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

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?

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 now, 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.

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.