Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

“We’ve made a terrible mistake. We—” The sounds faded in and out on Purnie’s ears as the creature turned slowly and called in different directions. He watched the animal walk over to the pile of scattered logs and peer around and under them.

“If you’re hurt I’d like to help!” The twin moons were high in the sky now, and where their light broke through the swirling clouds a double shadow was cast around the animal. With foggy awareness, Purnie watched the creature shake its head slowly, then walk away in the direction of the others.

Purnie’s eyes stared, without seeing, at the panorama before him. The beach was deserted now, and his gaze was transfixed on a shimmering white square floating on the ocean. Across it, the last thing Purnie ever saw, was emblazoned the word FORBES.

The Ugly Earthman has had small chance as yet to assert his antagonisms aspace. But all along familiar planetary frontiers, explorers (of both breeds; questers and conquistadors) daily attack the boundaries of the unknown.

Last year, one of the oldest of old mysteries, the Abominable Snowman, was back in the public prints, under examination on two very different fronts.

Fellow name of Tschernezky In London (a reputable zoologist at Queen Mary College), made a plaster cast from photographs of footprints ascribed to A. Snowman; compared the cast’s prints with those of similarly made prints of the several animals the A. S. is supposed to be; announced (according to Newsweek) that the photo prints had not been, made by bear, langur, or mountain gorilla, but by a “very huge, heavily built, two-footed primate....”

Meantime Edmund (Everest) Hillary went back to the mountains to check the whole matter out; came back and published a series of loudly debunking articles, exposing all evidence offered to him as either fraudulent or honest error. (Whether he saw Tshernezky’s plaster casts, I do not know.)

In any case, the public prints were full of A. S., and s-f was ripe for it; this was the year for Other Creature stories.

Ed McKale straightened up under his load of cameras and equipment, squinting against the blasting wind, peering, staring, sweeping the jagged, unending expanse of snow and wind-scoured rock. Looking, searching, as he’d been doing now for two months, cameras at the ready.

Nothing. Nothing but the towering Himalayas, thrusting miles high on all sides, stretching in awesome grandeur from horizon to horizon, each pinnacle tipped with immense banners of snow plumes, streaming out in the wind, vivid against the darkly blue sky. The vista was one of surpassing beauty; viewing it, Ed automatically thought of light settings, focal length, color filters—then just as automatically rejected the thought. He was here, on top of the world, to photograph something infinitely more newsworthy —if only he could find it.

The expedition paused, strung out along a ridge of blue snow, with shadows falling away to the right and left into terrifying abysses, and Ed sucked for air. Twenty thousand feet is really quite high, although many of the peaks beyond rose nearly ten thousand feet above him.

Up ahead, the Sherpa porters—each a marvelous shot, gap-toothed, ebullient grins, seamed faces, leathery brown— bowed under stupendous loads for this altitude, leaning on their coolie crutches, waiting for Doctor Schenk to make up his mind. Schenk, the expedition leader, was arguing with the guides again, his breath spurting little puffs of vapor, waving his arms, pointing—down.

Obviously Schenk was calling it quits. He was within his rights, Ed knew; two months was all Schenk had contracted for. Two months of probing snow and ice; scrambling over crevasses, up rotten rock cliffs, wind-ravaged, bleak, stretching endlessly toward Tibet and the never-never lands beyond. Two months of searching for footprints where none should be. Searching for odors, for droppings, anything to disclose the presence of creatures other than themselves. Without success.

Two months of nothing. Big, fat nothing.

The expedition was a bust. The goofiest assignment of this or any other century, as Ed felt it would be from the moment he’d sat across a desk from the big boss in the picture-magazine’s New York office, two months ago, looking at the blurred photograph, while the boss filled him in on the weird details:

The photograph, his boss had told him gravely, had been taken in the Himalayan mountains, at an altitude of twenty-one thousand feet, by a man soaring overhead in a motor-less glider.

“A glider,” Ed had said noncommittally, staring at the fuzzy enlarged snapshot of a great expanse of snow and rocky ledges, full of harsh light and shadows, a sort of roughly bowl-shaped plateau apparently, and in the middle of it a group of indistinct figures, tiny, lost against the immensity of great ice pinnacles. Ed looked closer. Were the figures people? If so—what had happened to their clothes?

“A glider,” his boss reiterated firmly. The glider pilot, the boss said, was maneuvering in an updraft, attempting to do the incredible—soar over Mount Everest in a homemade glider. The wide-winged glider had been unable to achieve the flight over Everest, but, flitting silently about seeking updrafts, it cleared a jagged pinnacle and there, less than a thousand feet below, the pilot saw movement where none should have been. And dropping lower, startled, he’d seen, the boss said dryly, “creatures—creatures that looked exactly like a group of naked men and women and kids, playing in the snow, at an altitude of twenty thousand five hundred feet.” He’d had the presence of mind to take a few hasty snapshots before the group disappeared. Only one of the pictures had developed.

Looking at the snapshot with professional scorn, Ed had said, “These things are indistinct. I think he’s selling you a bill of goods.’”

“No,” the boss said, “we checked on the guy. He really did make the glider flight. We’ve had experts go over that blowup. The picture’s genuine. Those are naked biped, erect-walking creatures.” He flipped the picture irritably. “I can’t publish this thing; I want close-ups, action shots, the sort of thing our subscribers have come to expect of us.”

He’d lighted a cigar slowly. “Bring me back some pictures I can publish, Ed, and you can write your own ticket.”

“You’re asking me to climb Mount Everest,” Ed said, carefully keeping the sarcasm out of his voice. “To search for this plateau here,” he tapped the shoddy photograph, “and take pix of—what are they, biped, erect-walking creatures, you say?”

The boss cleared his throat. “Not Mount Everest, Ed. It’s Gauri Sankar, one of the peaks near Mount Everest. Roughly, it’s only about twenty-three thousand feet or so high.”

“That’s pretty rough,” Ed said.

The boss looked pained. “Actually it’s not Gauri Sankar either. Just one of the lesser peaks of the Gauri Sankar massif. Well under twenty-three thousand. Certainly nothing to bother a hot-shot exparatrooper like you, Ed.”

Ed winced, and the boss continued, “This guy—this glider pilot—wasn’t able to pin-point the spot, but he did come up with a pretty fair map of the terrain—for a pretty fair price. We’ve checked it out with the American Alpine Club; it conforms well with their own charts of the general area. Several expeditions have been in the vicinity, but not this exact spot, they tell me. It’s not a piece of cake by any means, but it’s far from being another Annapurna, or K-Two, for accessibility.”

He sucked at his cigar thoughtfully. “The Alpine Club says we’ve got only about two months of good weather before the inevitable monsoons hit that area—so time, as they say, is of the essence, Ed. But two months for this kind of thing ought to be plenty. Everything will be first class; we’re even including these new gas guns that shoot hypodermic needles, or something similar. We’ll fly the essentials into Katmandu and air-drop everything possible along the route up to your base at”—he squinted at a map— “Namche Bazar. A Sherpa village which is twelve thousand feet high.”