so much less to carry, my Keith. Think how grateful our tired friend Corporal Miller is going to be … This is only a little thing.’
‘Yes,’ Mallory said. ‘Yes, of course. A little thing.’ He turned abruptly, tugged the cord, watched the rope disappear over the edge.
Fifteen minutes later, in drenching, torrential rain, a great, sheeting downpour almost constantly illuminated by the jagged, branching stilettos of the forked lightning, Casey Brown’s bedraggled head came into view over the edge of the cliff. The thunder, too, emptily cavernous in that flat and explosive intensity of sound that lies at the heart of a thunderstorm, was almost continuous: but in the brief intervals, Casey’s voice, rich in his native Clydeside accent, carried clearly. He was expressing himself fluently in basic Anglo-Saxon, and with cause. He had had the assistance of two ropes on the way up – the one stretched from spike to spike and the one used for raising supplies, which Andrea had kept pulling in as he made the ascent. Casey Brown had secured the end of this round his waist with a bowline, but the bowline had proved to be nothing of the sort but a slip-knot, and Andrea’s enthusiastic help had almost cut him in half. He was still sitting on the cliff-top, exhausted head between his knees, the radio still strapped to his back, when two tugs on Andrea’s rope announced that Dusty Miller was on his way up.
Another quarter of an hour elapsed, an interminable fifteen minutes when, in the lulls between the thunder-claps, every slightest sound was an approaching enemy patrol, before Miller materialised slowly out of the darkness, halfway down the rock chimney. He was climbing steadily and methodically, then checked abruptly at the cliff-top, groping hands pawing uncertainly on the top-soil of the cliff. Puzzled, Mallory bent down, peered into the lean face: both the eyes were clamped tightly shut.
‘Relax, Corporal,’ Mallory advised kindly. ‘You have arrived.’
Dusty Miller slowly opened his eyes, peered round at the edge of the cliff, shuddered and crawled quickly on hands and knees to the shelter of the nearest boulders. Mallory followed and looked down at him curiously.
‘What was the idea of closing your eyes coming over the top?’
‘I did not,’ Miller protested.
Mallory said nothing.
‘I closed them at the bottom,’ Miller explained wearily. ‘I opened them at the top.’
Mallory looked at him incredulously.
‘What! All the way?’
‘It’s like I told you, boss,’ Miller complained. ‘Back in Castelrosso. When I cross a street and step up on to the sidewalk I gotta hang on to the nearest lamp-post. More or less.’ He broke off, looked at Andrea leaning far out over the side of the cliff, and shivered again. ‘Brother! Oh, brother! Was I scared!’
Fear. Terror. Panic. Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain. Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain. Once, twice, a hundred times, Andy Stevens repeated the words to himself, over and over again, like a litany. A psychiatrist had told him that once and he’d read it a dozen times since. Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain. The mind is a limited thing, they had said. It can only hold one thought at a time, one impulse to action. Say to yourself, I am brave, I am overcoming this fear, this stupid, unreasoning panic which has no origin except in my own mind, and because the mind can only hold one thought at a time, and because thinking and feeling are one, then you will be brave, you will overcome and the fear will vanish like a shadow in the night. And so Andy Stevens said these things to himself, and the shadows only lengthened and deepened, lengthened and deepened, and the icy claws of fear dug ever more savagely into his dull exhausted mind, into his twisted, knotted stomach.
His stomach. That knotted ball of jangled, writhing nerve-ends beneath the solar plexus. No one could ever know how it was, how it felt, except those whose shredded minds were going, collapsing into complete and final breakdown. The waves of panic and nausea and faintness that flooded up through a suffocating throat to a mind dark and spent and sinewless, a mind fighting with woollen fingers to cling on to the edge of the abyss, a tired and lacerated mind, only momentarily in control, wildly rejecting the clamorous demands of a nervous system, which had already taken far too much, that he should let go, open the torn fingers that were clenched so tightly round the rope. It was just that easy. ‘Rest after toil, port after stormy seas.’ What was that famous stanza of Spenser’s? Sobbing aloud, Stevens wrenched out another spike, sent it spinning into the waiting sea three hundred long feet below, pressed himself closely into the face and inched his way despairingly upwards.
Fear. Fear had been at his elbow all his life, his constant companion, his alter ego, at his elbow, or in close prospect or immediate recall. He had become accustomed to that fear, at times almost reconciled, but the sick agony of this night lay far beyond either tolerance or familiarity. He had never known anything like this before, and even in his terror and confusion he was dimly aware that the fear did not spring from the climb itself. True, the cliff was sheer and almost vertical, and the lightning, the ice-cold rain, the darkness and the bellowing thunder were a waking nightmare. But the climb, technically, was simple: the rope stretched all the way to the top and all he had to do was to follow it and dispose of the spikes as he went. He was sick and bruised and terribly tired, his head ached abominably and he had lost a great deal of blood: but then, more often than not, it is in the darkness of agony and exhaustion that the spirit of man burns most brightly.
Andy Stevens was afraid because his self-respect was gone. Always before, that had been his sheet anchor, had tipped the balance against his ancient enemy – the respect in which other men had held him, the respect he had had for himself. But now these were gone, for his two greatest fears had been realised – he was known to be afraid, he had failed his fellow-man. Both in the fight with the German caique and when anchored above the watch-tower in the creek, he had known that Mallory and Andrea knew. He had never met such men before, and he had known all along that he could never hide his secrets from such men. He should have gone up that cliff with Mallory, but Mallory had made excuses and taken Andrea instead – Mallory knew he was afraid. And twice before, in Castelrosso and when the German boat had closed in on them, he had almost failed his friends – and tonight he had failed them terribly. He had not been thought fit to lead the way with Mallory – and it was he, the sailor of the party, who had made such a botch of tying that last knot, had lost all the food and the fuel that had plummeted into the sea a bare ten feet from where he had stood on the ledge … and a thousand men on Kheros were depending on a failure so abject as himself. Sick and spent, spent in mind and body and spirit, moaning aloud in his anguish of fear and self-loathing, and not knowing where one finished and the other began, Andy Stevens climbed blindly on.
The sharp, high-pitched call-up buzz of the telephone cut abruptly through the darkness on the cliff-top. Mallory stiffened and half-turned, hands clenching involuntarily. Again it buzzed, the jarring stridency carrying clearly above the bass rumble of the thunder, fell silent again. And then it buzzed again and kept on buzzing, peremptory in its harsh insistence.
Mallory was half-way towards it when he checked in mid-step, turned slowly round and walked back towards Andrea. The big Greek looked at him curiously.
‘You have changed your mind?’
Mallory nodded but said nothing.
‘They will keep on ringing until they get an answer,’ Andrea murmured. ‘And when they get no answer, they will come. They will come quickly and soon.’
‘I know, I know.’ Mallory shrugged. ‘We have to take that chance – certainty rather. The question is – how long will it be before anyone turns up.’ Instinctively he looked both ways along the windswept
