Uneasy Relations by Aaron Elkins

of last night’s dream.
    As the helpless, mindless panic of his fall subsided and his breathing became more regular, he took stock of his situation. The trunk seemed solid enough. It hadn’t seemed to give much when he landed on it, and he was relieved to see a set of thick roots twining into whatever earth they could find between heavy slabs of rock. The two branches supporting him were less conducive to serenity. They had given, all right, almost bouncing him back into space, and they were still quivering from the shock of it When he shifted his weight to a less painful position, he felt them bend under him, and one of them gave out an ominous, thin, snapping sound.
    He stopped shifting his weight.
    Still, he wasn’t dead after all; that was the critical thing. He breathed out a sigh. As long as he didn’t move, he was safe.
    By now his wits had returned to the extent that the thought made him laugh. Safe, as long as he sat in, or rather
on
, a dwarf tree sticking out of the side of the Rock of Gibraltar, a thousand feet in the air, with nothing at all between him and the stony beach at the bottom, and twenty feet of nearly vertical cliff face between him and safety of a more permanent sort at the top.
    He tried calling out, but gave it up after his second “Hello . . . is anybody there?” (He felt too ridiculous to sit there in his tree yelling, “Help!”) Whatever he yelled, he realized no one was going to answer anyway. If someone had actually pushed him, whoever had done it had probably already fled, and if not, he wasn’t about to come to his aid. To reach anyone else, his voice would have to carry up and over the top of the ridge and down the long stone stairwell to the trail. And even if his voice did carry, which it wouldn’t — not in this wind — who was there to hear him? If there was anybody out on the trail in this weather, Gideon certainly hadn’t seen him.
    All right then, it was up to him to get himself out of there. Time for a plan. Julie, in her park-ranger mode, said that the best plan, the best thing you could do if you were lost or in trouble, as long as you weren’t in danger of imminent death, was to stay put. People would come and find you, especially if they had some idea of where you’d been going. And in this case, Julie knew he’d been headed for the watchtower, and Rowley knew exactly where it was. So how long would it be before they came looking? Well, at least another forty minutes: half an hour before they started worrying about him, and ten minutes to get here. After that, it would be another twenty minutes, because they’d have to go back to the cable terminal building and return with some rope. So, at a minimum, an hour, all told. Could he last that long?
    Not a chance. Oh, the tree felt solid enough, even with that
crack
he’d heard, but the fact was, he didn’t trust himself not to fall out of the damn thing. Balance had never been his strong suit. He’d fallen into more than one stream from more than one log bridge that his companions had crossed without a problem. And that had been from heights of three or four feet, not with a thousand feet of empty space under him and fierce, spiteful gusts of wind whacking away at him. Some people were said to be seized by a near-irresistible urge to jump when they found themselves looking down from a height like this. Not him. All he had was an irresistible certainty that he’d fall out of the damn tree if he sat there long enough.
    No, it was time to go.
    He looked at the wall of solid rock that loomed above him. Well, not exactly what you’d call solid rock, really. Mostly, it was composed of what appeared to be a compacted, gravelly clay of some kind, with outcroppings of limestone pushing through it here and there. The Aleppo had improbably grown from one such outcropping, winding its roots through and around the limestone to reach the clay beneath. About fifteen feet above him — only five feet below the top of the Rock