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?
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 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.
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.