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I looked down at it and I was sick! I wondered, where did it lead?
Stars?
There were no words. I stared and I stared, and I cursed the fact
that the thing existed and that someone had found it while I was still
around.
"Well?" said Lanning, and he banked the flier so that I could look
upward.
I shook my head and shaded my already shielded eyes.
"Make it go away," I finally told him.
"Can't. It's bigger than I am."
"It's bigger than anybody," I said.
"I can make _us_ go away..."
"Never mind. I want to take some pictures."
He brought it around, and I started to shoot.
"Can you hover--or get any closer?"
"No, the winds are too strong."
"That figures."
So I shot--through telescopic lenses and scan attachment and all--as
we circled it.
"I'd give a lot to see the top."
"We're at thirty thousand feet, and fifty's the ceiling on this
baby. The Lady, unfortunately, stands taller than the atmosphere."
"Funny," I said, "from here she doesn't strike me as the sort to
breath ether and spend all her time looking at stars."
He chuckled and lit a cigarette, and I reached us another bulb of
coffee.
"How _does_ the Gray Sister strike you?"
And I lit one of my own and inhaled, as the flier was buffeted by
sudden gusts of something from somewhere and then ignored, and I said,
"Like Our Lady of the Abattoir--right between the eyes."
We drank some coffee, and then he asked, "She too big, Whitey?"
and I gnashed my teeth through caffeine, for only my friends call me
Whitey, my name being Jack Summers and my hair having always been this
way, and at the moment I wasn't too certain of whether Henry Lanning
qualified for that status--just because he'd known me for twenty
years--after going out of his way to find this thing on a world with a
thin atmosphere, a lot of rocks, a too-bright sky and a name like LSD
pronounced backwards, after George Diesel, who had set foot in the
dust and then gone away--smart fellow!
"A forty-mile-high mountain," I finally said, "is not a mountain.
It is a world all by itself, which some dumb deity forgot to throw
into orbit."
"I take it you're not interested?"
I looked back at the gray and lavender slopes and followed them
upward once more again, until all color drained away, until the
silhouette was black and jagged and the top still nowhere in sight,
until my eyes stung and burned behind their protective glasses; and I
saw clouds bumping up against that invincible outline, like icebergs
in the sky, and I heard the howling of the retreating winds which had
essayed to measure its grandeur with swiftness and, of course, had
failed.
"Oh, I'm interested," I said, "in an academic sort of way. Let's
go back to town, where I can eat and drink and maybe break a leg if
I'm lucky."
He headed the flier south, and I didn't look around as we went. I
could sense her presence at my back, though, all the way: The Gray
Sister, the highest mountain in the known universe. Unclimbed, of
course.
She remained at my back during the days that followed, casting her
shadow over everything I looked upon. For the next two days I studied
the pictures I had taken and I dug up some maps and I studied them,
too; and I spoke with people who told me stories of the Gray Sister,
strange stories....
During this time, I came across nothing really encouraging. I
learned that there had been an attempt to colonize Diesel a couple
centuries previously, back before faster-than-light ships were
developed. A brand-new disease had colonized the first colonists,
however, wiping them out to a man. The new colony was four years old,
had better doctors, had beaten the plague, was on Diesel to stay and
seemed proud of its poor taste when it came to worlds. Nobody, I
learned, fooled around much with the Gray Sister. There had been a
few abortive attempts to climb her, and some young legends that
followed after.
During the day, the sky never shut up. It kept screaming into my
eyes, until I took to wearing my climbing goggles whenever I went out.
Mainly, though, I sat in the hotel lounge and ate and drank and
studied the pictures and cross-examined anyone who happened to pass by
and glance at them, spread out there on the table.
I continued to ignore all Henry's questions. I knew what he
wanted, and he could damn well wait. Unfortunately, he did, and
rather well, too, which irritated me. He felt I was almost hooked by
the Sister, and he wanted to Be There When It Happened. He'd made a
fortune on the Kasla story, and I could already see the opening
sentences of this one in the smug lines around his eyes. Whenever he
tried to make like a poker player, leaning on his fist and slowly
turning a photo, I could see whole paragraphs. If I followed the
direction of his gaze, I could probably even have seen the dust
jacket.
At the end of the week, a ship came down out of the sky, and some
nasty people got off and interrupted my train of thought. When they
came into the lounge, I recognized them for what they were and removed
my black lenses so that I could nail Henry with my basilisk gaze and
turn him into stone. As it would happen, he had too much alcohol in
him, and it didn't work.
"You tipped off the press," I said.
"Now, now," he said, growing smaller and stiffening as my gaze
groped its way through the murk of his central nervous system and
finally touched upon the edges of that tiny tumor, his forebrain.
"You're well known, and...."
I replaced my glasses and hunched over my drink, looking far gone,
as one of the three approached and said, "Pardon me, but are you Jack
Summers?"
To explain the silence which followed, Henry said, "Yes, this is
Mad Jack, the man who climbed Everest at twenty-three and every other
pile of rocks worth mentioning since that time. At thirty-one, he
became the only man to conquer the highest mountain in the known
universe--Mount Kasla on Litan--elevation, 89,941 feet. My book--"
"Yes," said the reporter. "My name is Cary, and I'm with GP. My
friends represent two of the other syndicates. We've heard that you
are going to climb the Gray Sister."
"You've heard incorrectly," I said.
"Oh?"
The other two came up and stood beside them.
"We thought that--" one of them began.
"--you were already organizing a climbing party," said the other.
"Then you're not going to climb the Sister?" asked Cary, while one
of the two looked over my pictures and the other got ready to take
some of his own.
"Stop that!" I said, raising a hand at the photographer. "Bright
lights hurt my eyes!"
"Sorry. I'll use the infra," he said, and he started fooling with
his camera.
Cary repeated the question.
"All I said was that you've heard incorrectly," I told him. "I
didn't say I was and I didn't say I wasn't. I haven't made up my
mind."
"If you decide to try it, have you any idea when it will be?"
"Sorry, I can't answer that."
Henry took the three of them over to the bar and started
explaining something, with gestures. I heard the words "...out of
retirement after four years," and when/if they looked to the booth
again, I was gone.
I had retired, to the street which was full of dusk, and I walked
along it thinking. I trod her shadow even then, Linda. And the Gray
Sister beckoned and forbade with her single unmoving gesture. I
watched her, so far away, yet still so large, a piece of midnight at
eight o'clock. The hours that lay between died like the distance at
her feet, and I knew that she would follow me wherever I went, even
into sleep. Especially into sleep.
So I know, at that moment. The days that followed were a game I
enjoyed playing. Fake indecision is delicious when people want you to
do something. I looked at her then, my last and my largest, my very
own Koshtra Pivrarcha, and I felt that I was born to stand upon her
summit. Then I could retire, probably remarry, cultivate my mind, not
worry about getting out of shape, and do all the square things I
didn't do before, the lack of which had cost me a wife and a home,
back when I had gone to Kasla, elevation 89,941 feet, four and a half
years ago, in the days of my glory. I regarded my Gray Sister across
the eight o'clock world, and she was dark and noble and still and
waiting, as she had always been.
The following morning I sent the messages. Out across the light-years
like cosmic carrier pigeons they went. They winged their ways to some
persons I hadn't seen in years and to others who had seen me off at
Luna Station. Each said, in its own way, "If you want in on the
biggest climb of them all, come to Diesel. The Gray Sister eats Kasla
for breakfast. R.S.V.P. c/o. The Lodge, Georgetown. Whitey."
Backward, turn backward....
I didn't tell Henry. Nothing at all. What I had done and where I
was going, for a time, were my business only, for that same time. I
checked out well before sunrise and left him a message on the desk:
"Out of town on business. Back in a week. Hold the fort. Mad
Jack."
I had to gauge the lower slopes, tug the hem of the lady's skirt,
so to speak, before I introduced her to my friends. They say only a
madman climbs alone, but they call me what they call me for a reason.
From my pix, the northern face had looked promising.
I set the rented flier down as near as I could, locked it up,
shouldered my pack and started walking.
Mountains rising to my right and to my left, mountains at my back,
all dark as sin now in the predawn light of a white, white day. Ahead
of me, not a mountain, but an almost gentle slope which kept rising
and rising and rising. Bright stars above me and cold wind past me as
I walked. Straight up, though, no stars, just black. I wondered for
the thousandth time what a mountain weighed. I always wonder that as
I approach one. No clouds in sight. No noises but my boot sounds on
the turf and the small gravel. My small goggles flopped around my
neck. My hands were moist within my gloves. On Diesel, the pack and
I together probably weighed about the same as me alone on Earth--for
which I was duly grateful. My breath burned as it came and steamed as
it went. I counted a thousand steps and looked back, and I couldn't
see the flier. I counted a thousand more and then looked up to watch
some stars go out. About an hour after that, I had to put on my
goggles. By then I could see where I was headed. And by then the
wind seemed stronger.
She was so big that the eye couldn't take all of her in at once.
I moved my head from side to side, leaning further and further
backward. Wherever the top, it was too high. For an instant, I was
seized by a crazy acrophobic notion that I was looking down rather
than up, and the soles of my feet and the palms of my hands tingled,
like an ape's must when, releasing one high branch to seize another,
he discovers that there isn't another.
I went on for two more hours and stopped for a light meal. This
was hiking, not climbing. As I ate, I wondered what could have caused
a formation like the Gray Sister. There were some ten and twelve-mile
peaks within sixty miles of the place and a fifteen-mile mountain
called Burke's Peak on the adjacent continent, but nothing else like
the Sister. The lesser gravitation? Her composition? I couldn't
say. I wondered what Doc and Kelly and Mallardi would say when they
saw her.
I don't define them, though. I only climb them.
I looked up again, and a few clouds were brushing against her now.
>From the photos I had taken, she might be an easy ascent for a good
ten or twelve miles. Like a big hill. There were certainly enough
alternate routes. In fact, I thought she just might be a pushover.
Feeling heartened, I repacked my utensils and proceeded. It was going
to be a good day. I could tell.
And it was. I got off the slope and onto something like a trail
by late afternoon. Daylight lasts about nine hours on Diesel, and I
spent most of it moving. The trail was so good that I kept on for
several hours after sundown and made considerable height. I was
beginning to use my respiration equipment by then, and the heating
unit in my suit was turned on.
The stars were big, brilliant flowers, the way was easy, the night
was my friend. I came upon a broad, flat piece and made my camp under
an overhang.
There I slept, and I dreamt of snowy women with breasts like the
Alps, pinked by the morning sun; and they sang to me like the wind and
laughed, had eyes of ice prismatic. They fled through a field of
clouds.
The following day I made a lot more height. The "trail" began to
narrow, and it ran out in places, but it was easy to reach for the sky
until another one occurred. So far, it had all been good rock. It
was still tapering as it heightened, and balance was no problem. I
did a lot of plain old walking. I ran up one long zigzag and hit it
up a wide chimney almost as fast as Santa Claus comes down one. The
winds were strong, could be a problem if the going got difficult. I
was on the respirator full time and feeling great.
I could see for an enormous distance now. There were mountains
and mountains, all below me like desert dunes. The sun beat halos of
heat about their peaks. In the east, I saw Lake Emerick, dark and
shiny as the toe of a boot. I wound my way about a jutting crag and
came upon a giant's staircase, going up for at least a thousand feet.
I mounted it. At its top I hit my first real barrier: a fairly
smooth, almost perpendicular face rising for about eight-five feet.
No way around it, so I went up. It took me a good hour, and there
was a ridge at the top leading to more easy climbing. By then,
though, the clouds attacked me. Even though the going was easy, I was
slowed by the fog. I wanted to outclimb it and still have some
daylight left, so I decided to postpone eating.
But the clouds kept coming. I made another thousand feet, and
they were still about me. Somewhere below me, I heard thunder. The
fog was easy on my eyes, though, so I kept pushing.
Then I tried a chimney, the top of which I could barely discern,
because it looked a lot shorter than a jagged crescent to its left.
This was a mistake.
The rate of condensation was greater than I'd guessed. The walls
were slippery. I'm stubborn, though, and I fought with skidding boots
and moist back until I was about a third of the way up, I thought, and
winded.
I realized then what I had done. What I had thought was the top
wasn't. I went another fifteen feet and wished I hadn't. The fog
began to boil about me, and I suddenly felt drenched. I was afraid to
go down and I was afraid to go up, and I couldn't stay where I was
forever.
Whenever you hear a person say that he inched along, do not accuse
him of a fuzzy choice of verbs. Give him the benefit of the doubt and
your sympathy.
I inched my way, blind, up an unknown length of slippery chimney.
If my hair hadn't already been white when I entered at the bottom....
Finally, I got above the fog. Finally, I saw a piece of that
bright and nasty sky, which I decided to forgive for the moment. I
aimed at it, arrived on target.
When I emerged, I saw a little ledge about ten feet above me. I
climbed to it and stretched out. My muscles were a bit shaky, and I
made them go liquid. I took a drink of water, ate a couple of
chocolate bars, took another drink.
After perhaps ten minutes, I stood up. I could no longer see the
ground. Just the soft, white, cottony top of a kindly old storm. I
looked up.
It was amazing. She was still topless. And save for a couple
spots, such as the last--which had been the fault of my own stupid
overconfidence--it had almost been as easy as climbing stairs.
Now the going appeared to be somewhat rougher, however. This was
what I had really come to test.
I swung my pick and continued.
All the following day I climbed, steadily, taking no unnecessary
risks, resting periodically, drawing maps, taking wide-angle photos.
The ascent eased in two spots that afternoon, and I made a quick seven
thousand feet. Higher now than Everest, and still going, I. Now,
though, there were places where I crawled and places where I used my
ropes, and there were places where I braced myself and used my
pneumatic pistol to blast a toehold. (No, in case you're wondering: I
could have broken my eardrums, some ribs, and arm and doubtless
ultimately, my neck, if I'd tried using the gun in the chimney.)
Just near sunset, I came upon a high, easy winding way up and up
and up. I debated with my more discreet self. I'd left the message
that I'd be gone a week. This was the end of the third day. I wanted
to make as much height as possible and start back down on the fifth
day. If I followed the rocky route above me as far as it would take
me I'd probably break forty thousand feet. Then, depending, I might
have a halfway chance of hitting near the ten-mile mark before I had
to turn back. Then I'd be able to get a much better picture of what
lay above.
My more discreet self lost, three to nothing, and Mad Jack went
on.
The stars were so big and blazing I was afraid they'd bite. The
wind was no problem. There wasn't any at that height. I had to keep
stepping up the temperature controls on my suit, and I had the feeling
that if I could spit around my respirator, it would freeze before it
hit the trail.
I went on even further than I'd intended, and I broke forty-two
thousand that night.
I found a resting place, stretched out, killed my hand beacon.
It was an odd dream that came to me.
It was all cherry fires and stood like a man, only bigger, on the
slope above me. It stood in an impossible position, so I knew I had
to be dreaming. Something from the other end of my life stirred,
however, and I was convinced for a bitter moment that it was the Angel
of Judgment. Only, in its right hand it seemed to hold a sword of
fires rather than a trumpet. It had been standing there forever, the
tip of its blade pointed toward my breast. I could see the stars
through it. It seemed to speak.
It said: "_Go back_."
I couldn't answer it, though, for my tongue clove to the roof of
my mouth. And it said it again, and yet a third time, "_Go back_."
"Tomorrow," I thought, in my dream, and this seemed to satisfy it.
for it died down and ceased, and the blackness rolled about me.
The following day, I climbed as I hadn't climbed in years. By late
lunchtime I'd hit forty-eight thousand feet. The cloud cover down
below had broken. I could see what lay beneath me once more. The
ground was a dark and light patchwork. Above, the stars didn't go
away.
The going was rough, but I was feeling fine. I knew I couldn't
make ten miles, because I could see that the way was pretty much the
same for quite a distance, before it got even worse. My good spirits
stayed, and they continued to rise as I did.
When it attacked, it came on with a speed and a fury that I was
only barely able to match.
The voice from my dream rang in my head, "_Go back! Go back! Go
back!_"
Then it came toward me from out of the sky. A bird the size of a
condor. Only it wasn't really a bird. It was a bird-shaped thing.
It was all fire and static, and as it flashed toward me I barely
had time to brace my back against stone and heft my climbing pick in
my right hand, ready.
I sat in the small, dark room and watched the spinning, colored
lights. Ultrasonics were tickling my skull. I tried to relax and
give the man some Alpha rhythms. Somewhere a receiver was receiving,
a computer was computing and a recorder was recording.
It lasted perhaps twenty minutes.
When it was all over and they called me out, the doctor collared
me. I beat him to the draw, though:
"Give me the tape and send the bill in care of Henry Lanning at
the Lodge."
"I want to discuss the reading," he said.
"I have my own brain-wave expert coming. Just give me the tape."
"Have you undergone any sort of traumatic experience recently?"
"You tell me. Is it indicated?"
"Well, yes and no," he said.
"That's what I like, a straight answer."
"I don't know what is normal for you, in the first place," he
replied.
"Is there any indication of brain damage?"
"I don't read it that way. If you'd tell me what happened, and
why you're suddenly concerned about your brain-waves, perhaps I'd be
in a better position to...."
"Cut," I said. "Just give me the tape and bill me."
"I'm concerned about you as a patient."
"But you don't think there were any pathological indications?"
"Not exactly. But tell me this, if you will: Have you had an
epileptic seizure recently?"
"Not to my knowledge. Why?"
"You displayed a pattern similar to a residual subrythm common in
some forms of epilepsy for several days subsequent to a seizure."
"Could a bump on the head cause that pattern?"
"It's highly unlikely."
"What else _could_ cause it?"
"Electrical shock, optical trauma--"
"Stop," I said, and I removed my glasses. "About the optical
trauma. Look at my eyes."
"I'm not an ophtha--" he began, but I interrupted:
"Most normal light hurts me eyes. If I lost my glasses and was
exposed to very bright light for three, four days, could that cause the
pattern you spoke of?"
"Possible...." he said. "Yes, I'd say so."
"But there's more?"
"I'm not sure. We have to take more readings, and if I know the
story behind this it will help a lot."
"Sorry," I said. "I need the tape now."
He sighed and made a small gesture with his left hand as he turned
away.
"All right, Mister Smith."
Cursing the genius of the mountain, I left the General Hospital,
carrying my tape like a talisman. In my mind I searched, through
forests of memory, for a ghost-sword in a stone of smoke, I think.
Back in the Lodge, they were waiting. Lanning and the newsmen.
"What was it like?" asked one of the latter.
"What was what like?"
"The mountain. You were up on it, weren't you?"
"No comment."
"How high did you go?"
"No comment."
"How would you say it compares with Kasla?"
"No comment."
"Did you run into any complications?"
"Ditto. Excuse me, I want to take a shower."
Henry followed me into my room. The reporters tried to.
After I had shaved and washed up, mixed a drink and lit a
cigarette, Lanning asked me his more general question:
"Well?" he said.
I nodded.
"Difficulties?"
I nodded again.
"Insurmountable?"
I hefted the tape and thought a moment.
"Maybe not."
He helped himself to the whiskey. The second time around, he
asked:
"You going to try?"
I knew I was. I knew I'd try it all by myself if I had to.
"I really don't know," I said.
"Why not?"
"Because there's something up there," I said, "something that
doesn't want us to do it."
"Something _lives_ up there?"
"I'm not sure whether that's the right word."
He lowered the drink.
"What the hell happened?"
"I was threatened. I was attacked."
"Threatened? Verbally? In English?" He set his drink aside,
which shows how serious his turn of mind had to be. "Attacked?" he
added. "By what?"
"I've sent for Doc and Kelly and Stan and Mallardi and Vincent. I
checked a little earlier. They've all replied. They're coming.
Miguel and the Dutchman can't make it, and they send their regrets.
When we're all together, I'll tell the story. But I want to talk to
Doc first. So hold tight and worry and don't quote."
He finished his drink.
"When'll they be coming?"
"Four, five weeks," I said.
"That's a long wait."
"Under the circumstances," I said, "I can't think of any
alternatives."
"What'll we do in the meantime?"
"Eat, drink, and contemplate the mountain."
He lowered his eyelids a moment, then nodded, reached for his
glass.
"Shall we begin?"
It was late, and I stood alone in the field with a bottle in one hand.
Lanning had already turned in, and night's chimney was dark with cloud
soot. Somewhere away from there, a storm was storming, and it was
full of instant outlines. The wind came chill.
"Mountain," I said. "Mountain, you have told me to go away."
There was a rumble.
"But I cannot," I said, and I took a drink.
"I'm bringing you the best in the business," I said, "to go up on
your slopes and to stand beneath the stars in your highest places. I
must do this thing because you are there. No other reason. Nothing
personal...."
After a time, I said, "That's not true.
"I am a man," I said, "and I need to break mountains to prove that
I will not die even though I will die. I am less than I want to be,
Sister, and you can make me more. So I guess it _is_ personal.
"It's the only thing I know how to do, and you're the last one
left--the last challenge to the skill I spent my life learning. Maybe
it is that mortality is the closest to immortality when it accepts a
challenge to itself, when it survives a threat. The moment of triumph
is the moment of salvation. I have needed many such moments, and the
final one must be the longest, for it must last me the rest of my
life.
"So you are there, Sister, and I am here and very mortal, and you
have told me to go away. I cannot. I'm coming up, and if you throw
death at me I will face it. It must be so."
I finished what remained in the bottle.
There were more flashes, more rumbles behind the mountain, more
flashes.
"It is the closest thing to diving drunkenness," I said to the
thunder.
And then she winked at me. It was a red star, so high upon her.
Angel's sword. Phoenix' wing. Soul on fire. And it blazed at me,
across the miles. Then the wind that blows between the worlds swept
down over me. It was filled with tears and with crystals of ice. I
stood there and felt it, then, "Don't go away," I said, and I watched
until all was darkness once more and I was wet as an embryo waiting to
cry out and breathe.
Most kids tell lies to their playmates--fictional autobiographies, if
you like--which are either received with appropriate awe or countered
with greater, more elaborate tellings. But little Jimmy, I've heard,
always hearkened to his little buddies with wide, dark eyes, and near
the endings of their stories the corners of his mouth would begin to
twitch. By the time they were finished talking, his freckles would be
mashed into a grin and his rusty head cocked to the side. His
favorite expression, I understand, was "G'wan!" and his nose was
broken twice before he was twelve. This was doubtless why he turned
it toward books.
Thirty years and four formal degrees later, he sat across from me
in my quarters in the lodge, and I called him Doc because everyone
did, because he had a license to cut people up and look inside them,
as well as doctoring to their philosophy, so to speak, and because he
looked as if he should be called Doc when he grinned and cocked his
head to the side and said, "G'wan!"
I wanted to punch him in the nose.
"Damn it! It's true!" I told him. "I fought with a bird of
fire!"
"We all hallucinated on Kasla," he said, raising one finger,
"because of fatigue," two fingers, "because the altitude affected our
circulatory systems and consequently our brains," three, "because of
the emotional stimulation," four, "and because we were pretty
oxygen-drunk."
"You just ran out of fingers, if you'll sit on your other hand for
a minute. So listen," I said, "it flew at me, and I swung at it, and
it knocked me out and broke my goggles. When I woke up, it was gone
and I was lying on the ledge. I think it was some sort of energy
creature. You saw my EEG, and it wasn't normal. I think it shocked
my nervous system when it touched me."
"You were knocked out because you hit your head against a rock--"
"It _caused_ me to fall back against the rock!"
"I agree with that part. The rock was real. But nowhere in the
universe has anyone ever discovered an 'energy creature.'"
"So? You probably would have said that about America a thousand
years ago."
"Maybe I would have. But that neurologist explained your EEG to
my satisfaction. Optical trauma. Why go out of your way to dream up
an exotic explanation for events? Easy ones generally turn out
better. You hallucinated and you stumbled."
"Okay," I said, "whenever I argue with you I generally need
ammunition. Hold on a minute."
I went to my closet and fetched it down from the top shelf. I
placed it on my bed and began unwrapping the blanket I had around it.
"I told you I took a swing at it," I said. "Well, I
connected--right before I went under. Here!"
I held up my climbing pick--brown, yellow, black and pitted--looking
as though it had fallen from outer space.
He took it into his hands and stared at it for a long time, then
he started to say something about ball lightning, changed his mind,
shook his head and placed the thing back on the blanket.
"I don't know," he finally said, and this time his freckles
remained unmashed, except for those at the edges of his hands which
got caught as he clenched them, slowly.
We planned. We mapped and charted and studied the photos. We plotted
our ascent and we started a training program.
While Doc and Stan had kept themselves in good shape, neither had
been climbing since Kasla. Kelly was in top condition. Henry was on
his way to fat. Mallardi and Vince, as always, seemed capable of
fantastic feats of endurance and virtuosity, had even climbed a couple
times during the past year, but had recently been living pretty high
on the tall hog, so to speak, and they wanted to get some practice.
So we picked a comfortable, decent-sized mountain and gave it ten days
to beat everyone back into shape. After that, we stuck to vitamins,
calisthenics and square diets while we completed our preparations.
During this time, Doc came up with seven shiny, alloy boxes, about six
by four inches and thin as a first book of poems, for us to carry on
our persons to broadcast a defense against the energy creatures which
he refused to admit existed.
One fine, bitter-brisk morning we were ready. The newsmen liked
me again. Much footage was taken of our gallant assemblage as we
packed ourselves into the fliers, to be delivered at the foot of the
lady mountain, there to contend for what was doubtless the final time
as the team we had been for so many years, against the waiting gray
and the lavender beneath the sunwhite flame.
We approached the mountain, and I wondered how much she weighed.
You know the way, for the first nine miles. So I'll skip over that.
It took us six days and part of a seventh. Nothing out of the
ordinary occurred. Some fog there was, and nasty winds, but once
below, forgotten.
Stan and Mallardi and I stood where the bird had occurred, waiting
for Doc and the others.
"So far, it's been a picnic," said Mallardi.
"Yeah," Stan acknowledged.
"No birds either."
"No," I agreed.
"Do you think Doc was right--about it being an hallucination?"
Mallardi asked. "I remember seeing things on Kasla...."
"As I recall," said Stan, "it was nymphs and an ocean of beer.
Why would anyone want to see hot birds?"
"Damfino."
"Laugh, you hyenas," I said. "But just wait till a flock flies
over."
Doc came up and looked around.
"This is the place?"
I nodded.
He tested the background radiation and half a dozen other things,
found nothing untoward, grunted and looked upwards.
We all did. Then we went there.
It was very rough for three days, and we only made another five
thousand feet during that time.
When we bedded down, we were bushed, and sleep came quickly. So
did Nemesis.
He was there again, only not quite so near this time. He burned
about twenty feet away, standing in the middle of the air, and the
point of his blade indicated me.
"_Go away_," he said, three times, without inflection.
"Go to hell," I tried to say.
He made as if he wished to draw nearer. He failed.
"Go away yourself," I said.
"_Climb back down. Depart. You may go no further._"
"But I am going further. All the way to the top."
"_No. You may not._"
"Stick around and watch," I said.
"_Go back._"
"If you want to stand there and direct traffic, that's your
business," I told him. "I'm going back to sleep."
I crawled over and shook Doc's shoulder, but when I looked back my
flaming visitor had departed.
"What is it?"
"Too late," I said. "He's been here and gone."
Doc sat up.
"The bird?"
"No, the thing with the sword."
"Where was he?"
"Standing out there," I gestured.
Doc hauled out his instruments and did many things with them for
ten minutes or so.
"Nothing," he finally said. "Maybe you were dreaming."
"Yeah, sure," I said. "Sleep tight," and I hit the sack again,
and this time I made it through to daylight without further fire or
ado.
It took us four days to reach sixty thousand feet. Rocks fell like
occasional cannonballs past us, and the sky was like a big pool, cool,
where pale flowers floated. When we struck sixty-three thousand, the
going got much better, and we made it up to seventy-five thousand in
two and a half more days. No fiery things stopped by to tell me to
turn back. Then came the unforeseeable, however, and we had enough in
the way of natural troubles to keep us cursing.
We hit a big, level shelf.
It was perhaps four hundred feet wide. As we advanced across it,
we realized that it did not strike the mountainside. It dropped off
into an enormous gutter of a canyon. We would have to go down again,
perhaps seven hundred feet, before we could proceed upward once more.
Worse yet, it led to a featureless face which strove for and achieved
perpendicularity for a deadly high distance: like miles. The top was
still nowhere in sight.
"Where do we go now?" asked Kelly, moving to my side.
"Down," I decided, "and we split up. We'll follow the big ditch
in both directions and see which way gives the better route up. We'll
meet back at the midway point."
We descended. Then Doc and Kelly and I went left, and the others
took the opposite way.
After an hour and a half, our trail came to an end. we stood
looking at nothing over the edge of something. Nowhere, during the
entire time, had we come upon a decent way up. I stretched out, my
head and shoulders over the edge, Kelly holding onto my ankles, and I
looked as far as I could to the right and up. There was nothing in
sight that was worth a facing movement.
"Hope the others had better luck," I said, after they'd dragged me
back.
"And if they haven't...?" asked Kelly.
"Let's wait."
They had.
It was risky, though.
There was no good way straight up out of the gap. The trail had
ended at a forty-foot wall which, when mounted, gave a clear view all
the way down. Leaning out as I had done and looking about two hundred
feet to the left and eighty feet higher, however, Mallardi had rested
his eyes on a rough way, but a way, nevertheless, leading up and west
and vanishing.
We camped in the gap that night. In the morning, I anchored my
line to a rock, Doc tending, and went out with the pneumatic pistol.
I fell twice, and made forty feet of trail by lunchtime.
I rubbed my bruises then, and Henry took over. After ten feet,
Kelly got out to anchor a couple of body-lengths behind him, and we
tended Kelly.
Then Stan blasted and Mallardi anchored. Then there had to be
three on the face. Then four. By sundown, we'd made a hundred-fifty
feet and were covered with white powder. A bath would have been nice.
We settled for ultrasonic shakedowns.
By lunch the next day, we were all out there, roped together, hugging
cold stone, moving slowly, painfully, slowly, not looking down much.
By day's end, we'd made it across, to the place where we could
hold on and feel something--granted, not much--beneath our boots. It
was inclined to be a trifle scant, however, to warrant less than a
full daylight assault. So we returned once more to the gap.
In the morning, we crossed.
The way kept its winding angle. We headed west and up. We
traveled a mile and made five hundred feet. We traveled another mile
and made perhaps three hundred.
Then a ledge occurred, about forty feet overhead.
Stan went up the hard way, using the gun, to see what he could
see.
He gestured, and we followed; and the view that broke upon us was
good.
Down right, irregular but wide enough, was our new camp.
The way above it, ice cream and whiskey sours and morning coffee
and a cigarette after dinner. It was beautiful and delicious: a
seventy-degree slope full of ledges and projections and good clean
stone.
"Hot damn!" said Kelly.
We all tended to agree.
We ate and we drank and we decided to rest our bruised selves that
afternoon.
We were in the twilight world now, walking where no man had ever
walked before, and we felt ourselves to be golden. It was good to
stretch out and try to unache.
I slept away the day, and when I awakened the sky was a bed of
glowing embers. I lay there too lazy to move, too full of sight to go
back to sleep. A meteor burnt its way bluewhite across the heavens.
After a time, there was another. I thought upon my position and
decided that reaching it was worth the price. The cold, hard
happiness of the heights filled me. I wiggled my toes.
After a few minutes, I stretched and sat up. I regarded the
sleeping forms of my companions. I looked out across the night as far
as I could see. Then I looked up at the mountain, then dropped my
eyes slowly among tomorrow's trail.
There was movement within shadow.
Something was standing about fifty feet away and ten feet above.
I picked up my pick and stood.
I crossed the fifty and stared up.
She was smiling, not burning.
A woman, an impossible woman.
Absolutely impossible. For one thing, she would just have to
freeze to death in a mini-skirt and a sleeveless shell-top. No
alternative. For another, she had very little to breath. Like,
nothing.
But it didn't seem to bother her. She waved. Her hair was dark
and long, and I couldn't see her eyes. The planes of her pale, high
cheeks, wide forehead, small chin corresponded in an unsettling
fashion with certain simple theorems which comprise the geometry of my
heart. If all angles, planes, curves be correct, it skips a beat,
then hurries to make up for it.
I worked it out, felt it do so, said, "Hello."
"Hello, Whitey," she replied.
"Come down," I said.
"No, you come up."
I swung my pick. When I reached the ledge she wasn't there. I
looked around, then I saw her.
She was seated on a rock twelve feet above me.
"How is it that you know my name?" I asked.
"Anyone can see what your name must be."
"All right," I agreed. "What's yours?"
"..." Her lips seemed to move, but I heard nothing.
"Come again?"
"I don't want a name," she said.
"Okay. I'll call you 'girl,' then."
She laughed, sort of.
"What are you doing here?" I asked.
"Watching you."
"Why?"
"To see whether you'll fall."
"I can save you the trouble," I said. "I won't."
"Perhaps," she said.
"Come down here."
"No, you come up here."
I climbed, but when I got there she was twenty feet higher.
"Girl, you climb well," I said, and she laughed and turned away.
I pursued her for five minutes and couldn't catch her. There was
something unnatural about the way she moved.
I stopped climbing when she turned again. We were still about
twenty feet apart.
"I take it you do not really wish me to join you," I said.
"Of course I do, but you must catch me first." And she turned
once more, and I felt a certain fury within me.
It was written that no one could outclimb Mad Jack. I had written
it.
I swung my pick and moved like a lizard.
I was near to her a couple of times, but never near enough.
The day's aches began again in my muscles, but I pulled my way up
without slackening my pace. I realized, faintly, that the camp was
far below me now, and that I was climbing alone through the dark up a
strange slope. But I did not stop. Rather, I hurried, and my breath
began to come hard in my lungs. I heard her laughter, and it was a
goad. Then I came upon a two-inch ledge, and she was moving along it.
I followed, around a big bulge of rock to where it ended. Then she
was ninety feet above me, at the top of a smooth pinnacle. It was
like a tapering, branchless tree. How she'd accomplished it, I didn't
know. I was gasping by then, but I looped my line around it and began
to climb. As I did this, she spoke:
"Don't you ever tire, Whitey? I thought you would have collapsed
by now."
I hitched up the line and climbed further.
"You can't make it up here, you know."
"I don't know," I grunted.
"Why do you want so badly to climb here? There are other nice
mountains."
"This is the biggest, girl. That's why."
"It can't be done."
"Then why all this bother to discourage me? Why not just let the
mountain do it?"
As I neared her, she vanished. I made it to the top, where she
had been standing, and I collapsed there.
Then I heard her voice again and turned my head. She was on a
ledge, perhaps eighty feet away.
"I didn't think you'd make it this far," she said. "You are a
fool. Good-by, Whitey." She was gone.
I sat there on the pinnacle's tiny top--perhaps four square feet of
top--and I know that I couldn't sleep there, because I'd fall. And I
was tired.
I recalled my favorite curses and I said them all, but I didn't
feel any better. I couldn't let myself go to sleep. I looked down.
I knew the way was long. I knew she didn't think I could make it.
I began the descent.
The following morning when they shook me, I was still tired. I told
them the last night's tale, and they didn't believe me. Not until
later in the day, that is, when I detoured us around the bulge and
showed them the pinnacle, standing there like a tapering, branchless
tree, ninety feet in the middle of the air.
We went steadily upward for the next two days. We made slightly under
ten thousand feet. Then we spent a day hammering and hacking our way
up a great flat face. Six hundred feet of it. Then our way was to
the right and upward. Before long we were ascending the western side
of the mountain. When we broke ninety thousand feet, we stopped to
congratulate ourselves that we had just surpassed the Kasla climb and
to remind ourselves that we had not hit the halfway mark. It took us
another two and a half days to do that, and by then the land lay like
a map beneath us.
And then, that night, we all saw the creature with the sword.
He came and stood near our camp, and he raised his sword above his
head, and it blazed with such a terrible intensity that I slipped on
my goggles. His voice was all thunder and lightning this time:
"_Get off this mountain!_" he said. "_Now! Turn back! Go down!
Depart!_"
And then a shower of stones came down from above and rattled about
us. Doc tossed his slim, shiny, case, causing it to skim along the
ground toward the creature.
The light went out, and we were alone.
Doc retrieved his case, took tests, met with the same success as
before--_i.e._, none. But now at least he didn't think I was some kind
of balmy, unless of course he thought we all were.
"Not a very effective guardian," Henry suggested.
"We've a long way to go yet," said Vince, shying a stone through
the space the creature had occupied. "I don't like it if the thing
can cause a slide."
"That was just a few pebbles," said Stan.
"Yeah, but what if he decided to start them fifty thousand feet
higher?"
"Shut up!" said Kelly. "Don't give him any idea. He might be
listening."
For some reason, we drew closer together. Doc made each of us
describe what we had seen, and it appeared that we all had seen the
same thing.
"All right," I said, after we'd finished. "Now you've all seen
it, who wants to go back?"
There was silence.
After perhaps half a dozen heartbeats, Henry said, "I want the
whole story. It looks like a good one. I'm willing to take my
chances with angry energy creatures to get it."
"I don't know what the thing is," said Kelly. "Maybe it's no
energy creature. Maybe it's something--supernatural--I know what you'll
say, Doc. I'm just telling you how it struck me. If there are such
things, this seems a good place for them. Point is--whatever it is, I
don't care. I want this mountain. If it could have stopped us, I
think it would've done it already. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it can.
Maybe it's laid some trap for us higher up. But I want this mountain.
Right now, it means more to me than anything. If I don't go up, I'll
spend all my time wondering about it--and then I'll probably come back
and try it again some day, when it gets so I can't stand thinking
about it any more. Only then, maybe the rest of you won't be