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.
V
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 available. Let's face it, we're a good climbing team. Maybe the best in the business. Probably. If it can be done, I think we can do it."
"I'll second that," said Stan.
"What you said, Kelly," said Mallardi, "about it being supernatural--it's funny, because I felt the same thing for a minute when I was looking at it. It reminds me of something out of the _Divine Comedy_. If you recall, Purgatory was a mountain. And then I thought of the angel who guarded the eastern way to Eden. Eden had gotten moved to the top of Purgatory by Dante--and there was this angel....Anyhow, I felt almost like I was committing some sin I didn't know about by being here. But now that I think it over, a man can't be guilty of something he doesn't know is wrong, can he? And I didn't see that thing flashing any angel ID card. So I'm willing to go up and see what's on top, unless he comes back with the Tablets of the Law, with a new one written in at the bottom."
"In Hebrew or Italian?" asked Doc.
"To satisfy you, I suppose they'd have to be drawn up in the form of equations."
"No," he said. "Kidding aside, I felt something funny too, when I saw and heard it. And we didn't really hear it, you know. It skipped over the senses and got its message right into our brains. If you think back over our descriptions of what we experienced, we each 'heard' different words telling us to go away. If it can communicate a meaning as well as a pyschtranslator, I wonder if it can communicate an emotion, also....You thought of an angel too, didn't you, Whitey?"
"Yes," I said.
"That makes it almost unanimous then, doesn't it?"
Then we all turned to Vince, because he had no Christian background at all, having been raised as a Buddhist on Ceylon.
"What were your feelings concerning the thing?" Doc asked him.
"It was a Deva," he said, "which is sort of like an angel, I guess. I had the impression that every step I took up this mountain gave me enough bad karma to fill a lifetime. Except I haven't believed in it that way since I was a kid. I want to go ahead, up. Even if that feeling was correct, I want to see the top of this mountain."
"So do I," said Doc.
"That makes it unanimous," I said.
"Well, everyone hang onto his angelsbane," said Stan, "and let's sack out."
"Good idea."
"Only let's spread out a bit," said Doc, "so that anything falling won't get all of us together."
We did that cheerful thing and slept untroubled by heaven.
Our way kept winding right, until we were at a hundred forty-four thousand feet and were mounting the southern slopes. Then it jogged back, and by a hundred fifty we were mounting to the west once more.
Then, during a devilish, dark and tricky piece of scaling, up a smooth, concave bulge ending in an overhang, the bird came down once again.
If we hadn't been roped together, Stan would have died. As it was, we almost all died.
Stan was lead man, as its wings splashed sudden flames against the violet sky. It came down from the overhang as though someone had kicked a bonfire over its edge, headed straight toward him and faded out at a distance of about twelve feet. He fell then, almost taking the rest of us with him.
We tensed our muscles and took the shock.
He was battered a bit, but unbroken. We made it up to the overhang, but went no further that day.
Rocks did fall, but we found another overhang and made camp beneath it.
The bird did not return that day, but the snakes came.
Big, shimmering scarlet serpents coiled about the crags, wound in and out of jagged fields of ice and gray stone. Sparks shot along their sinuous lengths. They coiled and unwound, stretched and turned, spat fires at us. It seemed they were trying to drive us from beneath the sheltering place to where the rocks could come down upon us.
Doc advanced upon the nearest one, and it vanished as it came within the field of his projector. He studied the place where it had lain, then hurried back.
"The frost is still on the punkin," he said.
"Huh?" said I.
"Not a bit of ice was melted beneath it."
"Indicating?"
"Illusion," said Vince, and he threw a stone at another and it passed through the thing.