Charles Sheffield: The Web Between the Worlds

“Keep it on him. I’ve got Caliban hooked into the circuit. He needs everything, audio and visual. Can you push the gain higher? I want to get a better look at the face.”

The woman nodded. She turned a control and the display zoomed in on Rob Merlin’s head and shoulders. There was a grunt from the wall speaker.

“I see what you mean. He does look smooth. I wish I could see his eyes.”

“Not at this altitude. There’s so much UV around, he’ll keep the goggles on all the time. But I can tell you what his eyes look like. They’re the same as his face — like a blank canvas, waiting for somebody to paint the picture on it.”

“That’s poetic, but it doesn’t carry precision.” The voice chuckled, a rough grating sound. “I suppose I can wait until he gets back below twenty thousand before I try my own description. You can back off from high gain now.”

The woman nodded. She made two economical movements and the image on the screen returned to a more distant view of Rob Merlin. “I’ll keep it like that for Caliban. Any new ideas on how I ought to contact Merlin?”

“No. That’s your department, not mine. Do it as soon as you can, though. I need to get back to base, and I don’t want to hang around here any longer than I have to.”

The woman shook her fringe of chestnut hair away from her eyes and peered again into the view-finder. “I’ll get to him as soon as I can, but it may be a while yet. I’d have had a plausible reason to contact him if he’d got into difficulties on the way up, and I can use the same reason if he has problems on the way down. Otherwise, I’m sure he’ll want to do the hard parts himself. If things go smoothly you shouldn’t expect us for another three days.”

“Three days!” The gruff voice was impatient. “Why so long? He’s at the top, isn’t he, that’s all he wanted?”

“He is.” The woman sounded amused. “And he’ll want to get down in his own way. If I try and contact him now, chances are he’ll tell me to get lost. That’s my opinion — check it with Caliban, if you don’t believe it.”

“I did.” The voice held grudging agreement. “We couldn’t make any sense of his outputs. I’ll ask Joseph to try him again, but I doubt if we’ll get anything new.”

While they were talking, Rob Merlin stood up, adjusted his face mask, and began to make his way to the final summit of K-2. When he reached it he remained there for only a couple of minutes, a tiny figure standing on top of the world. As he turned to begin the laborious descent his total attention was on the sloping ice walls and crevasses below him. They dipped and folded in dizzying complexity, all the way to his planned resting point four thousand feet further down. Full attention was crucial. At this height and pressure the blackened ice would sublime in the sunshine before it would melt — unless it had the force of his weight above it. With that weight, each footstep became perilous.

He never looked back up the mountain, or glanced towards the sun and the silver speck that was hidden in its bright glare. Ascent was the exciting part. Arrival at the summit never matched prior expectations; and descent, as always, would be the most dangerous.

At eighteen thousand feet there came a subtle but significant change in the surroundings. He was still well above the top of the vegetation line, but now the surface of the mountain was rougher and more broken. He could even see choices in the paths that lay ahead of him, replacing the insignificant options that faced the climber above twenty thousand feet. Rob paused to disconnect the oxygen booster and loosened his face mask. He moved slowly down, trying to think of the path ahead instead of the luxury of hot food and hot baths that still lay days in the future.

The noise of the aircraft had been muffled by his ear-pieces. He noticed it only when it came into view a hundred meters ahead of him, descending towards the surface of the slope and hovering there on its air columns. It was a two-passenger model, and an expensive one. As it drifted smoothly towards him, Rob could see the pilot, calmly aligning the exit port with a level patch of scree. He stood and waited as she switched to automatic pilot, opened the port, and stepped out onto the rocky surface twenty meters in front of him.

“Want a ride for the rest of the way? You’ve finished all the hard part.” She was dressed in a quilted snow-suit, with head and forearms bare. Her face was thin and brown, with lively eyes and a full, humorous mouth above a strong chin. Her manner was familiar, but Rob was fairly sure they had never met. He would have remembered that dark complexion and the surprise of those pale, animated eyes.

He looked at her for a moment, thinking suddenly of the delights of a long, lazy soak in steaming water and of his own grimy condition. It was a tempting offer — and she was right, the hard part was all behind him. After a few seconds he shook his head.

“I’ve taken it this far, I’ll finish it myself. Anyway, my gear is all down at Suget Jangal.”

“That’s on my way. You can get a hot bath there, too.” She seemed to be reading his mind — unless she could smell him from four paces.

“I imagine that you need one,” she went on. “Eleven days on the mountain is a long time.”

“Too long.” He looked at her curiously. “You checked my departure down at Suget?”

“Yes. And I’ve had my eye on you for the past few days.” She showed no embarrassment at intruding on what he had thought to be his privacy. He looked at her more closely. She was short, not much above five feet, and slightly built. She didn’t look older than twenty, but her manner was completely confident. He shrugged his backpack to an easier position, rubbed at his eleven-day growth of beard, and looked at the waiting aircraft.

“And I had the innocent idea that I was alone up here. So much for privacy. Why couldn’t you have waited for me at Suget Jangal? I’ll be there anyway, three days from now.”

“Sure — and you’ll be surrounded by twenty people. That’s why I didn’t hang around there waiting for you to get back. Did you know that there are four business groups in your hotel waiting for the return of Rob Merlin? You slipped out before they could contact you after the end of your last contract. Now they want to try and get in early to make bids for you on the next one.”

“I’m not surprised. They were after me even before I finished. That’s why I ran for it and tried to get a little time to myself. I guess I was too easy to track.” Rob frowned. The lines added to his smooth forehead suddenly made him look a lot older. “And you’re just another one of them, I suppose — but you wanted to get in first even more than they did. Well, it’s still no. I’m going to finish the climb. You should have done your homework better. If you had, you’d know that I won’t deal with intermediaries — and you’d know that I don’t like pressure from anybody to set up contracts before I’m ready.”

Her expression didn’t alter. She looked around her at the peaks of the Karakorum Range, then back to Rob.

“I know all that.” Her mouth quirked. “Give me credit for some brains. I admit that I came here to talk business, but there are special circumstances. First, take my word for it that we’re not interested in outbidding anybody for your talents. We don’t want to build a bridge at all — at least, not one of the usual sort. Second, this couldn’t be handled without an intermediary.” She was watching Rob’s expressions closely. “The man I work for isn’t here because he can’t be. He would never survive a trip down to the surface of the Earth. Darius Regulo is sick, has been sick for more than forty years.”

“Regulo!” Rob showed his first real sign of interest. “Are you telling me that you work for Darius Regulo?”