“What’s on your mind, sonny?” There was a trace of careless indulgence in Eckert’s voice and his eyes were fixed hungrily on the glowing green rectangle.
“Don’t you get it? These creatures are building a glassfibre replica of Mount Everest!”
“Balls,” Eckert commented in an amiable voice, without turning his head. He lay perfectly still, watching as the group of aliens moved off purposefully. They took a course which led them only slightly to the left of the sheltering hillock, but none of them noticed the two men. As soon as they had vanished into the flurried snow Eckert turned to Coburn, pistol at the ready.
“This is the parting of the ways for us,” he said. “I’m going through the green light.”
“I want to go too.”
“I daresay, but you’re the one guy who could blow the whistle on me. Sorry.” He aimed the pistol.
“Our hairy friends will hear if you shoot me. They could be all round us. They could go after you.”
Eckert considered. “That’s right. I’d be better to wreck the black boxes on those posts after I’m through and close the door behind me. That’ll hold you in the meantime.” He thrust the muzzle of the gun into Coburn’s solar plexus with the force of a karate blow. Coburn felt the breath driven from his lungs, and—although he remained conscious—his paralysed thorax refused to take in any more air. He began to worry about dying. Glutinous clicking noises were emerging from his throat as Eckert stood up and, with red-furred head bent low, ran towards the portal.
He had almost reached it when another gorilla stepped through.
Eckert shot the gorilla in the stomach. It sat down with a bump, clutched its middle, then gently fell backwards. Honking shouts came from the direction in which the original group had vanished. Eckert glanced all around him, jumped into the green rectangle and disappeared from view.
Coburn had a sudden conviction that Toner II had become an even more unhealthy place for him to be. So intense was the feeling that he overcame his paralysis and rose to his knees in an effort to reach the portal, but already he could hear the aliens returning and knew he could not escape in time. He threw himself down again as running humanoid figures emerged blurrily from the haze. Four of them were of the now-familiar gorilla type, but two were hairless, much thinner, with green-tinted skins partially covered by yellow tunics. Their bald heads glistened like carefully polished apples.
They all gathered round the supine, motionless form of the shot gorilla, talked quietly for a moment, and began to scan the immediate vicinity with fierce, brooding scowls. Coburn abruptly became aware of Eckert’s footprints leading directly from the portal to his protective hillock, and a moment later the aliens noticed the same thing. They spread out in a crescent and began to advance on Coburn’s position. He was trying to sink into the unyielding ground when there was an unexpected diversion.
Patsy Eckert stumbled back out through the rectangular brilliance of the portal.
He was coated with real snow from head to foot, shivering so violently he could barely stand, and the little to be seen of his face beneath its icy covering had assumed a corpse-like pallor. One of the gorillas saw Eckert immediately, gave a shout and the others ran at him in a bunch. Eckert tried to raise his pistol but it dropped from his fingers. A hairless creature brought him down with a passable football tackle and he was lost to view in a confusion of alien bodies and limbs.
In his place of comparative safety Coburn’s ideas about the glassfibre copy of Mount Everest were crystallizing. If his thesis was correct, the portal did not lead to just any random location on Earth—it had to emerge at the corresponding point on the real Everest so that the survey teams could easily transfer their measurements. Eckert therefore had emerged on Mount Everest in the middle of winter, in an environment where a man could live for only a matter of seconds without a heated suit and facemask. Apparently the gorilla beings could survive in those conditions with their long shaggy coats, and if they had been surreptitiously visiting Earth for a couple of centuries …
My God, Coburn thought, I’m looking at Abominable Snowmen!
All the old unconfirmed sightings, all the inexplicable footprints in the Himalayan snow, all the legends of the Yeti had originated with these alien creatures who—for reasons of their own—were making a plastic imitation of Earth’s highest mountain.
The mystery of the gorillas’ motives was threatening to swamp Coburn’s mind when he was distracted by new developments near the portal. Ignoring the body of their dead companion, the aliens gathered up the helpless Eckert and carried him away into the green-tinted mists. They passed close by the hillock, again without noticing Coburn. His breathing had returned to normal and the path was now clear for him to leap through the portal, but he had learned there was no escape that way. He took a sustainer pellet from his belt pouch, sucked on it thoughtfully, then set off to follow the group of aliens at a discreet distance.
Less than a kilometre along the slope, at an area of rocky outcroppings, they were met by a party of four of the hairless beings who stopped to examine the still-shivering form of Patsy Eckert. One of them put his face too close to Eckert, who demonstrated his returning powers of mobility by punching it in the region of the nose. Coburn felt a grudging respect for some aspects of the ginger man’s character as he edged near enough to hear what the aliens were saying. He had begun to believe both types of creature were rather shortsighted and he felt little sense of immediate danger in wriggling in so close.
“… by what we found in the ship there were two Earthmen,” one of the newly arrived green humanoids was honking in Galingua. “We must find the other before the chief gets here.”
“I suppose we’ll get the blame as usual,” the smallest gorilla complained. “I always said we should have orbital defences.”
“And attract attention? You know how strict the Galactic Games Committee are about infringements of the rules. If they found our mountaineering team practising the ascent of Everest in advance of the Games we’d be disqualified for a minimum of ten centuries.”
The small gorilla was not satisfied. “Why did they have to pick Everest, anyway?”
“You’re beginning to sound disloyal, Vello,” the hairless alien said. “Everest is an excellent mountain, well up to competition standard. And you know how difficult it is for the Committee’s scouts to find a suitable new mountain every five centuries when they can choose only from worlds they are sure will be eligible to join the Galactic Commune before the next Games. It’s far from easy, specially when the natives have good eyes and start making UFO searches,”
“I still don’t think this practice model is worth all the effort.”
“My dear boy, you’re obviously too young to appreciate the value of the prestige, the enormous political capital a competing world acquires by fielding a winning team.” The others joined in, ganging up on the small gorilla. Coburn became so interested in trying to decipher the babble of voices that he incautiously raised his head above the level of the glassfibre rock. A chilling sensation gripped him as he found his eyes met by those of Eckert, who was lying at the aliens’ feet. Coburn did not know why he should feel alarmed at having been seen by the other human, because the gorillas and hairless creatures were now in a full-scale bull session and had not noticed him. He raised one hand and wiggled the fingers slightly in a comradely greeting—Eckert had been prepared to kill him earlier, but now they were two Earthmen on an alien world, facing a hostile environment together.