Warlock

across the mouth for breath to be drawn more easily. Still, it was best to close the eyes as often as possible, even if only for a few seconds at a time. The temperature had dropped so low that tears froze on the skin even beneath the woolen climbing masks. One was also forced to breathe shallowly lest the lungs freeze with the gulping intake of great quantities of sub-zero air. There were fifty-two degrees of frost, Sergeant Crowler said-twenty degrees below zero-and the tender tissue of the lung collapsed under that if it was taken in too heartily. The slower breathing also slowed their pace, but Richter refused to call a halt until he had found some place better than open ground for the making of camp.
        
        “In the open,” the tough old officer had told Mace, “we will all surely freeze to death this night!” He had given Mace the duty of keeping his eyes open for the sign of a cave which might be all but drifted shut with snow. He trusted the giant's eyes more than even his own, and he was known for his hawklike vision.
        
        Even under the fur-lined hoods of their coats, their ears grew cold and enflamed.
        
        Even through the thickness of two pair of gloves, their fingers became frost-bitten, and they had to exercise their hands, slap them against their thighs as they walked.
        
        It was almost five-thirty with darkness closing in around them, when young Captain Belmondo died.
        
        Not ten minutes earlier, he had taken half an hour duty in the lead, testing for snow bridges which had now become an ever-present danger. Whistling sheets of snow could drift outward from two opposing cliffs and form a crust across a narrow gorge perhaps as wide as twenty feet in these high winds. The way would appear as safe as any, but the unwary climber would be setting foot on cotton and would plummet through to destruction.
        
        Belmondo walked carefully, almost cowardly. Since he had taken the advance position, the pace had slowed by half, even though the weather had already slowed them considerably. He never moved a foot without first testing for solid ground again and again. That was why it was such a shock to everyone when, suddenly, he found himself in the middle of a snow bridge that was giving way beneath him.
        
        He turned, scrambling back toward Richter who was reaching for him. But the crust cracked, shivered, fell and he was gone, his face so terror-stricken and his mind so dumbfounded by the realization of his own death, that he had no chance at all to scream.
        
        Immediately, Commander Richter ordered all the Banibaleers onto their hands and knees so as to distribute their weight over four points rather than two. They also eased away from one another, for there was no way of telling how many of them had strayed onto the shaky bridge of snow that was now the only thing barring them from oblivion.
        
        Also on their hands and knees, Richter and Crowler crept forward to the hole Belmondo had made. Looking down, they saw the battered corpse two hundred feet below, wedged in snow-swirled rocks. It was easy to see what had happened. Once the bridge had been formed, the wind had continued to whistle underneath, packed more and more snow on, blowing harder and harder until the bottom layers began to turn to ice. Perhaps two inches of clear, hard ice bottomed the snow bridge. It was this hard surface which Belmondo had felt with his probe and which he had taken to be solid earth. He had been trained to distinguish the sound of an ice sub-structure, but he had either never learned it properly or had forgotten.
        
        And now he was dead because of it.
        
        “It should be sturdy enough to support the men until they get off, don't you think?” Crowler asked
        
        Richter did not answer.
        
        “Sir?”
        
        Richter stared down the hole.
        
        “Sir, the men?”
        
        Richter stared at the body.
        
        Slowly, his mask pulled back from his face to give him a better view, Richter began to weep. The tears froze on his cheeks…
        

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    11
        
        
        
        Shaker Sandow sat with Commander Richter, separated from the other members of the Banibaleer party not by geography so much as by mood. The rest of the men were, if not jubilant, at least relieved and pleased that Mace had