No Contest

He was waiting for a chance when, almost magically, he had the perfect opportunity. The Swiss climber, in the lead, maneuvered over a near vertical section of the wall. According to the GPS feeds from his devices and the GPS feed from the climber, they were within three feet of one another. To make things even better, the German in third place was now directly below the Swiss climber.

The foreman had shot the devices into the ice wall from the opposite mountain, his high-powered sniper rifle rounds burying them in the ice in the dark of night. By morning, the pits where they had entered had frozen over, making them invisible.

There wasn’t much to the devices. A military-issue hardened GPS chip and tiny explosive triggered by a tiny receiver. It all fit into a sniper rifle round that was constructed to bury itself in rock, or ice, with little deformation.

The foreman had stationed the retransmitter on the opposite mountain, signaling over a satellite line to Sherm. Sherm used his mouse to click the display of the mountain, right on the round that was embedded beneath the Swiss climber.

The Swiss climber made a startled sound. The ice underneath him transformed to rubble, and he just dropped. No scrambling. No clawing. Just falling. The breath was knocked out of him by his impact with the German, and then both of them were on their way down.

“Wow! Incredible! I don’t believe it!” the Brit exclaimed, and he called cold fish. There wasn’t a single floppy-fish bet. And neither the Swiss nor the German was flopping.

Sherm gave the Austrian another half-hour. He was sobbing manfully over the radio to the British announcer. He saluted his fallen friends and stated his intention to declare a victory for all Germanic peoples when he reached the winner’s summit.

“Oh no, you don’t,” Sherm said, and the mouse clicked that Austrian straight into oblivion.

The Austrian froze. “Something’s happening!” he bellowed into the radio.

“Explain!” the Brit demanded, but then it was over. The Austrian was on his way to the bottom. It was a long, bumpy ride, but he never achieved any of the bone-breaking somersaults and flops that killed his companions. He reached the bottom a floppy fish.

Sherm MacGregor was deeply satisfied as Cedar Dunnaway muscled his way doggedly to the winner’s summit.

“Cedar, I’m gonna make you a star,” Sherm said.

There was a mist leaking down from the summit, and Sherm heard several different crew voices shouting over the technical feed from New Zealand.

“It’s obscuring the summit cameras. Where did it come from?”

“I don’t care where it came from, just fix it.”

“I can’t fix fog!”

Cedar Dunnaway climbed into the mist, which became thicker around him until he had vanished from sight.

“Now the climber cams are out! Dammit, is he on the summit or not?”

“GPS says he’s there, but I got no audio and no video.”

“Come in, Dunnaway. You’re the champ, Dunnaway! Come in!”

“How can you possibly lose all the summit cameras at the same time?”

“I have no idea. Must be something weird going on up there.”

“Like what?”

“Yeah,” Sherm MacGregor said aloud. “Like what?”

Chapter 33

Cedar Dunnaway tried real hard at everything, all the time. He wasn’t the smartest man, nor was he the most ambitious, but he was a man who tried real hard. Usually it didn’t get him anywhere. The one skill that he could count on was patience. Back home, which was in Buffalo, New York, there were people who called him “the most bullheaded human being I ever met.” One time and one time only was Cedar ever given good advice. The man was the manager of the Seven-11 where Cedar was a cashier. Cedar was trying to teach himself to use a complicated cash register. He had been working on it for six hours straight.

“I’ve never seen anybody so determined to do anything,” the manager said. Cedar took that as a compliment.

Cedar was fired. Although he eventually excelled at making change, he never became competent at other tasks as simple as facing display shelves or cleaning the frankfurter cooking machine. But the manager told him, “Cedar, you figure out the one thing that you can do that will make your life prosperous, and then you put your determination into it the way you know how to do, and then you’ll be a successful man.”

Cedar went home and wrote that down.

Now, it took him a while to figure out what that one thing was. It couldn’t involve much thinking, so it had to be hands-on. It couldn’t be creative. Cedar was not creative. He was pretty good at climbing rocks, though.

Could he make a living climbing rocks?

Well, yes, he could, if he was good enough. He could enter a contest. He could climb rocks and plastic cliffs and he could climb walls of ice. He could even get paid for doing it.

When he reached his arm over the rim of the winner’s summit in New Zealand, he said to himself, “Cedar, you did try hard enough.”