The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

CREATURE OF THE SNOWS by William Sambrot

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.”

He smiled amiably at Ed. “That’s a couple of weeks’ march up from the nearest railroad, and ought to get you acclimatized nicely. Plenty of experienced porters at Namche, all Sherpas. We’ve lined up a couple of expert mountain climbers with Himalayan background. And expedition leader will be Doctor Schenk—top man in his field.”

“What is his field?” Ed asked gloomily.

“Zoology. Whatever these things are in this picture, they’re animal, which is his field. Everyone will be sworn to secrecy; you’ll be the only one permitted to use a camera, Ed. This could be the biggest thing you’ll ever cover, if these things are what I think they are.”

“What do you think they are?”

“An unknown species of man—or sub-man,” his boss said, and prudently Ed remained silent. Two months would tell the tale.

But two months didn’t tell. Oh, there were plenty of wild rumors by the Nepalese all along the upper route. Hushed stories of the two-legged creature that walked like a man. A monster the Sherpas called Yeti. Legends. Strange encounters; drums sounding from snow-swept heights; wild snatches of song drifting down from peaks that were inaccessible to ordinary men. And one concrete fact: a ban, laid on by the Buddhist monks, against the taking of any life in the high Himalayas. What life? Ed wondered.

Stories, legends—but nothing else.

Two months of it. Starting from the tropical flatlands, up through the lush, exotic rain forest, where sun struggled through immense trees festooned with orchids. Two months, moving up into the arid foothills, where foliage abruptly ceased and the rocks and wind took over. Up and ever up, to where the first heavy snow pack lay. And higher still, following the trail laid out by the glider pilot— and what impelled a man, Ed wondered, to soar over Mount Everest in a homemade glider?

Two months, during which Ed had come to dislike Doctor Schenk intensely. Tall, saturnine, smelling strongly of formaldehyde, Schenk classified everything into terms of vertebrate, invertebrate.

So now, standing on this wind-scoured ridge with the shadows falling into the abysses on either side, Ed peered through ice-encrusted goggles, watching Schenk arguing with the guides. He motioned to the ledge above, and obediently the Sherpas moved toward it. Obviously that would be the final camping spot. The two months were over by several days; Schenk was within his rights to call it quits. It was only Ed’s assurances that the plateau they were seeking lay just ahead that had kept Schenk from bowing out exactly on the appointed time; that and the burning desire to secure his niche in zoology forever with a new specimen: biped, erect-walking—what?

But the plateau just ahead, and the one after that, and all the rest beyond had proved just as empty as those behind.

A bust. Whatever the unknown creatures were the glider pilot had photographed, they would remain just that—unknown.

And yet, as Ed slogged slowly up toward where the porters were setting up the bright blue-and-yellow nylon tents, he was nagged by a feeling that that odd-shaped pinnacle ahead looked awfully much like the one in the blurred photograph. With his unfailing memory for pictures, Ed remembered the tall, jagged cone that had cast a black shadow across a snowy plateau, pointing directly toward the little group that was in the center of the picture.

But Schenk wasn’t having any more plateaus. He shook his head vehemently, white-daubed lips a grim line on his sun-blistered face. “Last camp, Ed,” he said firmly. “We agreed this would be the final plateau. I’m already a week behind schedule. If the monsoons hit us, we could be in serious trouble below. We have to get started back. I know exactly how you feel, but—I’m afraid this is it.”

Later that night, while the wind moved ceaselessly, sucking at the tent, they burrowed in sleeping bags, talking.

“There must be some basis of fact in those stories,” Ed said to Doctor Schenk. “I’ve given them a lot of thought. Has it occurred to you that every one of the sightings, the few face-to-face meetings of the natives and these—these unknowns, has generally been just around dawn, and usually when the native was alone?”

Schenk smiled dubiously. “Whatever this creature may be—and I’m convinced that it’s either a species of large bear, or one of the great anthropoids—it certainly must keep off the well-traveled routes. There are very few passes through these peaks, of course, and it would be quite simple for them to avoid these locales.”

“But we’re not on any known trail,” Ed said thoughtfully. “I believe our methods have been all wrong—stringing out a bunch of men, looking for trails in the snow. All we’ve done is announce our presence to anything with ears for miles around. That glider pilot made no sound; he came on them without warning.”

Ed looked intently at Schenk. “I’d like to try that peak up ahead—and the plateau beyond.” When Schenk uttered a protesting cry, Ed said, “Wait; this time I’ll go alone— with just one Sherpa guide. We could leave several hours before daybreak. No equipment, other than oxygen, food for one meal—and my cameras, of course. Maintain a strict silence. We could be back before noon. Will you wait long enough for this one last try?” Schenk hesitated. “Only a few hours more,” Ed urged.

Schenk stared at him, then he nodded slowly. “Agreed. But aren’t you forgetting the most important item of all?” When Ed looked blank, Schenk smiled. “The gas gun. If you should run across one, we’ll need more proof than just your word for it.”

There was very little wind, no moon, but cold, the cold approaching that of outer space, as Ed and one Sherpa porter started away from the sleeping camp, up the shattered floor of an ice river that swept down from the jagged peak ahead.

They moved up, hearing only the squeak of equipment, the peculiar gritty sound of crampons biting into packed snow, an occasional hollow crash of falling ice blocks. To the east already a faint line of gray was visible; daylight was hours away, but at this tremendous height sunrise came early. They moved slowly, the thin air cutting cruelly into their lungs, moving up, up.

They stopped once for hot chocolate from a vacuum bottle, and Ed slapped the Sherpa’s shoulder, grinning, pointing ahead to where the jagged peak glowed pink and gold in the first slanting rays of the sun. The Sherpa looked at the peak and quickly shifted his glance to the sky. He gave a long, careful look at the gathering clouds in the east, then muttered something, shaking his head, pointing back, back down to where the camp was hidden in the inky shadows of enormous boulders.

When Ed resumed the climb, the Sherpa removed the long nylon line which had joined them. The route was now comparatively level, on a huge sweeping expanse of snow-covered glacier that flowed about at the base of the peak. The Sherpa, no longer in the lead, began dropping behind as Ed pressed eagerly forward.

The sun was up, and with it the wind began keening again, bitterly sharp, bringing with it a scent of coining snow. In the east, beyond the jagged peak just ahead, the immense escarpment of the Himalayas was lost in approaching cloud. Ed hurried as best he could; it would snow, and soon. He’d have to make better time.

But above, the sky was blue, infinitely blue, and behind, the sun was well up, although the camp was still lost in night below. The peak thrust up ahead, near, with what appeared to be a natural pass skirting its flank. Ed made for it. As he circled an upthrust ridge of reddish, rotten rock, he glanced ahead. The plateau spread out before him, gently sloping, a natural amphitheater full of deep, smooth snow, with peaks surrounding it, and the central peak thrusting a long black shadow directly across the center. He paused, glancing back. The Sherpa had stopped, well below him, his face a dark blur, looking up, gesticulating frantically, pointing to the clouds. Ed motioned, then moved around, leaning against the rock, peering ahead.

That great shadow against the snow was certainly similar to the one in the photo—only, of course, the shadow pointed west now, when, later, it would point northwest, as the sun swung to the south. And when it did, most certainly it was the precise— He sucked in a sharp, lung-piercing breath.

He stared, squinting against the rising wind that seemed to blow from earth’s outermost reaches. Three figures stirred slightly, and suddenly leaped into focus, almost perfectly camouflaged against the snow and wind-blasted rock. Three figures, not more than a hundred feet below him. Two small, one larger.

He leaned forward, his heart thudding terribly at this twenty-thousand-foot height. A tremor of excitement shook him. My Lord—it was true. They existed. He was looking at what was undeniably a female and two smaller—what? Apes?

They were covered with downy hair, nearly white, resembling nothing so much as tight-fitting leotards. The female was exactly like any woman on earth—except for the hair. No larger than most women, with arms slightly longer, more muscular. Thighs heavier, legs out of proportion to the trunk—shorter. Breasts full and firm. Not apes.

Hardly breathing, Ed squinted, staring, motionless. Not apes. Not standing so erectly. Not with those broad, high brows. Not with the undeniable intelligence of the two young capering about their mother. Not—and seeing this, Ed trembled against the freezing rock—not with the sudden affectionate sweep of the female as she lifted the smaller and pressed it to her breast, smoothing back hair from its face with a motion common to every human mother on earth. A wonderfully tender gesture.

What were they? Less than human? Perhaps. He couldn’t be certain, but he thought he heard a faint gurgle of laughter from the female, fondling the small one, and the sound stirred him strangely. Doctor Schenk had assured him that no animal was capable of genuine laughter; only man.

But they laughed, those three, and, hearing it, watching the mother tickling the younger one, watching its delighted squirming, Ed knew that in that marvelous little grouping below, perfectly lighted, perfectly staged, he was privileged to observe one of the earth’s most guarded secrets.

He should get started, shooting his pictures; afterward he should stun the group into unconsciousness with the gas gun and then send the Sherpa back down for Doctor Schenk and the others. Clouds were massing, immensities of blue-black. Already the first few flakes of snow, huge and wet, drifted against his face.

But for a long moment more he remained motionless, oddly unwilling to do anything to destroy the harmony, the aching purity of the scene below, so vividly etched in brilliant light and shadow. The female, child slung casually on one hip, stood erect, hand shading her eyes, and Ed grinned. Artless, but perfectly posed. She was looking carefully about and above, scanning the great outcroppings of rock, obviously searching for something.

Then she paused. She was staring directly at him.

Ed froze, even though he knew he was perfectly concealed by the deep shadows of the high cliff behind him. She was still looking directly at him, and then, slowly her hand came up. She waved.

He shivered uncontrollably in the biting wind, trying to remain motionless. The two young ones suddenly began to jump up and down and show every evidence of joy. And suddenly Ed knew.

He turned slowly, very slowly, and with the sensation of a freezing knife plunging deeply into his chest, he saw the male less than five yards away.

It was huge, easily twice the size of the female below. And, crazily, Ed thought of Schenk’s little lecture, given what seemed like eons ago, in the incredible tropical grove far below, and six weeks before, where rhododendrons grew in wild profusion and enormous butterflies flitted about: “In primitive man,” Schenk had said, “as in the great apes today, the male was far larger than the female.”

The gas gun was hopelessly out of reach, securely strapped to his shoulder pack. Ed stared, knowing there was absolutely nothing he could do to protect himself before this creature, fully eight feet tall, with arms as big as Ed’s own thighs, and eyes (My Lord—blue eyes!) boring into his. There was a light of savage intelligence there—and something else.

The creature made no move against him, and Ed stared at it, breathing rapidly, shallowly and with difficulty, noting with his photographer’s eyes the immense chest span, the easy rise and fall of his breathing, the large, square, white teeth, the somber cast of his face. There was long, sandy fur on the shoulders, chest and back, shortening to off-white over the rest of the magnificent torso. Ears rather small and close to the head. Short, thick neck, rising up from the broad shoulders to the back of the head in a straight line. Toes long and definitely prehensile.

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?