The Contest Page 3

  It made Uncle Joe proud. “I love watching you handle those ropes, kid. You’re a natural!”

  Uncle Joe never quite figured it out: Perry Noonan was good with ropes precisely because he wasn’t a natural. He had been faking it all these years — up all those crags, all those gorges and cliffs. Now he was going to try to fake his way up the tallest mountain on Earth, twenty-nine thousand feet of not looking down. And just because he didn’t have the guts to disappoint Uncle Joe.

  His reverie popped like a bubble, and Perry was back in the tent.

  He rolled over in the tight space. “It doesn’t matter how I got here,” he muttered in the darkness. “I’m not going to make the team anyway.”

  “You got that right,” snorted Tilt.

  It was Perry’s one consolation. There was no way an expert like Cap Cicero could fail to notice that Perry didn’t exactly measure up to his fellow candidates. For starters, Ethan Zaph would be coming soon. He was as good as 90 percent of the adult alpinists in the world and had summited Everest already. Then there were guys like Chris and Joey — and Tilt, who was a loudmouth and a bully, but athletically, a Mack truck. Even a couple of the girls seemed miles ahead of Perry. He thought of Bryn’s confident efficiency and Sammi’s fearlessness. This was more than a hobby to them. It was a way of life. Half the kids spent their free time bouldering. Nine hours of workouts a day, and these guys choked down lunch so they could race outside the complex and find a twenty-foot rock to scale. For fun.

  Perry didn’t belong on the same mountain with them. They were the kind of people who looked down.

  He peered through the tent flap. All was quiet except for a shadowy figure about fifty feet away, barely visible in the storm. As he squinted through the blowing snow, whoever it was tumbled over the rise and disappeared down the slope.

  “Hey!” He grabbed Tilt’s sleeping bag. “Somebody fell!”

  “Not my problem,” the big boy mumbled, turning over.

  Perry burst out of the tent in a full sprint — or at least as much of a sprint as was possible plowing through snow. He peered down the hill. There was very little light, but he could hear distant screaming and could make out a dark shape plunging into the valley at unnatural speed.

  He scrambled down the slope, breathing a silent prayer that he wasn’t in hot pursuit of some kind of wolf, or worse, a bear. At the bottom, there was a shower of white and the figure disappeared. Perry rushed over.

  “Hello?” he called. “Hello, are you all right?”

  The snow shifted, and a frosted Sammi Moon sprang up, eyes shining. “Not bad!” She reached down into the drift and came up with a plastic garbage can lid. “I wonder if there’s some way I could get this waxed.”

  Perry stared at her. “It’s two-thirty in the morning! I thought you’d fallen over the edge!”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” Sammi said innocently. She held out the lid. “Want to try?”

  Correction, Perry reflected, amending his thought from before. He didn’t belong on the same planet as these people.

  * * *

  The next morning, the camp awoke to clear blue skies gleaming off a foot of fresh snow. The storm was over. Dominic rushed to unzip the tent, eager for his first blast of warming sun. Instead, he found himself staring into the weathered face of Cap Cicero.

  “All right, vacation’s over!” the team leader bawled. “Everybody into the gym! We’ve got a mountain to get ready for!”

  Tilt was belligerent. “I can’t believe you made us do this!”

  Cicero winced. “Change of plan, everybody. First mouthwash, then into the gym.”

  By the end of the day, two more SummitQuest candidates had quit and were on their way to the airport in Denver. Happy was one of them, smiling no longer. His parting words were: “It’s too hard. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

  Perry had never even learned his real name.

  The first round of official cuts was scheduled for the end of that week. Everybody realized it was coming, but nobody knew exactly what to expect. Would Cicero pull you aside and give you the bad news? Or maybe Sneezy, or Dr. Oberman? Would it be public? Would you be yanked away from the dinner table and marched off in disgrace? Maybe it would be the opposite of that: You’d wake up in the morning, and a whole bunch of kids would be just plain gone. And, of course, the million-dollar question: Who?

  One thing was certain. As the time approached, the tension rose so high that you could almost hear a hum throughout the complex.

  Tilt thought he might be the most nervous of the lot. It was crazy. What did he have to worry about? He was the best climber in the group, except maybe for Ethan Zaph, who still hadn’t shown up. But Tilt was worried about all the mouthing off he’d done to Cicero. Not that the dictator didn’t deserve it. The guy was on some kind of power trip and got his jollies by bossing around a bunch of kids. But maybe it was stupid to bug the person who was in charge of picking the team. Tilt would have only himself to blame if he washed out.

  And he needed this more than the others. Tilt Crowley, the youngest kid to climb Everest. Buy this breakfast cereal; it helped Tilt Crowley reach the top of the world. Oh, Harvard needs a man like Tilt Crowley. How else was he going to get to the Ivy League? Was he supposed to pay the tuition by working himself to death on a triple paper route, the way he’d bought his secondhand crampons? And the ice ax with the slightly warped handle? The other kids here all had state-of-the-art stuff. That was Tilt’s definition of rich people. He didn’t mean mansions and private jets, like Perry’s uncle probably had. Rich was anyone who could climb as a hobby — a hobby that wasn’t attached to a second career, seven miles a day, lugging the Cincinnati Inquirer through sleet or hundred-degree heat. If he made it to the summit, only he would know that the mountain had been the easy part of the ascent.

  Sure, he realized the others didn’t like him. They climbed on ropes; he climbed on attitude. If he had their advantages, he could be a nice guy, too. Maybe he should have been nicer. Maybe he was going to be cut now for getting on people’s nerves — on Cicero’s nerves.

  Come on, Cap, don’t wash me out! I’m the best you’ve got. And I need this!

  It finally happened after a thirty-mile hike with full gear through the snow. Seven lockers in the equipment room were tagged with yellow Post-it notes. See Cap was all they said. But everyone knew instantly. The ax had taken its first swing.

  Four boys and three girls were headed home. Their Everest dreams were over.

  Astonishingly, Joey Tanuda was one of them.

  “But you’ve been eating Cap’s workouts for lunch!” exclaimed Bryn.

  Joey could only shake his head miserably.

  Sammi was also surprised. “I mean, Perry made it, and you’re twice the climber he is!”

  “Hey!” Perry said feelingly.

  “No offense, but it’s true,” Sammi persisted. “Why cut him and not you?”

  Joey was so devastated that he could barely raise his gaze from the floor tiles. “A couple of years ago, I broke my nose bouldering, and the surgeon offered to do a nose job while he was in there anyway. I figured I might as well be beautiful, right? Now Andrea says my nasal passages are too tight for easy breathing when the air gets thin high on the mountain.”

  “Won’t the bottled oxygen help?” asked Chris, feeling the other boy’s pain.

  “Not enough,” said Joey. “I’m done.”

  “And after all that, you’re still ugly,” observed Tilt, kicking his climbing boots into his locker.

  “I love you, too,” Joey mumbled miserably.

  Chris turned on Tilt. “The guy just washed out for something that’s not even his fault. Think maybe now isn’t the time for jokes?”

  Tilt shrugged nonchalantly. “Who’s joking?”

  Joey glared at him. “You know what would make this okay? If you’re next.”

  “Dream on, nose job,” sneered Tilt. “I’m the best climber in this dump.”

  “Maybe so
,” said Joey. “But you’re a self-centered jerk. There’s no place for that on a climbing team.” He shouldered his duffel and stood up.

  “Sure, go ahead and hate me,” invited Tilt. “But I’m the only honest one here. These guys all act like your best friends. But they don’t want to admit that, deep down, they’re celebrating. With you gone, one more spot on the team is up for grabs.”

  There was an awkward, embarrassed silence as the truth of Tilt’s words sunk in. Joey had been a favorite to make the chosen four. Sad as it was, his departure meant better chances for the remaining climbers.

  “Hey,” Joey said in a subdued tone. “I’ve got no hard feelings. I’ll be following along on the Web site, pulling for you guys. Most of you,” he added with a dirty look at Tilt.

  Sneezy entered to record the parting on video. He was almost as disconsolate as Joey. “Sorry, kid. I know it’s hard, but I’ve got to shoot this for the site.”

  Joey smiled halfheartedly. “Don’t worry, Sneezy. We all knew the rules before we got here.” With the camera running, he turned to Chris. “This is my Cub Scout mountaineering badge,” he said, holding out a tattered piece of felt. “It’s the first climbing thing I ever won. I want you to leave it on the summit for me.”

  Chris accepted the token. “If I get there, you get there,” he promised.

  And then there were ten Everest hopefuls left in the Summit Athletic Sports Training Facility.

  * * *

  What none of them knew was that, during the hike, Cap Cicero had actually affixed eight Post-it notes, not seven. The extra cut had been Dominic Alexis. Cicero had made the decision with regret. The boy was a talented climber with incredible stamina and unfailing courage. But Cicero had felt from the start that the kid was too young and too small. So Dominic was out.

  Later, Cicero was in Dr. Oberman’s office, examining the candidates’ chest X rays, which were all lined up across a wide viewing box. It was important for kids especially to have good lung capacity on Everest, where there was so little oxygen in the air.

  He was looking with approval at an assortment of healthy chests when Tony Devlin ran up, all atwitter. “You have to change the cut.”

  Cicero looked surprised. “Why? Perry’s still alive — not that you can tell from his effort level.”

  “This isn’t about Perry,” Devlin explained. “You’ve sent home all the wild-card kids.”

  Cicero adjusted the backlight. “Yeah, and I wonder why. Everest isn’t a theme park, you know. You don’t take tourists up there.”

  “The retail contest focused a huge amount of attention on SummitQuest,” Devlin argued. “Already the newspapers and wire services are running updates from our Web site. It’s like Survivor. People want to know who’s going to make it. It looks bad if all the contest kids wash out by the first cut.”

  “It looks worse if we leave them dead in the Khumbu Icefall,” Cicero said shortly.

  “I’m not saying they have to end up on the team,” Devlin reasoned. “Just keep one of them in the running a little longer so we can play it up on the site. Make it seem like the contest wasn’t totally bogus — you know, like this kid really has a chance to go.”

  “It’s not fair to the kid, either,” Cicero noted. “These workouts aren’t exactly patty-cake.”

  “Just do it,” coaxed Devlin. “You of all people know how important it is to keep the sponsor happy.”

  It was true. Star alpinists would be stopped in their tracks if a disgruntled sponsor cut off the shipments of food and equipment.

  “Fine.” The team leader’s eyes scanned the X rays and came to rest on the scrawny body that could belong only to one person. He blinked. Dominic Alexis was half the size of the others, but he had a chest full of dark, expanded lung tissue that would be the envy of anyone there. He may be small, Cicero reflected, but he has the respiratory system of a six-foot-five bodybuilder.

  “We’ll keep the little guy,” he said suddenly. “Just till the next round. Then he’s history.”

  “Thanks, Cap.” A satisfied Devlin headed off to remove the Post-it from Dominic’s locker.

  MEDICAL LOG — PSYCH PROFILES

  Interview with Perry Noonan

  Dr. Oberman: You seem surprised that you survived the first cut.

  Perry: No, I’m not. I’m as good as anybody here, right?

  Dr. Oberman: What do you think?

  Perry: I’ve been climbing since I was nine.

  Dr. Oberman: With your uncle?

  Perry: Right.

  Dr. Oberman: Do you want to climb Mount Everest?

  Perry: Every mountaineer —

  Dr. Oberman: Not every mountaineer. You. Do you want to climb Everest?

  Perry: Yes.

  Dr. Oberman: You’re sure about that?

  Perry: What do you want me to tell you? That it’s less than useless? That if you’re going to spend zillions of dollars on something that’s practically impossible, you might as well be curing cancer, or stopping wars, or feeding the hungry? Well, forget it. People climb mountains, period. And the biggest one is the one they want to climb most.

  Dr. Oberman: And that includes you?

  Perry: Yeah, sure. Why not?

  Dr. Oberman: I’m not hearing any straight answers.

  Perry: I’m not hearing any straight questions.

  The kitchen manager, aka Sleepy, escorted Cicero around the wreckage of the crockery cabinet. The breakfront itself was tipped over on the floor. Around it were a million shards of broken glass and dishware.

  The team leader was appalled. “My guys did this?”

  “Unless we have a poltergeist,” Sleepy said grimly.

  Dr. Oberman spoke up. “I’ve been doing psych evaluations on all the kids. I could be wrong, but nobody jumps out at me as a vandal.”

  “Psych, my butt!” seethed Cicero. “It’s Tilt Crowley! He’s gone, first thing tomorrow morning.”

  The doctor was shocked. “You can’t do that. You have absolutely no proof!”

  “The Supreme Court needs proof!” Cicero raged. “I’m instant law! Ask any of the kids, and they’ll tell you Tilt’s the one.”

  “He has a lot of anger,” Dr. Oberman agreed. “And there may be good reasons to send him home. But this isn’t one of them. For starters, I don’t think he did it. And if I’m right, the real culprit would still be here, and might even end up on the team.”

  “What about my dishes?” Sleepy demanded.

  Cicero could only shake his head. “Charge them to the expedition, I guess.” To the doctor he said, “I don’t care about the money. It’s the distraction that worries me. We can’t lose our focus. Not on Everest. Not when we’re facing the Death Zone.”

  The cuts brought a change in the atmosphere at the Summit complex. When the Everest hopefuls had been twenty in number, the final team had seemed very remote. Now they were ten, vying for four spots. And even though the top place was being held for Ethan Zaph, the odds were improving. The candidates could almost feel their crampons biting into the blue ice of Everest’s glaciers. The biggest prize in mountaineering was slowly coming within reach.

  A new sport was born, one that was almost as popular as climbing: figuring the angles.

  Cameron Mackie was an expert at it. “Z-man takes the number-one spot; Chris gets number two — that’s pretty definite.”

  “And one of the girls,” put in Dominic. There were three left.

  “Bryn,” mused Cameron. “Then again, you can’t write off Sammi. She’s crazy, but she’s good.”

  Dominic did the math. “That leaves only one spot for the rest of us. Probably Tilt.”

  “Tilt’s too dumb,” Cameron said seriously. “He’ll give Cap a wedgie and get himself cut. So, depending on the Perry factor, if I keep my nose clean, maybe I can sneak in the back door.”

  The Perry factor was the question of why Perry was still standing after much stronger climbers had been packed off to the airport.

  “Maybe Cap thinks I�
�m good,” was Perry’s explanation. “Maybe you guys are wrong about me.” But he didn’t sound convinced.

  “Maybe Cap’s your rich uncle,” sneered Tilt.

  Perry said nothing. He had often thought of having a different uncle, but in his imagination it was always a nonclimber who thought the Himalayas was a chain of doughnut shops.

  “It’s getting weird,” Bryn admitted to Sneezy in an on-camera interview for the Web site. “Normally, climbers are the friendliest people on the planet. You take six total strangers scaling El Capitán, and by lunch you’ve got six best buddies. Here you want to be nice to people. But part of you says that, if they do well, it could cost you your chance.”

  Nowhere was that more true than with Bryn and Sammi. Both were convinced that only one female would advance to the final team. So their competition, they felt, was solely between them and the other girl, who wasn’t really a threat. Their growing friendship cooled. They weren’t enemies, but they became afraid to trust each other.

  Tombstone IV was a black crag, not enormous, but steep and awkwardly shaped — the toughest piece of technical mountaineering the candidates had tackled so far. The route required them to get over a rocky spur called the Club, and while they were climbing up the underside, they would be hanging exposed over a hundred-foot drop.

  “Extreme,” breathed Sammi reverently.

  “I’m really starting to hate that word,” groaned Bryn.

  Bryn inserted a spring-loaded CAM in a crack on the bottom of the spur and watched the unit expand to secure the protection point. Sammi passed a rope through the ring and then wiggled out to place a second piece of hardware. But as she tried to scramble around to the top, the tangle of lines imprisoned her ankle. Bryn climbed out and reached to free her partner’s leg.

  And froze.

  High up the crag, the two girls’ eyes locked, and the message passed between them as if by radar: If I leave you here and go for help, Cap could cut you for a beginner’s mistake and then I’ve got a guaranteed spot on the team.

  The moment was over as quickly as it had unfolded. Bryn broke out of her inaction and undid the snarl of rope around Sammi’s ankle. The two clambered atop the Club and rested, eyeing each other suspiciously.