“Sure. But the weather’s turning bad. A front moving in from the Great Lakes. Cloudy, windy, snow. Freezing. If we’re socked in, we’ll look like fools. I say January the sixth. In the morning. No matter what. How do you feel about it?”
“All right with me. The sooner the better. How do you want to do it: climber or ’copter?”
“ ’Copter. Agreed?”
“Yes. That’ll be best.”
“All right. I’ll start laying it on. I’ll be over tomorrow and we’ll talk. Shit, he’s probably dead right now.”
“Yes,” Captain Delaney said. “Probably.”
The world had become a song for Daniel Blank. A song. Soonngg…Everything was singing. Not words, or even a tune. But an endless hum that filled his ears, vibrated so deep inside him that cells and particles of cells jiggled to that pleasant purr.
There was no thirst, no hunger and, best of all, there was no pain, none at all. For that he was thankful. He stared at a milky sky through filmed eyes almost closed by scratchy lids. The whiteness and the tuneless drone became one: a great oneness that went on forever, stretched him with a dreamy content.
He was happy he no longer heard his name shouted, happy he no longer saw a helicopter dipping and circling above his rock. But perhaps he had imagined those things; he had imagined so much: Celia Montfort was there once, wearing an African mask. Once he spoke to Tony. Once he saw a hunched, massive silhouette, lumbering away from him, dwindling. And once he embraced a man in a slow-motion dance that faded into milkiness before the ice ax struck, although he saw it raised.
But even these visions, all visions, disappeared; he was left only with an empty screen. Occasionally discs, whiter than white, floated into view, drifted, then went off, out of sight. They were nice to watch, but he was glad when they were gone.
He had a slowly diminishing apprehension of reality, but before weakness subdued his mind utterly, he felt his perception growing even as his senses faded. It seemed to him he had passed through the feel-taste-touch-smell-hear world and had emerged to this gentle purity with its celestial thrum, a world where everything was true and nothing was false.
There was, he now recognized with thanksgiving and delight, a logic to life, and this logic was beautiful. It was not the orderly logic of the computer, but was the unpredictable logic of birth, living, death. It was the mortality of one, and the immortality of all. It was all things, animate and inanimate, bound together in a humming whiteness.
It was an ecstasy to know that oneness, to understand, finally, that he was part of the slime and part of the stars. There was no Daniel Blank, no Devil’s Needle, and never had been. There was only the continuum of life in which men and rocks, slime and stars, appear as seeds, grow a moment, and then are drawn back again into that timeless whole, continually beginning, continually ending.
He was saddened that he could not bring this final comprehension to others, describe to them the awful majesty of the certitude he had found: a universe of accident and possibility where a drop of water is no less than a moon, a passion no more than a grain of sand. All things are nothing, but all things are all. In his delirium, he could clutch that paradox to his heart, hug it, know it for truth.
He could feel life ebbing in him-feel it! It oozed away softly, no more than an invisible vapor rising from his wasted flesh, becoming part again of that oneness from whence it came. He died slowly, with love, for he was passing into another form; the process so gentle that he could wonder why men cried out and fought.
Those discs of white on white appeared again to drift across his vision. He thought dimly there was a moisture on his face, a momentary tingle; he wondered if he might be weeping with joy.
It was only snow, but he did not know it. It covered him slowly, soothing the roughened skin, filling out the shrunken hollows of his body, hiding the seized joints and staring eyes.
Before the snow ended at dawn, he was a gently sculpted mound atop Devil’s Needle. His shroud was white and without stain.
Late on the night of January 5th, Captain Delaney met with Major Samuel Barnes, Chief Forrest, Captain Sneed, the crew of the State Police helicopter, and the chief radioman. They all crowded into the gate-keeper’s cottage; a uniformed guard was posted outside the door to keep curious reporters away.
Major Barnes had prepared a schedule, and handed around carbon copies.
“Before we get down to nuts-and-bolts,” he said rapidly, “the latest weather advisory is this: Snow beginning at midnight, tapering off at dawn. Total accumulation about an inch and a half or two. Temperatures in the low thirties to upper twenties. Then, tomorrow morning, it should clear with temperatures rising to the middle thirties. Around noon, give or take an hour, the shit will really hit the fan, with a dropping barometer, temperature going way down, snow mixed with rain, hail, and sleet, and winds of twenty-five gusting to fifty.
“Beautiful,” one of the pilots said. “I love it.”
“So,” Barnes went on, disregarding the interruption, “we have five or six hours to get him down. If we don’t, the weather will murder us, maybe for days. This is a massive storm front moving in. All right, now look at your schedules. Take-off from the Newburgh field at nine ayem. I’ll be aboard the ’copter. The flight down and the final aerial reconnaissance completed by nine-thirty ayem, approximate. Lower a man to the top of Devil’s Needle via cable and horse collar by ten ayem. Captain Delaney, you will be in command of ground operations here. This shack will be home base, radio coded Chilton One. The ’copter will be Chilton Two. The man going down will be Chilton Three. Everyone clear on that? Sneed, have your surgeon here at nine ayem. Forrest, can you bring out a local ambulance with attendants and a body bag?”
“Sure.”
“I think Blank is dead, or at least unconscious. But if he’s not, the man going down on the cable will be armed.”
Captain Delaney looked up. “Who’s Chilton Three?” he asked. “Who’s going down on the cable?”
The three-man helicopter crew looked at each other. They were all young men, wearing sheepskin jackets over suntan uniforms, their feet in fleece-lined boots.
Finally the smallest man shrugged. “Shit, I’ll go down,” he said, rabbity face twisted into a tight grin. “Fm the lightest. I’ll get the fucker.”
“What’s your name?” Delaney asked him.
“Farber, Robert H.”
“You heard what the Major said, Farber. Blank is probably dead or unconscious. But there’s no guarantee. He’s already killed five people. If you get down there, and he makes any threatening movement-anything at all-grease him.”
“Don’t worry, Captain. If he as much as sneezes, he’s a dead fucker.”
“What will you carry?”
“What? Oh, you mean guns. My thirty-eight, I guess. Side holster. And I got a carbine.”
Captain Delaney looked directly at Major Barnes. “I’d feel better if he carried more weight,” he said. He turned back to Farber. “Can you handle a forty-five?” he asked.
“Sure, Captain. I was in the fuckin’ Marine Corps.”
“You can borrow mine, Bobby,” one of the other pilots offered.
“And a shotgun rather than the carbine,” Delaney said. “Loaded with buck.”
“No problem,” Major Barnes said.
“You really think I’ll need all that fuckin’ artillery?” Farber asked the Captain.
“No, I don’t,” Delaney said. “But the man was fast. So fast I can’t tell you. Fast enough to take out one of my best men. But he’s been up there a week now without food or water. If he’s still alive, he won’t be fast anymore. The heavy guns are just insurance. Don’t hesitate to use them if you have to. Is that an order, Major Barnes?”
“Yes,” Barnes nodded. “That’s an order, Farber.”
They discussed a few more details: briefing of the press, positioning of still and TV cameramen, parking of the ambulance, selection of men to stand by when Blank was brought down.