on that marvelous coat, walked out onto the porch.
There were a lot of men still about-detectives and troopers, power and telephone repairmen, highway crews, reporters, television technicians. Delaney leaned against the railing, observed that all of them, sooner or later, went wandering off, affecting nonchalance, but looking back in guilt, anxious to see if anyone had noted their departure, half-ashamed of what they were doing. He knew what they were doing; they were going to Devil’s Needle to stand, stare up and wonder.
He did the same thing himself, drawn against his will. He went as far as the rock outcrops, then stepped back into the shadow of a huge, leafless sugar maple. From there he could see the slowly circling sentries, the sniper sitting patiently on his blanket, rifle cradled on one arm. And there were all the men who had come to watch, standing with heads thrown back, mouths open, eyes turned upward.
Then there was the palely illumined bulk of Devil’s Needle itself, looming like a veined apparition in the night. Captain Delaney, too, lifted his head, opened his mouth, turned his eyes upward. Above the stone, dimly, he could see stars whirling their courses in a black vault that went on forever.
He felt a vertigo, not so much of the body as of the spirit. He had never been so unsure of himself. His life seemed giddy and without purpose. Everything was toppling. His wife was dying and Devil’s Needle was falling. Monica Gilbert hated him and that man up there, that man…he knew it all. Yes,
Captain Edward X. Delaney decided, that man now knew it all, or was moving toward it with purpose and delight.
He became conscious of someone standing near him. Then he heard the words.
“…soon as I could,” Thomas Handry was saying. “Thanks for the tip. I filed a background story and then drove up. I’m staying at a motel just north of Chilton.”
Delaney nodded.
“You all right, Captain?”
“Yes. I’m all right.”
Handry turned to look at Devil’s Needle. Like the others, his head went back, mouth opened, eyes rolled up.
Suddenly they heard the bullhorn boom. It was midnight.
The bullhorn clicked off. The watching men strained their eyes upward. There was no movement atop Devil’s Needle.
“He’s not coming down, is he, Captain?” Handry asked softly.
“No,” Captain Delaney said wonderingly. “He’s not coming down.”
6
He awoke the first morning on Devil’s Needle, and it seemed to him he had been dreaming. He remembered a voice calling, “Daniel Blank…Daniel Blank…” That could have been his mother because she always used his full name. “Daniel Blank, have you done your homework? Daniel Blank, I want you to go to the store for me. Daniel Blank, did you wash your hands?” That was strange, he realized for the first time-she never called him Daniel or Dan or son.
He looked at his watch; it showed 11:43. But that was absurd, he knew; the sun was just rising. He peered closer and saw the sweep second hand had stopped; he had forgotten to wind it. Well, he could wind it now, set it approximately, but time really didn’t matter. He slipped the gold expansion band off his wrist, tossed the watch over the side.
He rummaged through his rucksack. When he found he had neglected to pack sandwiches and a thermos, he was not perturbed. It was not important.
He had slept fully clothed, crampons wedged under his ribs, spikes up, so he wouldn’t roll off Devil’s Needle in his sleep. Now he climbed shakily to his feet, feeling stiffness in shoulders and hips, and stood in the center of the little rock plateau where he could not be seen from the ground. He did stretching exercises, bending sideways at the waist, hands on hips; then bending down, knees locked, to place his palms flat on the chill stone; then jogging in place while he counted off five minutes.
He was gasping for breath when he finished, and his knees were trembling; he really wasn’t in very good condition, he acknowledged, and resolved to spend at least an hour a day in stretching and deep-breathing exercises. But then he heard his name being called again. Lying on his stomach, he inched cautiously to the edge of Devil’s Needle.
Yes, they were calling his name, asking him to come down, promising he wouldn’t be hurt. He wasn’t interested in that, but he was surprised by the number of men and vehicles down there. The packed dirt compound around the gate-keeper’s cottage was crowded; everyone seemed very busy with some job they were all doing. When he looked directly downward, he could see armed men circling the base of Devil’s Needle, but whether they were protecting the others from him or him from the others, he could not say and didn’t care.
He felt a need to urinate, and did so, lying on his side, peeing so the stream went over the edge of the rock. There wasn’t very much, and it seemed to him of a milky whiteness, not golden at all. There was a clogged heaviness in his bowels, but the difficulties of defecating up there, what he would do with the excrement, how he would wipe himself clean, were such that he resisted the urge, rolled back to the center of the stone, lay on his back, stared at the new sun.
At no time had he debated with himself and come to a conscious decision to stay up there, to die up there. It was just something his mind grasped instinctively and accepted. He was not driven to it; even now he could descend if he wanted to. But he didn’t. He was content where he was, in a condition of almost drowsy ease. And he was safe; that was important. He had his ice ax and could easily smash the skull of any climber who came after him. But what if one should come in the dark, wiggling his way silently upward to kill Daniel G. Blank as he slept?
He didn’t think it likely that anyone would attempt a night climb, but just to make it more difficult, he took his ice ax and using it as a hammer, knocked loose the two pitons that aided the final crawl from the chimney to the top of Devil’s Needle. The task took a long time; he had to rest awhile after the pitons were free. Then he slid them skittering across the stone, watched them disappear over the side.
Then they were calling his name again, a great mechanical booming: “Daniel Blank…Daniel Blank…” He wished they wouldn’t do that. For a moment he thought of shouting down and telling them to stop. But they probably wouldn’t. The thing was, it was disturbing his reverie, intruding on his isolation. He was enjoying his solitude, but it should have been a silent separateness.
He rolled over on his face, warming now as the watery sun rose higher. Beneath his eyes, close, close, he saw the rock itself, its texture. In all his years of mountain climbing and rock collecting, he had never looked at stone in that manner, seeing beneath the worn surface gloss, penetrating to the deep heart. He saw then what the stone was, and his own body, and the winter trees and glazed sun: infinite millions of bits, multicolored, in chance motion, a wild dance that went on and on ’to some silent tune.
He thought, for awhile, that these bits might be similar to the “bits” stored by a computer, recalled when needed to form a pattern, solve a problem, produce a meaningful answer. But this seemed to him too easy a solution, for if a cosmic computer did exist, who had programmed it, who would pose the questions and demand the answers? What answers? What questions?
He dozed off for awhile, awoke with that steel voice echoing, “Daniel Blank…Daniel Blank…” and was forced to remember who he was.
Celia had found her certitude-whatever it was-and he supposed everyone in the world was searching for his own, and perhaps finding it, or settling, disappointed, for something less. But what was important what was important was…What was important? It had been right there, he had been thinking of it, and then it went away.