The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

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.

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.

The people seemed waiting for something. As we came through the crowd, no one spoke. But Barbank paid no heed. We halted up in front; and he talked on.

“What’s more,” he was saying, “I don’t intend to bother with filthy Sherpa porters for the upper camps. Planes will drop the stuff.”

That set me off. “The Sherpas are brave men,” I told him, “and good mountaineers.”

“Rot,” he snapped. “They’re beasts of burden.” He pointed at the Holy Man. “There’s a sample for you. Look at that smirk. Pleased as punch with his own hocus-pocus— dirt, his nakedness, and all. They’ve made no progress since the Year One.”

The Holy Man was naked, or nearly so, but he was clean; his loincloth was spotless white. “Perhaps,” I answered, “they’re trying for something else.”

And slowly, then, the Holy Man looked up. He spoke to Barbank. “We are,” he said.

I met his eyes—and suddenly the statue came alive. It was as though I had seen only the shell of his serenity; now I saw its source. I felt that it was born, not in any rejection of the world, but in a knowledge of every human agony and joy.

“Yes, we are trying,” the Holy Man went on. His voice was beautiful and strangely accented, and there was humor in it, and irony. “But for something else? I do not think so. It is just that we are trying differently, we of the East and West—and sometimes one cannot succeed without the other.” Pausing, he measured Barbank with those eyes. “That is why I can help you, if you will only ask.”

Barbank’s mouth curled. “He’s heard the gossip down in the bazaar,” he said to me. “Well, he won’t get a penny out of me.”

The smile danced. “Must I explain? A mountain is much more than rock and ice. No man can conquer the hardest mountain in the world. His conquest can be only of himself.”

I shivered. That was what Mallory had said.

“You damned old humbug!” Barbank’s laugh roared out. “Are you trying to tell me you can help me reach the top?”

“I think I’d put it differently,” the Holy Man replied. ‘To be precise, I must say this. You never will achieve your heart’s desire without my aid. Your way of doing things is not quite good enough.”

Barbank’s neck reddened. “Oh, isn’t it?” he snarled. “Well, come along and watch! I can use one more mangy porter, I suppose.”

The Holy Man raised his fragile hands. “Thank you—but no,” he said gently.

Barbank spat in the dust. He pivoted and strode off, pushing roughly through the murmuring crowd.

It was then I decided that he must never be the Man on Top.

It is a long way from Darjeeling through Nepal to that dreadful mountain which the Tibetans call the Father of the Snows. The journey takes some weeks. We were eleven white men, but we soon found that we were not an expedition in the usual sense. We were Barbank’s retainers, walled off by his contempt.

The others left him pretty much alone. I couldn’t. The Holy Man’s prediction was my obsession now. At every chance, I talked to Barbank about the mysteries of the peak —the awful Snowmen, whom the Tibetans all swear exist, and the same dark, pulsating flying things which Smythe had seen high on haunted Everest. I said that, very possibly, Madsen, James and Leverhome had reached the summit first—that he might get to be the Man on Top only to find some evidence they’d left.

By the time we reached our Base Camp on the Great East Glacier, I had become his enemy, who had to be put to shame. And there was only one way to do that. Though Kenningshaw and Lane were better men, he chose me for the assault. I had to be there, to see the Man on Top with my own eyes. That was fine. Because I could only stop Barbank from being first on top by being first myself.

We followed the traditional approach—up the Great East Glacier and the West Wall of the South Col—up to Camp Five, nearly five miles above the sea. And, all the way, the mountain laughed at us. Against us, it sent its cruel light cavalry, wind, mist and snow—harassing us, keeping us aware of deadly forces held in reserve.

Yet, when we stood at Camp Five and watched the plane from India trying to drop the final camp higher than any man had camped before, the sky was clear. We watched the pilot try, and circle, and lose eight separate loads. The ninth remained; its grapples held.

“I bought two dozen, all identical,” said Barbank. “I told you there’s nothing these natives do that we can’t do better.”

He and I reached Camp Six, at over twenty-six thousand feet, late the next afternoon. We set the tent up, and weighted it with cylinders of oxygen. We ate supper out of self-heating cans and crawled into our sleeping bags.

We rose before dawn, and found that the fine weather still held. Barbank looked at the vast dark mountain, at the broad yellow band beneath the summit pyramid, at the depths of rock and glacial ice below.

“And so I won’t succeed?” he taunted me. “You bloody fool.”

We went up. We mounted to the ridge, and stared down the awful precipice of the South Face. We worked toward the second step, where James and Leverhome were last seen. Small, keen lancets of wind thrust through our clothes down to the flowing blood. The summit was hidden behind its plume of cloud.

Toward that plume we worked. Even with oxygen, it was agony. Up there, the air is thin. The thinness is in your flesh and bones, and in your brain. You move, and pause, and your whole attention is confined to the next move.

On such a mountain, physically, there can be no question over who shall lead. But morally there can. I can remember husbanding my strength, giving Barbank a grudging minimum of aid. I can remember Barbank weakening, relinquishing the lead high on a summit slab. I can remember the look in Barbank’s eyes.

The hours dragged. I moved. I ached. I forced myself to try to move again. Endlessly.

Then, without warning, the cloud-plume enfolded us. The Top of the World was fifty feet away. I knew that I could be the Man on Top, that I had Barbank where I wanted him. I stopped. I don’t know why. I laughed and waved him on. He passed by, hating me.

He reached the summit edge. He turned his head. I could not see his lips, but I could feel their curl of triumph and their contempt. He turned again. And, as he turned, a single gust screamed past us and laid the summit bare. I saw its rock. I saw a wide depression packed with snow.

But in the center there was no snow at all, for it had melted. On his mat, naked and serene, the Holy Man was waiting. He smiled upon us with his statue’s smile.

In that tone of pleased surprise with which one welcomes an unexpected guest, he spoke to Barbank. “How did you get up here?”

A strange sound came from Barbank’s leather mask. Automatically, he pointed—at the harsh summit, the ridge, the slabs, the miles of rock and ice and snow.

The Holy Man lifted both his hands. His gesture was exquisite, polite, incredulous.

“You mean,” he said, “you walked?”