Deathwatch by Robb White

reaction of hands and fingers against rock; there was nothing but pain. Time stopped, and distance became meaningless.
    He thought of nothing, for it now took no thought to move what had to be moved to advance his body up the stone; it was a slow rhythm, one muscle after another, one bone and then the next, over and over, on and on. Forever.
    Ben was not even aware that, for some inches now, his shoulders had been touching nothing,and he almost fell when the pressure of his legs pushed his bare butt out on the level and the change of pressure pitched him forward so that he was hanging, head down, teetering and rocking on the upper end of the V, two hundred feet of emptiness below him.
    It was the sunlight that finally made him stop his automatic weak pushings and gropings.
    The light burned his eyes when at last he opened them and looked around, his sight blurred and hazy.
    Half-rolling, half-sliding along, he moved out of the sun and into the shade, and there he collapsed, lying awkwardly on a flat area of stone, some birds coming down close to look at him.

8
    T HE SUN WAS the most fearsome thing Ben had ever seen. He could not believe that it could be so high in the absolutely cloudless sky, could not believe that it had taken him so long to get up that chimney of stone.
    He looked down at himself, and it made him sick. His feet were just bloody lumps of torn flesh half-covered with the dirty, bloody shreds of cloth.
    Where the rock had abraded him, the blood stood like a watery red dew.
    And in this juice of his blood the sun, looking small and mean, was frying him.
    It was at least eleven o’clock in the morning and, as he pushed himself up, he knew that he could not survive much longer. The itching had started all over his body. He resented most the fact that the itch was the most intolerable where his flesh had already been torn away.
    He was very sick and weak and saw now where he had vomited, small shreds of food in a thick, drying slime. He could also see that his hands andfeet were jerking and shaking as though being moved by something invisible to him.
    Forcing his eyes to stay open and to focus instead of rolling helplessly and dizzily in their dry sockets, Ben saw that he was sitting at one end of a wide, upward-sloping ledge of stone. Above him the face of the butte went straight up, apparently to the top, some hundreds of feet above. The surface of the rock was as smooth as a tombstone.
    Looking along the ledge he saw that it ended abruptly, not fading back into the mass of the butte, but cut off sharply.
    Other than the ledge and the cliff face there was nothing, no depressions in the stone, no fissures forming shallow baskets. There was nothing in sight that could interest even the birds.
    And there was no shade. There would be shade late in the afternoon but, by then, it would be too late to do him any good.
    It required a great effort for him to get up on his feet and when he took a step out along the ledge, the pain almost drove him back to his knees.
    Doing what he could to support himself with his hands on the cliff face, Ben hobbled along the edge until he came to the end of it.
    It was like a knife in the back; it was a meanness; he had been cheated, he had been robbed.
    The ledge ended as though it had been cut off by an enormous bandsaw, the edge of it perfectly straight. And from the edge it dropped straight down, all the way, right to the breccia; there wasnot a break or flaw in the straight wall.
    Something, the cold of the glacial ages, or the violence of earthquakes, or the temperature of a certain upflow of magma, had formed in the stone of the butte a shape almost like a funnel standing on end which had been cut in half from top to bottom. The ledge intercepted this stone funnel about halfway up the cup of it. High above him Ben could see the rim of the funnel, very wide there, perhaps a hundred feet across. Below him the spout was a chimney such as the one he had climbed, but instead of