1
It was difficult to sleep at night, wishing good men dead.
This was but one of the hurtful things I felt in my bones and wished I could
ignore. It was an ugly truth waving its arms that I turned my gaze from, that I
didn’t like to admit even to myself. But while my bag warmed me with the last
of its power and my breath spilled out in white plumes toward the roof of our
tent, while the flicker of a whisperstove melted snow for midnight tea, I lay
in that dead zone above sixty thousand feet and hoped not just for the failure
of those above me, but that no man summit and live to tell the tale. Not before
I had my chance.
It was a shameful admission, one I nearly raised with
Hanson, my tentmate, to see in the wrinkles of his snow-beat face whether this
was a guilt shared. I suspected it was. In the mess tents and around the yellow
craters we dubbed latrines, the look among us was that only one would be
remembered. The rest would die alone in the snow or live a long life
forgotten—and not one of us would’ve been able to explain to a child the
difference. Frozen to death by altitude or by time was all the same. The truth
was this: History remembers the first, and only the first. These are the
creeping and eternal glaciers, the names etched across all time like scars in
granite cliffs. Those who came after were the inch or two of snowdrift that
would melt in due time. They would trickle, forgotten, into the pores of the
earth, be swallowed and melt snow at the feet of other forgotten men.
It was a quarter past Eno’s midnight and time to get up.
If Shubert and Humphries were to make it to the top, they likely would’ve by
now. If any of their gear still worked, they would be radioing in their
victory, taking the first pictures of starlit peaks wrinkling far past the
limits of sight. By now, they would know how many fingers and toes it cost
them, how much oxygen left in their tanks, whether or not they would live to
speak of the mountain’s conquest.
The faint odor of tea penetrated my dark thoughts. It
must’ve been a potent brew to smell it at all. We had already scaled beyond the
heights where taste and scent fade to oblivion. One had to remind himself to
eat and drink, for the stomach is one of those organs that knows when to quit.
It is the first, in fact, to go. The mind of the climber is the last.
Hanson brought me tea. I wormed a single arm out into the
cold, though my heating bag had become a feeble thing. I did not want to lose
what little it held. I coughed into my fist, that persistent cough of the dead
zone, and accepted the steaming mug.
There were no words spoken as we forced ourselves to
drink. Every twitch was an effort at those altitudes. We were sleeping higher
than all the fabled peaks of Cirrus VII. Our fourth camp along the Slopeson
Ridge, at 42,880 feet, was higher than any speck of dirt on Hanson’s home
planet. And when we arrived on this wasteland of a frozen ball, out here in a
corner of the galaxy where men go either to not be found or to be remembered
for all times, we set up a basecamp very near to the highest peak of the place
I grew up: Earth. Where men were first born and first began to scale to deadly
heights.
I sipped my tea, burning my numb lips, and told myself it
would be an Earth-born who scaled Mt. Mallory first. This was a distasteful
idea that I and many others were willing to share. The secret I kept to myself
was that others could die if they dared climb her before me.
2
Two other private teams were making a go of it that
season. Government expeditions and collectives of alpine clubs had given up
decades ago. They now watched as men such as I took leave of our day jobs and
with borrowed funds and the best of gear and medicine at hand, set out to prove
what was possible.
The window of opportunity for a summit was but a bare
sliver of a crack. Half a day at most when the fearful winds of that dizzy
world slowed to a manageable gale and before the monsoons
It was difficult to sleep at night, wishing good men dead.
This was but one of the hurtful things I felt in my bones and wished I could
ignore. It was an ugly truth waving its arms that I turned my gaze from, that I
didn’t like to admit even to myself. But while my bag warmed me with the last
of its power and my breath spilled out in white plumes toward the roof of our
tent, while the flicker of a whisperstove melted snow for midnight tea, I lay
in that dead zone above sixty thousand feet and hoped not just for the failure
of those above me, but that no man summit and live to tell the tale. Not before
I had my chance.
It was a shameful admission, one I nearly raised with
Hanson, my tentmate, to see in the wrinkles of his snow-beat face whether this
was a guilt shared. I suspected it was. In the mess tents and around the yellow
craters we dubbed latrines, the look among us was that only one would be
remembered. The rest would die alone in the snow or live a long life
forgotten—and not one of us would’ve been able to explain to a child the
difference. Frozen to death by altitude or by time was all the same. The truth
was this: History remembers the first, and only the first. These are the
creeping and eternal glaciers, the names etched across all time like scars in
granite cliffs. Those who came after were the inch or two of snowdrift that
would melt in due time. They would trickle, forgotten, into the pores of the
earth, be swallowed and melt snow at the feet of other forgotten men.
It was a quarter past Eno’s midnight and time to get up.
If Shubert and Humphries were to make it to the top, they likely would’ve by
now. If any of their gear still worked, they would be radioing in their
victory, taking the first pictures of starlit peaks wrinkling far past the
limits of sight. By now, they would know how many fingers and toes it cost
them, how much oxygen left in their tanks, whether or not they would live to
speak of the mountain’s conquest.
The faint odor of tea penetrated my dark thoughts. It
must’ve been a potent brew to smell it at all. We had already scaled beyond the
heights where taste and scent fade to oblivion. One had to remind himself to
eat and drink, for the stomach is one of those organs that knows when to quit.
It is the first, in fact, to go. The mind of the climber is the last.
Hanson brought me tea. I wormed a single arm out into the
cold, though my heating bag had become a feeble thing. I did not want to lose
what little it held. I coughed into my fist, that persistent cough of the dead
zone, and accepted the steaming mug.
There were no words spoken as we forced ourselves to
drink. Every twitch was an effort at those altitudes. We were sleeping higher
than all the fabled peaks of Cirrus VII. Our fourth camp along the Slopeson
Ridge, at 42,880 feet, was higher than any speck of dirt on Hanson’s home
planet. And when we arrived on this wasteland of a frozen ball, out here in a
corner of the galaxy where men go either to not be found or to be remembered
for all times, we set up a basecamp very near to the highest peak of the place
I grew up: Earth. Where men were first born and first began to scale to deadly
heights.
I sipped my tea, burning my numb lips, and told myself it
would be an Earth-born who scaled Mt. Mallory first. This was a distasteful
idea that I and many others were willing to share. The secret I kept to myself
was that others could die if they dared climb her before me.
2
Two other private teams were making a go of it that
season. Government expeditions and collectives of alpine clubs had given up
decades ago. They now watched as men such as I took leave of our day jobs and
with borrowed funds and the best of gear and medicine at hand, set out to prove
what was possible.
The window of opportunity for a summit was but a bare
sliver of a crack. Half a day at most when the fearful winds of that dizzy
world slowed to a manageable gale and before the monsoons
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