The jangle of his telephone intersected his thoughts.

"Guess where I'm calling from?"

"I don't know, Gem." He was surprised at the fatigued sound of his own voice.

"From Bern. How about that?"

"What are you doing in Bern?" He was both relieved and oddly distressed.

"I'm not in Bern. That's just it. I'm in my cafe, just a pleasant fifteen-minute walk from your hotel. Which you may take as an invitation, if you have a mind to."

Jonathan waited, assuming she would explain.

"They routed my call through Bern. Isn't that weird?"

"Not really." Jonathan had experience with Swiss telephone systems, which rival only the French for efficiency. "The whole thing is based on the assumption that the shortest distance between two points is a cube."

"Well, Ithought it was weird."

He suspected she had no real reason for calling him, and he could sense a tone of helpless embarrassment in her voice.

"I'll try to see you tomorrow, Gem."

"OK. But if you feel an irresistible urge to drop in on me tonight, I'll try to arrange my schedule to make..." She gave up on it. Then, after a pause, "I love you, Jonathan." The ensuing silence begged for a response. When none came, she laughed without foundation. "I don't mean to drip all over you."

"I know you don't."

Her pickup was artificially gay. "Right then! Until tomorrow?"

"Until then." He held the line for a moment, hoping she would hang up first. When she did not, he placed the receiver gently onto its cradle, as though to soften the end of the conversation.

The sun glinted through a rift in the clouds, and hail and rain fell in silver diagonals through shafts of sunlight.

Two hours later the five men sat around a table in the middle of Ben's room. They leaned over a large photographic blowup of the Eigerwand, the corners of which were held down by rings of pitons. Karl traced with his finger a white line he had inked on the glossy surface.

Jonathan saw at a glance that the proposed route was a blend of the Sedlmayer/Mehringer approach and the classic path. It constituted a direct climb of the face, a linear attack that met the obstacles as they came with a minimum of traversing. It was almost the line a rock would take if it fell from the summit.

"We take the face here," Karl said, pointing to a spot three hundred meters left of the First Pillar, "and we go straight up to the Eigerwand Station. The climb is difficult—grade five, occasionally grade six—but it is possible."

"That first eight hundred feet will be wide open," Ben said in objection. And it was true that the first pitch offered no protection from the rock and ice that rattles down the face each morning when the touch of the sun melts the frost that has glued the loose rubble to the mountain through the night.

"I am aware of that," Karl responded. "I have weighed all the dangers. It will be vital that we cover that pitch in the early morning."

"Continue," Jean-Paul urged, already seduced by the prospect of being one of the first to take the face on a direct line.

"If all goes well, our first bivouac should be here." Karl's finger brushed a dark spot on the snow-crusted face just above the Eigerwand Station. There was a long gallery cut through the mountain during the building of the Jungfrau railroad tunnel. The gallery had been drilled through for ventilation and for jettisoning rubble from the main tunnel, and it was a favorite stopping-off place for tourists who walked to its well-protected edge and gaped down over the breath-catching void.

"In fact, we might get as high as Death Bivouac on the first day." Karl's finger traced a rippled shadow of mixed ice and rock. "And from then on, it's a matter of following the classic route." Freytag was aware that he had elided past the hitherto un-climbed part of the face, so he looked around the circle of men, ready to face objections.

Anderl leaned over the enlarged photograph and squinted for several minutes at a narrow diagonal band below the Eigerwand Station window. He nodded very slowly. "That might go. But we would have to stay out of the ice—hold to the rock as much as possible. It's a chute, Karl. I'll bet water rushes through it all day long. And it's a natural alley for avalanche. I would not care to be standing in it directing traffic like a policeman when the avalanche comes roaring through."

The laughter that greeted the image petered out hollowly. Jonathan turned from the table and looked down at the hazy meadow below the window.

Ben spoke slowly. "No one's ever been on that part of the face. We have no idea what it's like. What if the rock doesn't go? What if you're forced down into the gut of the chute?"

"I have no interest in suicide, Herr Bowman. If the edges are not a go, we shall retreat and follow the Sedlmayer/Mehringer route."

"The route that brought them to the Death Bivouac," Ben clarified.

"The weather killed them, Herr Bowman! Not the route!"

"You got some deal with God on weather?"

"Please, please," Jean-Paul interposed. "When Benjamin questions your route, Karl, he is not attacking you personally. For myself, I find the route intriguing." He turned to Jonathan at the window. "You have said nothing, Jonathan. What do you think?"

The mist had lifted from the face, and Jonathan was able to address his statements to the mountain. "Let me make sure of a couple of things, Karl. Assuming we make the Third Ice Field as you plan, the rest of the ascent will be classic, am I right? Up the Ramp, across the Traverse of the Gods, into the Spider, and up the Exit Cracks to the Summit Ice Field?"

"Exactly."

Jonathan nodded and ticked off each of the salient features on the face with his eyes. Then his glance returned to Karl's diagonal chute. "Certainly you realize that your route would not do for a retreat, if we were blocked higher up."

"I consider it self-defeating to plan in terms of retreat."

"I consider it stupid not to."

"Stupid!" Karl struggled with his control. Then he shrugged in peevish accord. "Very well. I shall leave the planning of a retreat route to Doctor Hemlock. After all, he has had more experience in retreating than I."

Ben glanced at Jonathan, surprised that he allowed this to pass with only a smile.

"I may take it then that my plan is accepted?" Karl asked.

Jonathan nodded. "Under the condition that the weather clears and freezes the new snow on. Without that, no route would go for a few days."

Jean-Paul was pleased with the agreement and went back over the route step by step with Karl, while Jonathan drew Anderl aside and asked him how he felt about the climb.

"It will be fun to try that diagonal pitch," was Anderl's only comment.

Ben was clearly unhappy with the route, with the team, with the whole idea of the climb. Jonathan crossed to him.

"Buy you a beer?"

"No thanks."

"What?"

"I don't feel like a beer. I feel like getting out of this whole business."

"We need you."

"I don't like it."

"What's the weather report like?"

Ben admitted reluctantly that the three-day prediction looked very good indeed: a strong high and a drop in temperature. Jonathan shared this good news with the party, and in a general mood of confidence they broke up, promising to take supper together.

By supper the weather in the valley had healed up with a palpable drop in temperature and a sudden clearing of the air. There was moonlight on the snow, and the stars could be counted. This fortuitous change and certain orthographic errors in the menu constituted the common small talk at the beginning of dinner, but before long the six of them had divided into four islands of concentration.

Jean-Paul and Karl chatted in French, limiting themselves to the climb and its problems. Karl enjoyed displaying the thoroughness with which he had considered every facet of the problem, and Jean-Paul enjoyed understanding.