The Summit Register
The summit register was missing.
The metal tube was where it should have been, bolted to a weathered post at the edge of the summit, its cap stiff with cold and grit. One of the men knelt beside it while the other lowered his pack onto the black volcanic rock.
They had met before, although neither could remember whether they had exchanged names.
Months earlier, an avalanche had damaged one man’s tent. By the time he reached the other’s camp, snow had worked into his clothes and his hands had become clumsy. There had been no ceremony about what happened next. Equipment was moved aside. A sleeping bag was opened. Space was made because the mountain required it.
They had separated in the morning.
They met again below a volcano and climbed through the night. At the summit, one of them saw a crow the other could not see. The older man did not argue with him. He asked where it stood, what it was doing, whether it moved or followed them. Then he led him down until the air thickened and the crow disappeared.
They had still not exchanged names.
Now they had met on another mountain.
The approach had been longer but easier. No glacier. No exposed traverse. The trail passed through forest, climbed above the trees, then followed a broad ridge toward a summit that remained visible for most of the morning.
They walked together without deciding to.
The man with the metal tube twisted the cap.
“Stuck.”
“Still?”
“Yes.”
The other man removed one glove.
“May I?”
The first stepped aside.
The cap turned immediately.
“Experience,” the younger man said.
“Leverage.”
“That too.”
The tube was deep enough for a rolled-up notebook and pencil.
Instead, the older man withdrew a gray plastic-wrapped binder.
“That isn’t the register.”
“No.”
The younger man peered into the tube.
“Nothing else.”
The older man turned the package over.
No title.
No name.
“Maybe somebody took the register.”
“And left this.”
“As an exchange?”
“Not a fair one.”
The summit was broad enough that they did not have to crowd each other. One unpacked the stove while the other sat against a sun-warmed rock, watching the plastic wrapping move in the wind.
Neither announced responsibility for the other.
Still, things appeared when needed.
Tea.
A biscuit.
A stove already assembled before anyone asked.
The younger man nodded toward the binder.
“Open it.”
“You found the tube.”
“You opened it.”
“You failed to.”
“That still makes it yours.”
The older man slid it across.
The tape lifted easily.
Inside was a plain gray binder.
No title.
The first page contained only two words.
FIRST CONDITIONS
Beneath them:
A conflict begins before the participants agree that it has begun. Declarations, mobilizations, and first exchanges of fire often provide convenient dates. They should not be mistaken for beginnings.
The younger man looked up.
“Somebody’s manuscript.”
“Maybe.”
He turned the page.
The next heading read:
THE NUMBER OF FRONTS
Below it:
The strength of a state cannot be measured solely by the forces it can place in the field. It must also be measured by the number of directions in which those forces may be required to move.
Then a list.
Rail capacity.
Port capacity.
Road density.
Fuel reserves.
Distance between industrial centers and probable theaters of operation.
Political reliability of neighboring states.
“It reads like staff work,” the younger man said.
“Military?”
“Governments have staffs.”
The younger man smiled.
“Churches don’t usually count fuel reserves.”
“They do if they have trucks.”
The tea finished heating.
The younger man poured two cups.
The older man drank while the pages turned.
Roman roads.
The grain supply of Athens.
Mongol remount stations.
Spanish silver fleets.
Railway timetables before the First World War.
No bibliography.
No footnotes.
No rhetoric.
Only examples.
Halfway through the binder the younger man stopped.
“Listen.”
Experience is indispensable to planning. It is also among its most persistent hazards. A successful response preserves not only knowledge but confidence in the conditions under which that knowledge was acquired. Later events may resemble the earlier event while differing in the one respect that matters.
Someone had underlined the final sentence in pencil.
The experienced observer is often the first to recognize a pattern and the last to notice that the pattern has changed.
“Someone read this before.”
“Probably.”
“Do you think the person who left it here made the mark?”
“No way to know.”
“There’s almost always a way to know.”
The older man closed the binder for a moment.
“Eventually.”
The younger man looked toward the rocks beyond the summit.
“There’s a bird.”
The older man didn’t look up.
“Standing?”
“Yes.”
“Flying?”
“No.”
“Near us?”
“No.”
“The one from before?”
A pause.
“Maybe.”
“What’s it doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Still nothing?”
“Yes.”
The older man nodded once.
Then he reached for the binder again.
The younger man kept watching the rocks another moment before returning to the page.
The next heading read:
POLITICAL COHESION AS MATERIAL CAPACITY
Farther down:
Political fracture may remove a front more efficiently than battlefield victory.
In the margin, again in pencil:
Direction is not control.
“This is Russia.”
The older man nodded.
“Russia in 1917.”
“They moved Lenin through Germany.”
“Yes.”
“Switzerland to Russia.”
“Through Germany.”
“To help remove a front.”
“Eventually.”
“And Brest-Litovsk.”
The younger man smiled.
“I remember words shaped like railway stations.”
The older man looked up.
“You remember the treaty.”
“I remember the word.”
“Sometimes that’s enough.”
“So this chapter is about Lenin.”
The older man shook his head.
“It uses Lenin.”
He took the binder.
Now he wasn’t reading paragraphs.
Only headings.
FIRST CONDITIONS
THE NUMBER OF FRONTS
POLITICAL COHESION AS MATERIAL CAPACITY
TRANSPORT AND THE APPEARANCE OF INEVITABILITY
THE MANAGEMENT OF DELAY
SUCCESSFUL PRECEDENT
He stopped.
The page in his hand was numbered 41.
The next was 58.
He turned backward.
Page 19.
The next surviving page:
He turned forward again.
The section beginning on page 41 ended cleanly.
The next surviving page was 58.
He frowned.
The younger man watched him.
“What?”
The older man handed the binder across.
“Look at the numbers.”
The younger man counted with his finger.
“Eight pages.”
He looked again.
“Seven missing.”
He turned to the next surviving section.
Another gap.
Then another.
He stopped.
“They’re grouped.”
The older man nodded.
“Not random.”
The younger man looked back at the headings.
FIRST CONDITIONS
THE NUMBER OF FRONTS
POLITICAL COHESION AS MATERIAL CAPACITY
He turned the page.
The next surviving heading read:
TRANSPORT AND THE APPEARANCE OF INEVITABILITY
The opening sentence was short.
Transportation determines whether a strategic opportunity can be converted into military consequence.
He read it twice.
Then he turned back to the previous section.
Political fracture may remove a front more efficiently than battlefield victory.
Without speaking, he placed one finger beneath the first sentence.
Then another beneath the second.
The space between them contained sixteen missing pages.
He looked at the older man.
“It isn’t the pages.”
“What isn’t?”
“The gap.”
The older man said nothing.
“The gap has a job.”
The wind shifted across the summit.
The plastic wrapping fluttered once against the rock and settled again.
The younger man continued reading.
The transport section never explained how a front disappeared.
It simply assumed one already had.
Rail capacity.
Rolling stock.
Repair intervals.
Bridges.
Fuel.
Replacement locomotives.
River crossings.
Port throughput.
Nothing political.
Only movement.
He turned back again.
The earlier section never explained what happened after a front disappeared.
Only how political fracture could produce one less direction from which an enemy might threaten.
He looked at the empty space between the two surviving sections.
“It belongs here.”
The older man nodded.
“What does?”
“The missing part.”
“What makes you think that?”
The younger man tapped the page.
“This chapter removes a front.”
He tapped the next.
“This one moves everything that used to defend it.”
The older man took the binder.
He did not read the missing space.
He read the pages on either side of it.
After a long silence he closed the cover.
The younger man looked toward the summit register.
The aluminum tube still hung open beside the post.
He thought about the people who had signed notebooks on mountains.
Names.
Dates.
Weather.
Distances walked.
Small evidence that someone had stood where he now stood.
He looked back at the binder.
“This isn’t a register.”
“No.”
“It records something else.”
“What?”
The older man rested the binder on his knees.
“I don’t know yet.”
The younger man smiled.
“I thought there was almost always a way to know.”
“There is.”
He waited.
The older man looked across the ridge, then back at the binder.
“Eventually.”
Neither spoke for a while.
Clouds drifted below the summit.
The tea had cooled.
The stove had long since gone out.
The younger man reached for the binder again.
He turned it over.
Nothing.
No publisher.
No institution.
No property stamp.
No handwriting except the pencil notes.
He opened it once more.
There were three different kinds of marks.
The printed text.
The penciled underlining.
The missing pages.
Three hands.
Or perhaps one hand acting at three different times.
He looked up.
“Do you think the person who wrote it removed the pages?”
“No way to know.”
“The person who underlined it?”
“No way to know.”
“The person who left it here?”
“No way to know.”
The younger man laughed.
“You’ve become less optimistic.”
“No.”
The older man smiled faintly.
“I’ve become more careful.”
The laughter faded.
The younger man closed the binder.
He rested one hand on the cover.
“What kind of person leaves only the steps that already happened?”
The older man looked at the closed binder for a long time.
Then he said,
“Someone who doesn’t want you to know which step comes next.”
WE&P by: EZorrillaMc&Co.
Travel in Life 