The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Judith Merril

  They looked intently at each other across the abyss of time and mystery. Man and—what? How long, Ed wondered, had it stood there, observing him? Why hadn’t it attacked? Had it been waiting for Ed to make a single threatening gesture—such as pointing a gun or camera? Seeing the calm awareness in those long, slanting, blue eyes, Ed sped a silent prayer of thanks upward; most certainly if he had made a move for camera or gun, that move would have been his last.

  They looked at each other through the falling snow, and suddenly there was a perfect instantaneous understanding between them. Ed made an awkward, half-frozen little bow, moving backward. The great creature stood motionless, merely watching, and then Ed did a strange thing: He held out his hands, palms up, gave a wry grin—and ducked quickly around the outcropping of rock and began a plunging, sliding return down the way he’d come. In spite of the harsh, snow-laden wind, bitterly cold, he was perspiring.

  Ed glanced back once. Nothing. Only the thickening veil of swift-blowing snow, blanking out the pinnacle, erasing every trace—every proof that anyone, anything, had stood there moments before. Only the snow, only the rocks, only the unending wind-filled silence of the top of the world. Nothing else.

  The Sherpa was struggling up to him from below, terribly anxious to get started back; the storm was rising. Without a word they hooked up and began the groping, stumbling descent back to the last camp. They found the camp already broken, Sherpas already moving out. Schenk paused only long enough to give Ed a questioning look.

  What could Ed say? Schenk was a scientist, demanding material proof: If not a corpse, at the very least a photograph. The only photographs Ed had were etched in his mind—not on film. And even if he could persuade Schenk to wait, when the storm cleared, the giant, forewarned, would be gone. Some farther peak, some remoter plateau would echo to his young ones’ laughter.

  Feeling not a bit bad about it, Ed gave Schenk a barely perceptible negative nod. Instantly Schenk shrugged, turned and went plunging down, into the thickening snow, back into the world of littler men. Ed trailed behind.

  On the arduous trek back, through that first great storm, through the snow line, through the rain forest, hot and humid, Ed thought of the giant, back up there where the air was thin and pure.

  Who, what was he, and his race? Castaways on this planet, forever marooned, yearning for a distant, never-to-be-reached home?

  Or did they date in unbroken descent from the Pleistocene —man’s first beginning—when all the races of not-quite-man were giants; unable, or unwilling, to take the fork in the road that led to smaller, cleverer man, forced to retreat higher and higher, to more remote areas, until finally there was only one comer of earth left to them—the high Himalayas?

  Or were he and his kind earth’s last reserves: not-yet-men, waiting for the opening of still another chapter in earth’s unending mystery story?

  Whatever the giant was, his secret was safe with him, Ed thought. For who would believe it—even if he chose to tell?

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  * * * *

  ABOMINABLE

  by Fredric Brown

  Fred Brown, once best known—outside of s-f—for his award-winning mysteries, has of recent years become an irrepressible miniaturizer, publishing trios of fantasy-humor vignettes in one magazine after another. (A snapcrackling sampling of the Brown quickies is in his recent collection, “Nightmares and Geezenstacks,” Bantam, 1961.) Here he foreshortens a situation only slightly different from Mr. Sambrot’s.

  Right up to the end, that is...

  * * * *

  Sir Chauncey Atherton waved a farewell to the Sherpa guides who were to set up camp here and let him proceed alone. This was the point beyond which they would not accompany him. This was Abominable Snowman country, a few hundred miles north of Mt. Everest, in the Himalayas. Abominable Snowmen were seen occasionally on Everest, on other Tibetan or Nepalese mountains, but Mt. Oblimov, at the foot of which he was now leaving his native guides, was so thick with them that not even the Sherpas would climb it, but would here await his return, if any. It took a brave man to pass this point. Sir Chauncey was a brave man.

  Also, he was a connoisseur of women, which was why he was here and about to attempt, alone, not only a dan­gerous ascent but an even more dangerous rescue. If Lola Gabraldi was still alive, an Abominable Snowman had her.

  Sir Chauncey had never seen Lola Gabraldi, in the flesh. He had, in fact, learned of her existence less than a month ago, when he had seen the one motion picture in which she had starred-and through which she had become suddenly fabulous, the most beautiful woman on Earth, the most pulchritudinous movie star Italy had ever produced, and Sir Chauncey could not understand how even Italy had pro­duced her. In one picture she had replaced Bardot, Lollo­brigida and Ekberg as the image of feminine perfection in the minds of connoisseurs anywhere. The moment he had seen her on the screen he had known that he must know her in the flesh, or die trying.

  But by that time Lola Gabraldi had vanished. As a vaca­tion after her first picture she had taken a trip to India and had joined a group of climbers about to make an as­sault on Mt. Oblimov. The others of the party had returned; she had not. One of them had testified that he had seen her, at a distance too great for him to reach her in time, ab­ducted, carried off screaming by a nine-foot-high hairy more-­or-less-manlike creature. An Abominable Snowman. The party had searched for her for days before giving up and returning to civilization. Everyone agreed that there was no possible chance, now, of finding her alive.

  Everyone except Sir Chauncey, who had immediately flown from England to India.

  He struggled on, now high into the eternal snows. And in addition to mountain climbing equipment he carried the heavy rifle with which he had, only last year, shot tigers in Bengal. If it could kill tigers, he reasoned, it could kill Snowmen.

  Snow swirled about him as he neared the cloud line. Sud­denly, a dozen yards ahead of him, which was as far as he could see, he caught a glimpse of a monstrous not-quite-human figure. He raised his rifle and fired. The figure fell, and kept on falling; it had been on a ledge over thousands of feet of nothingness.

  And at the moment of the shot, arms closed around Sir Chauncey from behind him. Thick, hairy arms. And then, as one hand held him easily, the other took the rifle and bent it into an L-shape as effortlessly as though it had been a toothpick and then tossed it away.

  A voice spoke from a point about two feet above his head. “Be quiet; you will not be harmed.” Sir Chauncey was a brave man, but a sort of squeak was all the answer he could make, despite the seeming assurance of the words.

  He was held so tightly against the creature behind him that he could not look upward and backward to see what its face was like.

  “Let me explain,” said the voice above and behind him. “We, whom you call Abominable Snowmen, are human, but transmuted. A great many centuries ago we were a tribe like the Sherpas. We chanced to discover a drug that let us change physically, let us adapt by increased size, hairiness and other physiological changes to extreme cold and altitude, let us move up into the mountains, into coun­try in which others cannot survive, except for the duration of brief climbing expeditions. Do you understand?”

  “Y-y-yes,” Sir Chauncey managed to say. He was begin­ning to feel a faint return of hope. Why would this creature be explaining these things to him if it intended to kill him?

  “Then I shall explain further. Our number is small and is diminishing. For that reason we occasionally capture, as I have captured you, a mountain climber. We give him the transmuting drug; he undergoes the physiological changes and becomes one of us. By that means we keep our number, such as it is, relatively constant.”

  “B-but,” Sir Chauncey stammered, “is that what hap­pened to the woman I’m looking for, Lola Gabraldi? She is now-eight feet tall and hairy and-”

  “She was. You just killed her. One of our tribe had taken her as its mate. We will take no revenge for your having killed her, but you must no
w, as it were, take her place.”

  “Take her place? But-I’m a man.”

  “Thank God for that,” said the voice above and behind him. He found himself turned around, held against a huge hairy body, his face at the right level to be buried between mountainous hairy breasts. “Thank God for that-because I am an Abominable Snowwoman.”

  Sir Chauncey fainted and was picked up and, as lightly as though he were a toy dog, carried away by his mate.

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  * * * *

  THE MAN ON TOP

  by R. Bretnor

  This story, originally published by Esquire In 1951, was reprinted last year in Fantasy and Science Fiction—thereby barely justifying my inclusion of it here, to complete my Himalayan set of three.

  * * * *

  Who was the first man to reach the top of Nanda Urbat? Any school kid can tell you—toughest mountain in the world. 26,318 feet, conquered finally by Geoffrey Barbank.

  I was forgotten. I was just the fellow who went along. The press gave Barbank the credit. He was the Man on Top, the Man on the Top of the World.

  Only he wasn’t, really. He knows that it’s a lie. And that hurts.

  A mountain, you know, is a quest, a mystery, a challenge to the spirit. Mallory, who died on Everest, knew that. But Barbank climbed Nanda Urbat simply to keep some other man from being first. Mysteries did not exist for him, and anyone who felt the sense of mystery was a fool. All men were fools to Barbank—or enemies.

  I found that out the day I joined the expedition in Darjeeling. “The town’s in a sweat about some flea-bag Holy Man,” he told me after lunch. “Let’s go and look the old fraud over. Might have a bit of fun.”

  So the two of us walked down from the hotel, and, all the way, he boasted of his plans. I can still see his face, big, cold, rectangular, as he discussed the men who’d tried and failed. Of course they’d muffed it. You couldn’t climb Nanda Urbat on the cheap. He’d do things differently. All his equipment was better than the best that the many others had had. Because he had designed it. Because it had cost a mint.

  It made me angry. But I had come too far to be turned back. I let him talk.

  We turned into the compound of a temple. There was a quiet crowd there, squatting in the dust, and many monkeys. By a stone wall, under a huge umbrella, the Holy Man was seated on a woven mat. His long, white hair framed the strangest face I’ve ever seen—moon-round, unlined, perfectly symmetrical. His eyes were closed. Against the pale brown skin, his full lips curved upward like the horns of a Turkish bow. It was a statue’s face, smiling a statue’s smile, utterly serene.

  The people seemed waiting for something. As we came through the crowd, no one spoke. But Barbank paid no heed. We halted up in front; and he talked on.

  “What’s more,” he was saying, “I don’t intend to bother with filthy Sherpa porters for the upper camps. Planes will drop the stuff.”

  That set me off. “The Sherpas are brave men,” I told him, “and good mountaineers.”

  “Rot,” he snapped. “They’re beasts of burden.” He pointed at the Holy Man. “There’s a sample for you. Look at that smirk. Pleased as punch with his own hocus-pocus— dirt, his nakedness, and all. They’ve made no progress since the Year One.”

  The Holy Man was naked, or nearly so, but he was clean; his loincloth was spotless white. “Perhaps,” I answered, “they’re trying for something else.”

  And slowly, then, the Holy Man looked up. He spoke to Barbank. “We are,” he said.

  I met his eyes—and suddenly the statue came alive. It was as though I had seen only the shell of his serenity; now I saw its source. I felt that it was born, not in any rejection of the world, but in a knowledge of every human agony and joy.

  “Yes, we are trying,” the Holy Man went on. His voice was beautiful and strangely accented, and there was humor in it, and irony. “But for something else? I do not think so. It is just that we are trying differently, we of the East and West—and sometimes one cannot succeed without the other.” Pausing, he measured Barbank with those eyes. “That is why I can help you, if you will only ask.”

  Barbank’s mouth curled. “He’s heard the gossip down in the bazaar,” he said to me. “Well, he won’t get a penny out of me.”

  The smile danced. “Must I explain? A mountain is much more than rock and ice. No man can conquer the hardest mountain in the world. His conquest can be only of himself.”

  I shivered. That was what Mallory had said.

  “You damned old humbug!” Barbank’s laugh roared out. “Are you trying to tell me you can help me reach the top?”

  “I think I’d put it differently,” the Holy Man replied. ‘To be precise, I must say this. You never will achieve your heart’s desire without my aid. Your way of doing things is not quite good enough.”

  Barbank’s neck reddened. “Oh, isn’t it?” he snarled. “Well, come along and watch! I can use one more mangy porter, I suppose.”

  The Holy Man raised his fragile hands. “Thank you—but no,” he said gently.

  Barbank spat in the dust. He pivoted and strode off, pushing roughly through the murmuring crowd.

  It was then I decided that he must never be the Man on Top.

  * * * *

  It is a long way from Darjeeling through Nepal to that dreadful mountain which the Tibetans call the Father of the Snows. The journey takes some weeks. We were eleven white men, but we soon found that we were not an expedition in the usual sense. We were Barbank’s retainers, walled off by his contempt.

  The others left him pretty much alone. I couldn’t. The Holy Man’s prediction was my obsession now. At every chance, I talked to Barbank about the mysteries of the peak —the awful Snowmen, whom the Tibetans all swear exist, and the same dark, pulsating flying things which Smythe had seen high on haunted Everest. I said that, very possibly, Madsen, James and Leverhome had reached the summit first—that he might get to be the Man on Top only to find some evidence they’d left.

  By the time we reached our Base Camp on the Great East Glacier, I had become his enemy, who had to be put to shame. And there was only one way to do that. Though Kenningshaw and Lane were better men, he chose me for the assault. I had to be there, to see the Man on Top with my own eyes. That was fine. Because I could only stop Barbank from being first on top by being first myself.

  We followed the traditional approach—up the Great East Glacier and the West Wall of the South Col—up to Camp Five, nearly five miles above the sea. And, all the way, the mountain laughed at us. Against us, it sent its cruel light cavalry, wind, mist and snow—harassing us, keeping us aware of deadly forces held in reserve.

  Yet, when we stood at Camp Five and watched the plane from India trying to drop the final camp higher than any man had camped before, the sky was clear. We watched the pilot try, and circle, and lose eight separate loads. The ninth remained; its grapples held.

  “I bought two dozen, all identical,” said Barbank. “I told you there’s nothing these natives do that we can’t do better.”

  He and I reached Camp Six, at over twenty-six thousand feet, late the next afternoon. We set the tent up, and weighted it with cylinders of oxygen. We ate supper out of self-heating cans and crawled into our sleeping bags.

  We rose before dawn, and found that the fine weather still held. Barbank looked at the vast dark mountain, at the broad yellow band beneath the summit pyramid, at the depths of rock and glacial ice below.

  “And so I won’t succeed?” he taunted me. “You bloody fool.”

  We went up. We mounted to the ridge, and stared down the awful precipice of the South Face. We worked toward the second step, where James and Leverhome were last seen. Small, keen lancets of wind thrust through our clothes down to the flowing blood. The summit was hidden behind its plume of cloud.

  Toward that plume we worked. Even with oxygen, it was agony. Up there, the air is thin. The thinness is in your flesh and bones, and in your brain. You move, and pause, and your whole atte
ntion is confined to the next move.

  On such a mountain, physically, there can be no question over who shall lead. But morally there can. I can remember husbanding my strength, giving Barbank a grudging minimum of aid. I can remember Barbank weakening, relinquishing the lead high on a summit slab. I can remember the look in Barbank’s eyes.

  The hours dragged. I moved. I ached. I forced myself to try to move again. Endlessly.