Kirinyaga

Something different from Joe Gores, and "clear and convincing"
proof of his writing versatility . . . an adventure-crime story
about mountain climbing in East Africa, with as authentic and
chilling a background as you have ever read... You won't
forget Kendrick's heroics for a long time . . .

The  climber looked like a fly at this distance, Kendrick  
 thought. Because of the anorak he wore, like a bright red
fly. Clinging to a rack face of vertical slabs and deep horizontal
sections  which  together  formed  a  massive  staircase  with
hundred-foot risers.
The fly had reached the top of a trough-like diedre in one of the
risers. Broken rock there. Brought up closer, the fly began work-
ing toward a niche in the edge of the step above. Not a bad show
for a man recovering from his annual bout of malaria, Kendrick
thought.
Closer yet. He could see the three-color zigzag design of the
knitted balaclava helmet. Hesitating at the foot of a bulging rock
face split by a shallow groove. Get on with it, Kendrick thought.
Right up through the bloody overhang to the stance above. You
know you have to do it.
Good show. Tight on the head and torso now. Fingers groping
above for purchase. It was coming now. Head turning so that sun-
light struck off smoked goggles. Unshaven, teeth clenched, sweat
rivuleting the cheek and line of jaw even in the subfreezing tem-
peratures of 17,000 feet. Now. Just here.
The climber slipped, swung free of the rock, only the fingers of
the right hand still holding their grip. A gasp went up. Kendrick
grinned. Yes. A good bit, that. Unexpected.
The image disappeared and the lights of the stuffy crowded
viewing room came up to the clearing of throats and muttered
comments. Kendrick paused in the hallway, sweat starting to dry
on his lean muscular body, made leaner by recent illness. A
couple of inches under six feet, with straight, prematurely white
hair and a deeply tanned mid-thirties face.'
Morna tucked a proprietary arm through his as the production
people and distributors' reps and studio flacks flowed around
them.
"Don't you think it's wonderful footage?" Her clear, very blue
eyes smiled up into his. Morna was his ex-wife. "Aren't you glad I
got you on as guide and Kenya technical adviser?"
"I can use the money," Kendrick agreed. He said, "You look
wonderful yourself, luv. London must agree with you."
He still had her note from two years before, when she had
packed it in. This bloody damn country . . . He had found it when
he'd returned from a fortnight on staff at the Outward Bound
Wilderness School on Kilimanjaro. Hadn't been strong enough to
hold her.
"Youlookawful,"shesaid."Thinand''
"The annual bout of malaria. It's finished now."
She tugged at his arm, skin like satin and untouched by the
sun, auburn hair worn long and straight and parted in the mid-
dle like an Asian's. "Let me buy you a drink. I'm meeting Burke
at The Thorn Tree."
Let her buy, Kendrick thought. She'd have plenty of pence now,
living with the great Burke Hamlin. He felt a stab of jealousy.
They went out into bright Kenya sunshine, then under the col-
orful umbrellas shading The Thorn Tree's sidewalk tables. Ham-
lin was already there, surrounded by the usual sycophants, news-
paper and media people; three tables gad been pulled together to
accommodate them. Perkins, the young reporter on the East Afri-
can Standard, was asking a question. Kendrick knew Perkins
from the Kenya Mountain Club.
"How did you get that superb climbing footage? I've been on
scrambles up Kenya myself, and that camera angle"
"Two cameras, both set up on the edge of that glacier on Point
Lenana." Art Kaye, the hulking bespectacled chief cameraman,
had taken it as a technical question on the difficulties of location
shooting over three miles above sea level where cameras would
want to freeze up. "What you saw was put together out of both
magazines. Aeroflex 35mm's, one with a 120mm zoom for the
loose stuff, the other with a Questar for in tight."
A woman reporter put the focus back on Hamlin. Morna had sat
down next to the actor and had an unconsciously familiar hand on
his thigh with Kendrick's drink forgotten.
"Mr. Hamlin, when you slipped and were hanging by only one
handwas that deliberate? Or"
Burke Hamlin leaned back in his chair and sipped thoughtfully
at his drink, a faraway look in his pale blue eyes. A grin split his
craggy features. He had a rolling masculine voice that went well
with the six-three physique and fifty-inch chest.
"Let's just say it makes damned good theater."
Kendrick used that as an exit line, sliding backward out of the
crowd as Morna's lips formed the words: Call me. Behind him,
Hamlin's voice, beautifully projected, was explaining that Kenya
was a corruption of a much older Kikuyu word, Kirinyagawhich
meant, literally, mountain of whiteness. The house of god, home
of Ngai, the creator.
Kendrick had told him that himself a few days before.
Over their first drink Morna said, "A few days in Nairobi and I
remember why I left East Africa."
"Thanks for them few kind words, ma'am."
Kendrick had felt a suppressed masculine excitement ever since
picking her up at the hotel. They'd been good together, and he'd
found single-life sex unexpectedly conventional and bland, like
British cooking. Morna laughed and laid a warm hand on his.
"Present company excepted. You don't much care for Burke, do
you?"
"Should I?"
"Beyond the machismo bit, I mean. After all, isn't he the sort
you've always professed to admire? A real man who can come out
here to your world and excel"
It slipped out drily beftre he realized it. "You mean like he did
in that climbing footage?"
"Exactly." She pushed aside the ruins of her steak. God, she
was beautiful, face alight, eyes sparkling, perfect lips curved.
Small wonder he'd not been man enough to hold her. She said,
"Catch-up time."
Not much to tell. White hunting, what was left of it, had be-
come a black man's game by government fiat, so he'd drifted into
the Kenya Game Department as a park warden. And spent his
spare time climbing, of courseKili, Kenya, the Aberdares, the
Ruwenzoris.
"The Mountains of the Moon!" he exclaimed. "Took us three
weeks to get in and up to the top of Rarasibi, and it rained every
bloody day. Except near the top, where it snowed."
"I'll take Carnaby Street."
She had literally, in fact, returning to the mannequin's job from
which Kendrick's whirlwind courtship during a long leave in En-
gland had snatched her. It was in Carnaby Street that Burke
Hamlin also had found her, modeling a wardrobe for his latest
dolly who'd quickly become ex-dolly.
"It's permanent with you and Burke?"
"I leave decisions to him, he's superb at them." The hotel
elevator bore them upward. "I enjoy the sex-object role."
Sex-object for Hamlin, thought Kendrick a bit bitterly over the
brandies in her room. If he'd been a stronger man, more self-
confident like bloody Hamlin, she'd still be his. Then she sur-
prised him with that special look he'd never been able to forget,
was kicking off her shoes and unzipping her dress with one flow
of sensuous movement. Her eyes were enormous and dark and un-
focused in the dim room.
"Just between us, darling," she said. "Old times."
It was better than old times. It was better than anything else
would ever be, Kendrick thought as he dressed by the soft glow
from the open bathroom door. She was lying on the bed, watching
him with solemn, sated eyes.
"I'd forgot," she said, "just how" She stopped. "Burke will be
busy again on Thursday night."
To his own surprise Kendrick said, "I'll be back upon Kenya
by then." It came out rougher than he wanted. But if he remained
in Nairobi he wouldn't be able to stay away from her, and he
didn't want that. She was another man's woman now.
"You just came down off that bloody mountain," she said curtly.
There wasn't any answer to that. He kissed her and let himself
out. He was glad he hadn't told her the truth about that climbing
footage of Hamlin. Hamlin was right for Morna, the strong, ag-
gressive individual she'd always wanted and hadn't found in Ken-
drick.
By the time he reached the summit of Point Lenana, only an
hour up the ridge from Top Hut, it was snowing again and the
two major peaks, Nelion and Batian, had been blotted out. It was
. just a scramble, nothing more strenuous than kicking steps in
each day's new snow. He'd been up to Lenana each morning for
the past three days, waiting for a window of decent climbing
weather to try the twin central peaks.
Going down, the snow-blanketed breadth of the Lewis Glacier
lay to his right, the clouds now pouring up over it and across the
ridge like smoke off dry ice. It was snowing in earnest when he
swung open the door of Top Hut, itself at 15,730 feet, and stomped
his feet clean. Only then did he realize two more climbers had ar-
rived.
"We wondered where you'd got to, with all your climbing gear
still here," said Perkins. The reporter from the Standard was a
slightly built youth, pale-skinned and pale-haired and, right now,
looking white and drawn around the mouth. The other climber
was Burke Hamlin.
"A scramble up Lenana." Kendrick stripped off outer clothing.
"Touch of mountain sickness?"
Burke Hamlin made a grandly dismissive gesture. He looked
nmense in his climbing clothes. "Not me. Young Perkins."
"You want some aspirin or Panadol for the head?"
"Some of the Panadol, if I may," said Perkins.
Kendrick watched him down the pills with water and fought a
rising anger. What the hell were these two doing up here? Per-
kins, easy of course: hero-worship of Hamlin, and a possible fea-
ture in one of the big London dailies. But why Hamlin? A talka-
tive bellhop at the hotel?
"Want to check the peaks," grunted Kendrick.
He left the hut without looking back, knowing the actor would
follow.  Bloody  fools.  Hamlin,  even  Perkins,  had never  seen
Kirinyaga frown. Now, with the wet season pushing the snow line
down, that frown could be deadly to climbers. He turned when he
heard Hamlin's boots crunching behind him.
"Neither of you is a good enough climber for any real rock-
work."
Hamlin gave him that wide and famous grin that celluloid vil-
lains saw just before the choreographed mayhem began. "Maybe I
want to revise that estimate for you. Or maybe I want to say I
don't mind your sleeping with my woman, but why did you tell
her the truth about that climbing footage?"
Morna herself must have told Hamlin of their coupling. Why?
"I didn't know there was any bloody great secret about that
footage, Hamlin. But for what it's worth, I didn't tell her."
"She says you did."
He shrugged. "Maybe Kaye mentioned it. I didn't have to."
In a surprisingly mild voice Hamlin said, "You're rather a
louse, aren't you?"
"Listen, Hamlin, any fears you might have that I'll get Morna
away from you are purely make-believe. Just for the effect. But
this mountain is real. Take the boy back down tomorrow. His
sickness gives you a good excuse."
"While you stay up here? Mighty mountaineer turning back the
lowly actor because the mountain is too dangerous for him? No,
thank you."
"For Pete's sake," said Kendrick in a pained voice.
He went back inside. Perkins was lying on one of the bunks
with a forearm over his eyes. Kendrick knew the symptoms of
oxygen starvation vividly himselfheadache, loss of appetite,
nausea, vomiting. But he also knew Perkins, hero-worshipping all
the way, would struggle up the peaks if Hamlin didunless he
could deflect the youngster himself. Hamlin couldn't very well try
it alone.
"That film you saw of Hamlin climbing," he told Perkins. "That
was me. Hamlin's no better climber than you are, doesn't know a
damned thing about any really tricky rock or ice-work. Standard
III, maybe. You'll be facing Standard V pitches up there, and ice
and snow."
Perkins sat up, swung his feet to the floor. He said, hesitantly,
"You're saying we'd be fools to go on?"
"Bloody fools. Rest here the night and head down in the morn-
ing. Will you do that?"
Perkins finally nodded. He looked very ill. Kendrick stood up.
"I'll spend the night at Two-Tarn Hut," he said. "Neither Ham-
lin nor I would be comfortable if I dossed here."
He settled into the shabby wooden hut that crouched near the
bleak shore of Hut Tarn well before dark. He found himself fight-
ing a vague uneasiness. He finally isolated it: Hamlin wouldn't be
fool enough to try for the peaks alone, would he?
Golden sunlight slanted through the window to wake him. It
was late, nearly 6:00 A.M. Kendrick yawned, sat up, began pulling
on layers of clothing. The hut was icy. When he opened the door,
the dazzling white and black peaks towered starkly above, surely
close enough to touch across the miles of snow and icefields flank-
ing the glaciers.
Kendrick hurriedly lighted the primus and set water heating in
the sufuria. Amazing to get a window of weather this far into the
season, he ought to make the most of it. He poured boiling, water
over the tea leaves, sugar and dried milk in his cup, and to the
remainder in the sufuria added white corn meal, dried milk, and
salt to make ugali. Porter's rations, that, not European fare; but
he could subsist on ten pounds of food a week up here.
He ate at the window. As he had thought. Already wisps of
cloud were forming in the cleavage between Nelion and Batian,
where the Diamond glacier sparkled. The cloud falling on the ice
made it gray and cold-looking. Kirinyaga's usual rainy season
tricks. Sunshine, then
Kendrick's spare hard body tensed. He never would have seen
them if the window hadn't framed them. given them scale.
Bloody stupid idiots! He glassed the distant figures with his
binoculars. Hamlin in the lead, Perkins behind, trying the south-
west ridge of Batian. He should have known Perkins' acquiescence
had been the mountain sickness working. When that had less-
ened, and with Hamlin whispering in his bloody ear
"The blind leading the blind," Kendrick said in a vicious voice.
The southwest ridge. A tough ascent even during the climbing
season. On the south side a snowfield, where they'd have to cut
steps across. At the head of that, a rock bulge that would be
treacherously verglassed this time of the year.
He jerked on sweaters, anorak, knitted mitts with split palms,
stuffed balaclava and waterproof gauntlets into pockets, jammed a
soft floppy-brimmed army fatigue hat on his head.
To the snout of the Darwin glacier he moved at a slow trot,
then angled up the true right bank of the ice floe, reversed him-
self,  went  left up  snow-sheathed  rocks  to  the  southwest ridge
notch. He followed their tracks across the snowfield, his cheeks
burning with cold. The sun had gone, the wind was moaning at
him from the east. He paused to don the balaclava, saving the
gauntlets for the real cold ahead. He had always hated heroics,
and now he was involved in those of a posturing ape.
They had somehow made it up and over the rock bulge, ver-
glassed as it was with frozen rain. He felt a spurt of adrenalin-
like hope; that had taken nerve and strength. But ahead, between
him and the main ridge, lay a hundred yards of steep black bro-
ken rock. And beyond that
A sudden shrill scream cut through the wind's low moan. He
needed no clatter of falling rock to confirm it; he'd heard men fall
before. He went up the hundred yards of tumbled rock in a single
ferocious sustained rush that left him on the narrow ridge pant-
ing and nauseated. The screams had cut off. Dead? In shock? One
or both?
He hallooed. No answer. He was aware of intense cold stinging
his nostrils and lungs. Of thin air pushing his pulse to 160. And
of fatigue. Bone-chilling fatigue. The annual fever bout was not as
far behind as he had thought.
Kendrick hallooed again. This time a weak voice answered.
They'd come to grief at the crux of the climb, a two-hundred-
foot buttress of exposed rock dismally bare of good handholds. His
eyes searched the swirling, snow-laden clouds above. There! A
dark shape clinging to the sheer wall.
One dark shape.
"Are you all right?" he called.
"Help! For God's sake, help!"
The rock bulged out toward Batian's west face, so his weight
was carried by his arms and the strain of thighs and knees
against the rock. Up, and up. The face mercifully eased to merely
vertical.  Thirty  feet.  Forty.  Burke  Hamlin  was  clinging
spreadeagled to good holds, face white and strained, eyes abso-
lutely wild.
"Get me down from here," he said hoarsely.
Kendrick was well to the side. Terrified climbers were like ter-
rified swimmers, they'd take anything within reach down with
them.
"Are you hurt?"
"Idon't know. For God's sake, man"
Kendrick's fingers were numbing with cold; he regretted the
gauntlets. Snow swirled around them. The actor's safety rope had
parted a couple of feet below his belt. Kendrick had to find Per-
kins, but before he could he had to get Hamlin down the ledge
formed by the ridgetop and the base of this exposed buttress.
"Move when I tell you, where I tell you," he said in the voice of
someone calming a spooked horse. "Don't look down. Okay, left
hand down six inches . . . good! Now, left foot . . . "
It was a bad twenty minutes. Hamlin collapsed on the four-foot
width of the ridgeline. Kendrick followed the ledge, found the
safety line with Perkins still attached to it. He'd been probably
twenty feet below Hamlin when he'd fallen and the rope had
parted, had struck the ridge, and had kept going over and down
the sheer face.
Kendrick crouched on the ledge. Visibility was so bad he could
barely see the blond youngster's limp body hooked around a knob
of rock fifteen feet below. Three feet to either side, Kendrick
thought, and he'd still be bouncing.
He belayed around an out-cropping, then roped down to assess
the damage. One leg was shattered just below the hip, so the jag-
ged white end of femur was thrust out through a rip in the flan-
nel trousers. The red meat exposed by the tear was already freez-
ing. Internal, Kendrick could only guess. A pulse, yes, but
The eyes suddenly opened in the deathly pale face a yard away.
"It's numb now."
"Anything broken inside that you know about?"
"My chest stabs when I breathe. I think it's ribs. I did two of
them at rugger once and it feels the same." He closed his eyes,
opened them. "I've had it, haven't I?"
Kendrick laid a momentary palm on his shoulder. "I'll get you
up to the ledge."
He went up his rope hand over hand. On the ridge Hamlin was
hunched in the lee of the buttress. He was shivering. There was a
blue line around his mouth and the rim of his nostrils.
"He's fifteen feet below the ridgetine," said Kendrick. "I'm not
sure I'm strong enough to get him up alone."
The wind moaned. Hamlin raised shock-dulled eyes. "He's still
alive?"
"He won't be if we keep fooling around. We'll have to"
He stopped there. Hamlin's mouth was set.
"I can't." His teeth had begun chattering. He was stripped of
pretense. "Can'tface it. Can'tpull him up to the ledge, can't
make it downcan't . . . arm broken."
Kendrick had seen men do remarkable things hampered by a
broken arm. But he had also seen men like Hamlin before
stunned by the sudden terrible mortality that Kirinyaga could
thrust upon you. Men who, faced with that realization, shriveled
up inside. It was in search of that insight that others climbed.
He left Hamlin there and returned to Perkins. He braced, took
a turn around his left hand, and began hauling. He was aware of
Hamlin, watching him like a ferret; the actor's naked ego had
begun peering once again from the rocks into which it had scut-
tled. The lift was the hardest thing Kendrick had ever done.
When it was finished, he walked downwind from the crumpled
youth and threw up.
"Lie down next to him, Hamlin. I've dragged him back under
the face of the buttress where there's some shelter from the
wind."
"Where are you going? You can't leave me here! You can't"
"Grow up," said Kendrick.
The descent to Two-Tarn Hut wasn't too bad; the whining press
of wind cut visibility with swirling snow, but gave him a fixed di-
rection on which to depend. He gathered up his bedroll and blan-
kets and started back up. He didn't like to contemplate the next
hours. He was wearing down already; and besides the wind which
in exposed places threatened to flick him off, his fatigue itself was
dangerous. It made him treat tricky bits of rock-work with a
numb, casual contempt.
The light was muddy as he dragged himself up the final yards
to the narrow ridge. Anger stirred him.
"Dammit, Hamlin, I told you to lie down next to him."
"Icouldn't move."
"Move now or I'll kick your arm!"
Hamlin moved, crabwise, his back against the rock, his right
arm hanging limply at his side. They got two of the blankets
around Perkins and rolled him into the sleeping bag. A pulse of
sorts, still breathing, but no outcry when they handled him. Just
as well, Kendrick thought. At the very best he was going to lose
his leg.
Hamlin snatched at the two remaining blankets.
"I'll need more than this, Kendrick! I'll freeze."
"You'll be all right. Keep moving around, work your fingers and
toes. And make sure Perkins stays covered."
Kendrick entered a curious limbo of exhaustion where he
moved solely by his superb mountaineer's sense. He had a
flashlight, but here on the peaks it merely reflected back from
swirling snow. During the rock-work he kept his mind awake
with speculations of times and distances. Twenty-five miles to his
VW down at the 9000-foot ,level, say. Easier going downhill, of
course, but in the dark, in the snow and, below that, rain ...
He fell the first time going down the steep scree north of Ship-
ton's Peak, twisting instinctively and landing on a shoulder
rather than on his face in the loose, sliding volcanic debris. By
the time he reached the stream at the head of Teleki Valley he
had fallen twice more. It was utterly black, pouring icy rain; he'd
left his poncho at Two-Tarn Hut. At old ruined Klarwill's Hut he
jettisoned ice axe, crampons, piton hammer, and ropes. He went
on down the long hollow of moorland dotted with giant lobelia
and euphorbia.
Below this was the vertical bog, several miles of coarse matted
tussocks with water between. He lost track of his falls there. Only
the vague starlight following the rain kept him floundering,
splashing, cursing his way down.
Ahead, the dark mass of the treeline. He fell on it as on a ban-
quet. Stunted, gnarled nidorellas bearded with moss. The Naru
Moru forest track plunged down into the rainforest's impenetrable
darkness. Sodden branches slapped at his face, clawed at his eyes.
He used his flashlight here, made plenty of noise so he wouldn't
surprise an elephant or leopard on the trail. Once the light
limned great streaming piles of fresh buffalo dung.
At the Meteorological Clearing at 10,000 feet, he found Hamlin
had left the keys in the Land Rover. That would cut 45 minutes
and three miles afoot from his descent. He rested his forehead
against the steering wheel as the four-wheel vehicle grumbled it-
self awake.
Midnight. Another day beginning. Good Lord, he'd never been
so tired. And he still had to get back up again.
He sent the Land Rover careening down the narrow red mur-
ram track, almost sideswiped his VW, and as soon as he cleared
the forest area swung off the route toward a distant farmhouse
owned by a middle-aged Scots family originally from the Republic.
His horn brought them awake so he could shamble through the
welcome triangle of yellow lamplight, hollow-eyed and gaunt and
caked with mud.
"Accident up on Batian."
"Full mountain rescue drill?" The farmer was already at the
phone; his wife was heating tea water and cutting bread.
Kendrick nodded and drank scalding tea. All the farmers on
Kirinyaga's approaches knew about accidents on the mountain.
The call would go through the Nairobi police, who would relay by
shortwave. He set aside the mug regretfully. The farmer was full
of objections.
"Man, you'll be in no condition to make it back up."
"And they'll be in no condition to wait up there alone."
He remembered little of the climb after he had smashed and
hulled the Land Rover two miles uphill beyond the Meteorological
Clearing before bogging down entirely. Watery dawn slashed
through renewed rain to greet him at the treeline. The bog should
have finished him; then, fording the rapid rain-swollen Naru
Moru by Teleki Hut, he knew he was all through.
He kept on.
At Klarwill's he collapsed on what was left of the floor. He
cried. He collected his climbing gear and went on.
The sun appeared to taunt him while he was on a lateral
moraine from the track to the stream below the Lewis Glacier. He
made the stiff scramble to Two-Tarn Hut and passed it without
pausing. The rest of the climb was made by instinct and will
power only. His body merely continued to respond in familiar
physical ways to familiar stimuli. Moving was as involuntary as
breathing.
He got there too late. Waiting for the rescue party, he knew
he'd driven his body beyond the normal limits of endurance be-
cause he had feared from the beginning that he would be too late.
The press conference was held two afternoons later in the
lounge of Nyeri's Outspan Hotel. Burke Hamlin had refused hos-
pitalization beyond having his arm set and being treated for expo-
sure. He lounged on one of the superbly comfortable old couches,
hemmed in by reporters, tourists, onlookers, flacks, studio people.
Cameras and mikes. His cast already scrawled with bawdy senti-
ments, a large whiskey at his elbow. As he'd said in an earlier
context, damned good theater.
"Does the broken arm hamper you much, Mr. Hamlin?"
"I tend to spill more drinks."
"The mountain sequences were finished. What were you looking
for up on Kirinyaga?"
"Read The Snows of Kilimanjaro."
"That isn't really an answer, is it, Mr. Hamlin?"
"It is for me."
"What can you tell us of the tragic death of Mr. Perkins?"
Stern sorrow molded the craggy features. The drink was set
aside unspilled. Kendrick, in a doorway well back from the crowd,
thought it was an excellent performance.
"What can one say when his best is not good enough? He died of
cold and exposure and shock before the rescuers arrived."
It broke up. Kendrick wandered tree-shaded paths, his nostrils
full of the rich acents of tropical blooms. Warm air caressed his
skin. He had slept the clock around. The Outspan was an old Col-
onial hotel, airy, spacious, quiet, civilized.
Cold and exposure and shock.
He looked between the branches of a scarlet-flowered Nandi
flame tree toward Kirinyaga, 40 miles away, with her head
buried in clouds of her own making. Here, deep blue sky filled
with stately gray-hulled clipper ships which would close ranks
and fire salvos of rain at four o'clock.
Cold and exposure and shock. Neat and cosmetic, antiseptic as a
hospital bed.
Reality was a bit more gross. Perkins was frozen solid. Lips
pulled back from the canines in a perpetual trapped hyeng snarl.
Fingers clawed into blunted parodies of a leopard's talons.
Eyeballs staring through their contact lenses of ice.
And Kendrick couldn't really condemn Hamlin for it. Blind
panic. How many cracked in battle under similar stress, and
while surrounded by companions and trained to it besides? Alone,
on a mountain ridge with Kirinyaga slavering above you
Couldn't condemn, but couldn't let it happen again so someone
else would die. He knocked on the actor's door just before four
o'clock, under a clouded sky with pre-rain wind dancing dust dev-
ils in the parking lot.
"It's open."
Hamlin was alone, sitting in a chair with his bare feet crossed
on the foot of the bed. He had a drink in his left hand.
"Pulling out at first light," said Kendrick.
"And you came to say goodbye? How touching." The magnifi-
cent leonine head followed Kendrick across the room as if to cam-
era cues. He set his bare feet on the rug. "Did I forget to thank
you for saving my life?"
"And for not saving Perkins'?"
"Meaning what, precisely?" asked Hamlin carefully.
Kendrick relaxed against the wall. The assurance he'd sought
was in the raw edges of Hamlin's voice, in the whiteness of his
fingers around the glass. Kendrick shook his head chidingly.
"It won't do, Hamlin. The ends of the safety rope. The broken
arm. The zipped-up sleeping bag."
Hamlin stood up. He swayed slightly, not from drink. His face
was pale, something akin to terror was in his eyes.
"I'm not going to listen to this, Kendrick. My arm"
"was broken by yourself, deliberately, when you saw me com-
ing up the mountain the next morning. You were clinging to that
rock face with both hands the first time I saw you. Both hands.
I'll grant it takes courage of a sort to jam your forearm between a
couple of rocks" He made a snapping motion with his hands.
"It's the image that's all important, isn't it? The image is every-
thing."
"Don't think I'll admit"
"And the safety rope. Brand-new Perlon, a thirty percent
stretch factor to absorb shockyou could have bounced Perkins
up and down on it like a yoyo and it wouldn't have broken."
"It broke." Sweat stood on Hamlin's face; his eyes were like
knobs of bone in spoiled meat. They found the closed bathroom
door, returned to Kendrick. "Broke. Broke. You weren't there, you
couldn't know. It broke, I tell you."
"Two feet off your belt where it would have no chance to be
rubbed through? It was cut. Perkins started sliding, screaming,
you panicked and cut him loose."
"Whowho would believe"
Kendrick laughed. It wasn't a pleasant laugh. Poor bloody Per-
kins. Poor bloody Hamlin, for all that.
"Nobody has to. I just wanted you aware that I know. So if you
ever get your nerve back and are ever tempted again"
Hamlin sat down heavily. He stared straight ahead.
"The cold," he said in a strangled voice. "The altitude." He
shuddered abruptly. "Do you think I ever again"
"Good." Kendrick's face hardened. "That leaves Perkins. Frozen
solid in his sleeping bag and his blankets."
"Youyou found him yourself."
"Only if he'd been out of the sleeping bag. Out of the blankets.
Even in delirium he couldn't have unzipped that bag. But you
could. You still had both arms then, you could take away the
blankets and bag for yourself, put them back when you saw me on
my way. You were afraid of freezing."
"He was finished. Done for." Hamlin was panting, sweating,
hunched in his chair like a man who'd been fed arsenic. "Just a
vegetable.  Oh,  it's easy for you!  You're never tired. Never
frightened. I was afraid to die. Afraid. Can you understand that?
Can you?"
The bathroom door opened and Morna came out. Must have
gone in there when Kendrick had knocked and stayed there
quietly, listening. No wonder Hamlin had tried to keep him from
talking about it. Morna, who wanted a strong man, a self-
sufficient man; Morna, who had dumped Kendrick because he
hadn't measured up. Now Hamlin had been stripped, exposed to
her scorn.                                          "
"No, he can't understand that, Burke," she said in a low deadly
voice. "He's never needed anyone or anything in his life." She met
Kendrick's gaze, a strange look on her lovely face. "Is it true? The
things you've accused him of?"
Kendrick shrugged. "I wasn't accusing. Just telling him what I
know. It doesn't go any further."
"All right, you've told him. Now get out and leave us alone."
She was on her knees beside the sobbing actor, her arms around
his massive shoulders, cooing soft words to him. She looked at
Kendrick past the magnificent shaggy head, her eyes ablaze.
"He needs me!" she cried triumphantly.
Kendrick felt as if he had narrowly missed being struck by a
train. He also felt nauseated. He said, "Yes. He needs you. God
help him."
He left the room. The first broad drops of rain were making
dime-sized splotches on the tarmac, making it smell of wet tar.
Kendrick looked instinctively to the east. Just gray cloud massed
there now, all the way to the horizon. But somewhere behind it
He shuddered. Morna had been wrong, of course, when she'd
said he had never needed anybody or anything. He stared at the
clouds, as if able to see through them to Kirinyaga, waiting there
with her fangs bared and gloaming.
Waiting. For Kendrick.