No Contest

Aaron Presci wouldn’t have cared if she said it to his face. Caring about other people just wasn’t what he did. What he did was produce the most thrilling extreme sporting events ever. He barely had his ass in his seat when the phone rang.

“I wonder if that’s Herbert,” Presci said through gritted teeth. He snatched the phone up.

“How’s it going down there?” Herbert Essen asked. “Got a lot riding on this, Aaron.”

“Morning, Herbert. My team is just getting into place. It’s bright and early here in New Zealand.”

“Any problems?”

“We had everything in place and checked out yesterday. We’re ready.”

“Keep me posted.”

Presci knew why the network president was nervous. This was a big deal for ESN. A lot of dollars were riding on it.

The thing was, the event was ideal for television, mostly because of the nature of the ice wall. There was nothing more photogenic than the image of a human body tumbling down, down, down…

This year, for the first time, the network had cameras mounted directly in the ice wall. With any luck somebody would fall directly into one of them—it promised to be a spectacular shot, because the autolenses had a huge range of vision and they could keep the body in focus throughout the plummet.

Sherm MacGregor was going to handle this one on his own. The foreman had put the tools in place, but now the foreman was gone. Now it was all up to Sherm.

“Come to Sherm,” he said under his breath.

“The temperature’s climbing, and we’re climbing under the most dangerous possible conditions here today,” the lead announcer explained. He was a BBC sports veteran—one of those fast-talking Brits who could sound completely amazed almost all the time. “I cannot believe that anyone would seriously attempt to climb the wall under melt conditions this severe. And yet, every climber is outfitted and ready to ascend. We go now to ground level.”

In the U.S. it was the middle of the night. The climb wouldn’t be broadcast on ESN-America for another twelve hours, but Sherm MacGregor had his own live satellite feed. When you’re the biggest advertiser on the network, you get special perks.

The real-time data feeds from New Zealand included all the commentator cameras, all the remote cameras on the mountainside facing the ice wall, and all the climber cams, which were lipstick-size video pickups built into the climbers’ special glasses.

The glasses were secured to the face prior to the start of the climb and locked on to the climber’s heads. A small electric current ran through the glass and effectively blacked them out. The climbers couldn’t see a thing. There was an emergency override switch on the glasses, for use if the climber felt he was in imminent danger. Using the switch resulted in immediate disqualification.

The winner’s glasses would automatically become transparent again the moment he reached the top of the ice wall.

The network reminded the viewers excitedly that they at home could actually see more than the climbers could see, thanks to the climber cams. What’s more, all climbers had a second cam inside their glasses, so the network could occasionally switch over to prove to the viewers that the climbers were really, truly climbing blind. This also made for a dramatic finish—the viewer could watch the glasses come on at the moment the win became official.

“Climbing this damp, slippery, dripping mass of cold stuff is insane, let alone doing it by feel,” the Brit announcer stated. “But here they go.”

Sherman MacGregor wanted to jump up and down in his seat for sheer excitement.

MacGregor’s favorite was a North Dakota native named Cedar Dunnaway. The guy was photogenic, tough looking and not too bright He’d be an ideal Extreme Nuggets spokesman. However, there was a woman climber who caught Sherm’s eye, Penny Peppiatt. She had a cute face and a slim, strong figure. Okay, he had to admit she had the body of an unfed spider monkey, but she was cute enough. They could airbrush some boobs on her.

One of them would win today. Sherm would see to that.

The problem was the Germans. And the Swiss. And the Austrians. Sherm saw them all as arrogant loudmouths. They’d been spouting off for months about their climbing skills. Like they had some sort of inbred ability to scale ice better than anybody else. “Mountain climbing Nazis,” Sherm muttered to himself. He wasn’t going to stick any of those jerks on his cereal boxes.

The problem was, they were good. They started strong and got stronger. The Swiss guy was in the lead after half an hour, then the Austrian, then the German. Out of a total of twenty-one climbers. Cedar Dunnaway and Penny Peppiatt were ninth and eleventh.

Sherm waited for his moment. He didn’t want to act too soon. He’d wait and see how things fell out.

The first one to fall out came only forty-five minutes into the climb. It was a New Zealander, who claimed loudly in the media that he had the home-field advantage. “Nobody knows Kiwi ice like a Kiwi,” he had boasted the night before.