Deathwatch by Robb White Page A

being vee-d this one was round, a cylinder cut in half.
    From where he stood, it was at least fifty feet across open space to the other side of the bisected funnel, farther than that if you measured across the curved stone face of the funnel itself.
    On the other side he could not make out exactly what the formation was, for a thin wall of basalt, a slab which had not broken off stood straight up at the outer edge of the butte, apparently unconnected to the mass except at the base. This thin wall and the solid wall of the butte formed a narrow corridor which lay in deep shade, the slab wall between it and the sun.
    It didn’t really matter what was in that dark corridor, for he could not get over there.
    He could, in fact, go nowhere. He was too close to death now to make it back down that long, vee-d chimney and, even if he had been in his best physical condition, there was no way, without ropes and pitons and hammers, spiked bootsand heavy gloves, to climb the sheer face of the butte.
    And without someone on the other side to anchor a rope bridge for him, there was no way across that curved bank of stone which formed the cup of the funnel.
    Ben was standing there helplessly staring at the stone wall when something struck his arm, forcing it back against the rock, and then the sound of the shot cracked the silence.
    With the sound still echoing, Ben shuffled back into the protection of the slab and stood plastered against it.
    Moving his arm only a little, he stared in amazement at a small, purplish hole in it halfway between his wrist and his elbow.
    Slowly turning his arm over, he saw the other hole, this one more ragged and with a little stream of bright blood flowing out of it and down into the palm of his hand.
    There was no pain at all.
    Ben put his thumb on one hole, his forefinger on the other and pressed gently. Now there was pain, but nothing compared to the aching of his mouth, or the burning of his eyes, or the sun on his raw flesh.
    He moved his arm slowly from the elbow, raising and lowering it and then turning it from side to side. These movements caused no more and no less pain in the wounds.
    He drew his hand into a fist, watching his fingers moving easily and normally.
    He had been shot. But it did not hurt him, and it had not damaged him. Even the blood had stopped flowing.
    Ben had not thought about Madec for a long time. Now he did.
    Madec was shooting now to kill him.
    And Ben’s body falling from this high cliff, smashing down against the ledges and finally into the breccia would be so mangled and broken that no one would suspect that he was dead before he fell.
    Faintly, as though from another world, he heard the Jeep engine start.
    Madec was trying to find a position where he could see Ben again.
    It would not, Ben realized, be hard to do.
    Somehow the sound of the Jeep set his mind adrift and he was suddenly thinking of a thing called a Velo-Drome that he had seen at a county fair when he was a boy. A girl with a long red scarf trailing in the wind had ridden a motorcycle up from the bottom of a wooden pit, going around and around until she left the sloping wooden sides and the motorcycle was traveling on the perfectly vertical wall of the thing. He had stared at this, not believing it could be done, but she was doing it, the red scarf trailing straight behind her, as she lay, flat out in space.…
    In a few minutes, Madec would have maneuvered into position to shoot him again.
    Ben knew that he had only until that Jeep motor stopped.
    Reaching behind him, he pulled the bundle of sotol leaves and the slingshot around to his stomach. He lashed them all into a compact bundle and then worked the whole thing around to his back again, tying it against his backbone.
    Lifting one foot and then the other, he ripped the shreds of his shorts from his feet.
    Ready, he stood a second longer, looking out across the ledge at the hot, smooth, slanting face of the funnel.
    Far below him the Jeep appeared and