The Highest Mountain
Date: 2016-01-07T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science fiction; Short stories; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction

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Title: The Highest Mountain

Author: Bryce Walton

Release date: January 7, 2016 [eBook #50868]
Most recently updated: October 22, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN ***

THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN

By BRYCE WALTON

Illustrated by BOB HAYES

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Galaxy Science Fiction June 1952.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

First one up this tallest summit in the Solar
System was a rotten egg ... a very rotten egg!

Bruce heard their feet on the gravel outside and got up reluctantly to open the door for them. He'd been reading some of Byron's poems he'd sneaked aboard the ship; after that he had been on the point of dozing off, and now one of those strangely realistic dreams would have to be postponed for a while. Funny, those dreams. There were faces in them of human beings, or of ghosts, and other forms that weren't human at all, but seemed real and alive—except that they were also just parts of a last unconscious desire to escape death. Maybe that was it.

"'Oh that my young life were a lasting dream, my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the 'morrow," Bruce said. He smiled without feeling much of anything and added, "Thanks, Mr. Poe."

Jacobs and Anhauser stood outside. The icy wind cut through and into Bruce, but he didn't seem to notice. Anhauser's bulk loomed even larger in the special cold-resisting suiting. Jacobs' thin face frowned slyly at Bruce.

"Come on in, boys, and get warm," Bruce invited.

"Hey, poet, you're still here!" Anhauser said, looking astonished.

"We thought you'd be running off somewhere," Jacobs said.

Bruce reached for the suit on its hook, started climbing into it. "Where?" he asked. "Mars looks alike wherever you go. Where did you think I'd be running to?"

"Any place just so it was away from here and us," Anhauser said.

"I don't have to do that. You are going away from me. That takes care of that, doesn't it?"

"Ah, come on, get the hell out of there," Jacobs said. He pulled the revolver from its holster and pointed it at Bruce. "We got to get some sleep. We're starting up that mountain at five in the morning."

"I know," Bruce said. "I'll be glad to see you climb the mountain."

Outside, in the weird light of the double moons, Bruce looked up at the gigantic overhang of the mountain. It was unbelievable. The mountain didn't seem to belong here. He'd thought so when they'd first hit Mars eight months back and discovered the other four rockets that had never got back to Earth—all lying side by side under the mountain's shadow, like little white chalk marks on a tallyboard.

They'd estimated its height at over 45,000 feet, which was a lot higher than any mountain on Earth. Yet Mars was much older, geologically. The entire face of the planet was smoothed into soft, undulating red hills by erosion. And there in the middle of barren nothingness rose that one incredible mountain. On certain nights when the stars were right, it had seemed to Bruce as though it were pointing an accusing finger at Earth—or a warning one.

With Jacobs and Anhauser and the remainder of the crew of the ship, Mars V, seven judges sat in a semi-circle and Bruce stood there in front of them for the inquest.

In the middle of the half-moon of inquisition, with his long legs stretched out and his hands folded on his belly, sat Captain Terrence. His uniform was black. On his arm was the silver fist insignia of the Conqueror Corps. Marsha Rennels sat on the extreme right and now there was no emotion at all on her trim, neat face.

He remembered her as she had been years ago, but at the moment he wasn't looking very hard to see anything on her face. It was too late. They had gotten her young and it was too late.

Terrence's big, square face frowned a little. Bruce was aware suddenly of the sound of the bleak, never-ending wind against the plastilene shelter. He remembered the strange misty shapes that had come to him in his dreams, the voices that had called to him, and how disappointed he had been when he woke from them.

"This is a mere formality," Terrence finally said, "since we all know you killed Lieutenant Doran a few hours ago. Marsha saw you kill him. Whatever you say goes on the record, of course."

"For whom?" Bruce asked.

"What kind of question is that? For the authorities on Earth when we get back."

"When you get back? Like the crews of those other four ships out there?" Bruce laughed without much humor.

Terrence rubbed a palm across his lips, dropped the hand quickly again to his belly. "You want to make a statement or not? You shot Doran in the head with a rifle. No provocation for the attack. You've wasted enough of my time with your damn arguments and anti-social behavior. This is a democratic group. Everyone has his say. But you've said too much, and done too much. Freedom doesn't allow you to go around killing fellow crew-members!"

"Any idea that there was any democracy or freedom left died on Venus," Bruce said.

"Now we get another lecture!" Terrence exploded. He leaned forward. "You're sick, Bruce. They did a bad psych job on you. They should never have sent you on this trip. We need strength, all the strength we can find. You don't belong here."

"I know," Bruce agreed indifferently. "I was drafted for this trip. I told them I shouldn't be brought along. I said I didn't want any part of it."

"Because you're afraid. You're not Conqueror material. That's why you backed down when we all voted to climb the mountain. And what the devil does Venus—?"

Max Drexel's freckles slipped into the creases across his high forehead. "Haven't you heard him expounding on the injustice done to the Venusian aborigines, Captain? If you haven't, you aren't thoroughly educated to the crackpot idealism still infecting certain people."

"I haven't heard it," Terrence admitted. "What injustice?"

Bruce said, "I guess it couldn't really be considered an injustice any longer. Values have changed too much. Doran and I were part of the crew of that first ship to hit Venus, five years ago. Remember? One of the New Era's more infamous dates. Drexel says the Venusians were aborigines. No one ever got a chance to find out. We ran into this village. No one knows how old it was. There were intelligent beings there. One community left on the whole planet, maybe a few thousand inhabitants. They made their last mistake when they came out to greet us. Without even an attempt at communication, they were wiped out. The village was burned and everything alive in it was destroyed."

Bruce felt the old weakness coming into his knees, the sweat beginning to run down his face. He took a deep breath and stood there before the cold nihilistic stares of fourteen eyes.

"No," Bruce said. "I apologize. None of you know what I'm talking about."

Terrence nodded. "You're psycho. It's as simple as that. They pick the most capable for these conquests. Even the flights are processes of elimination. Eventually we get the very best, the most resilient, the real conquering blood. You just don't pass, Bruce. Listen, what do you think gives you the right to stand here in judgment against the laws of the whole Solar System?"

"There are plenty on Earth who agree with me," Bruce said. "I can say what I think now because you can't do more than kill me and you'll do that regardless...."

He stopped. This was ridiculous, a waste of his time. And theirs. They had established a kind of final totalitarianism since the New Era. The psychologists, the Pavlovian Reflex boys, had done that. If you didn't want to be reconditioned to fit into the social machine like a human vacuum tube, you kept your mouth shut. And for many, when the mouth was kept shut long enough, the mind pretty well forgot what it had wanted to open the mouth for in the first place.

A minority in both segments of a world split into two factions. Both had been warring diplomatically and sometimes physically, for centuries, clung to old ideas of freedom, democracy, self-determinism, individualism. To most, the words had no meaning now. It was a question of which set of conquering heroes could conquer the most space first. So far, only Venus had fallen. They had done a good, thorough job there. Four ships had come to Mars and their crews had disappeared. This was the fifth attempt—

Terrence said, "why did you shoot Doran?"

"I didn't like him enough to take the nonsense he was handing me, and when he shot the—" Bruce hesitated.

"What? When he shot what?"

Bruce felt an odd tingling in his stomach. The wind's voice seemed to sharpen and rise to a kind of wail.

"All right, I'll tell you. I was sleeping, having a dream. Doran woke me up. Marsha was with him. I'd forgotten about that geological job we were supposed to be working on. I've had these dreams ever since we got here."

"What kind of dreams?"

Someone laughed.

"Just fantastic stuff. Ask your Pavlovian there," Bruce said. "People talk to me, and there are other things in the dreams. Voices and some kind of shapes that aren't what you would call human at all."

Someone coughed. There was obvious embarrassment in the room.

"It's peculiar, but many faces and voices are those of crew members of some of the ships out there, the ones that never got back to Earth."

Terrence grinned. "Ghosts, Bruce?"

"Maybe. This planet may not be a dead ball of clay. I've had a feeling there's something real in the dreams, but I can't figure it out. You're still interested?"

Terrence nodded and glanced to either side.

"We've seen no indication of any kind of life whatsoever," Bruce pointed out. "Not even an insect, or any kind of plant life except some fungi and lichen down in the crevices. That never seemed logical to me from the start. We've covered the planet everywhere except one place—"

"The mountain," Terrence said. "You've been afraid even to talk about scaling it."

"Not afraid," Bruce objected. "I don't see any need to climb it. Coming to Mars, conquering space, isn't that enough? It happens that the crew of the first ship here decided to climb the mountain, and that set a precedent. Every ship that has come here has had to climb it. Why? Because they had to accept the challenge. And what's happened to them? Like you, they all had the necessary equipment to make a successful climb, but no one's ever come back down. No contact with anything up there.

"Captain, I'm not accepting a ridiculous challenge like that. Why should I? I didn't come here to conquer anything, even a mountain. The challenge of coming to Mars, of going on to where ever you guys intend going before something bigger than you are stops you—it doesn't interest me."

"Nothing's bigger than the destiny of Earth!" Terrence said, sitting up straight and rigid.

"I know," Bruce said. "Anyway, I got off the track. As I was saying, I woke up from this dream and Marsha and Doran were there. Doran was shaking me. But I didn't seem to have gotten entirely awake; either that or some part of the dream was real, because I looked out the window—something was out there, looking at me. It was late, and at first I thought it might be a shadow. But it wasn't. It was misty, almost translucent, but I think it was something alive. I had a feeling it was intelligent, maybe very intelligent. I could feel something in my mind. A kind of beauty and softness and warmth. I kept looking—"

His throat was getting tight. He had difficulty talking. "Doran asked me what I was looking at, and I told him. He laughed. But he looked. Then I realized that maybe I wasn't still dreaming. Doran saw it, too, or thought he did. He kept looking and finally he jumped and grabbed up his rifle and ran outside. I yelled at him. I kept on yelling and ran after him. 'It's intelligent, whatever it is!' I kept saying. 'How do you know it means any harm?' But I heard Doran's rifle go off before I could get to him. And whatever it was we saw, I didn't see it any more. Neither did Doran. Maybe he killed it. I don't know. He had to kill it. That's the way you think."

"What? Explain that remark."

"That's the philosophy of conquest—don't take any chances with aliens. They might hinder our advance across the Universe. So we kill everything. Doran acted without thinking at all. Conditioned to kill everything that doesn't look like us. So I hit Doran and took the gun away from him and killed him. I felt sick, crazy with rage. Maybe that's part of it. All I know is that I thought he deserved to die and that I had to kill him, so I did."

"Is that all, Bruce?"

"That's about all. Except that I'd like to kill all of you. And I would if I had the chance."

"That's what I figured." Terrence turned to the psychologist, a small wiry man who sat there constantly fingering his ear. "Stromberg, what do you think of this gobbledegook? We know he's crazy. But what hit him? You said his record was good up until a year ago."

Stromberg's voice was monotonous, like a voice off of a tape. "Schizophrenia with mingled delusions of persecution. The schizophrenia is caused by inner conflict—indecision between the older values and our present ones which he hasn't been able to accept. A complete case history would tell why he can't accept our present attitudes. I would say that he has an incipient fear of personal inadequacy, which is why he fears our desire for conquest. He's rationalized, built up a defense which he's structured with his idealism, foundationed with Old Era values. Retreat into the past, an escape from his own present feelings of inadequacy. Also, he escapes into these dream fantasies."

"Yes," Terrence said. "But how does that account for Doran's action? Doran must have seen something—"

"Doran's charts show high suggestibility under stress. Another weak personality eliminated. Let's regard it that way. He imagined he saw something." He glanced at Marsha. "Did you see anything?"

She hesitated, avoiding Bruce's eyes. "Nothing at all. There wasn't anything out there to see, except the dust and rocks. That's all there is to see here. We could stay a million years and never see anything else. A shadow maybe—"

"All right," Terrence interrupted. "Now, Bruce, you know the law regulating the treatment of serious psycho cases in space?"

"Yes. Execution."

"No facilities for handling such cases en route back to Earth."

"I understand. No apologies necessary, Captain."

Terrence shifted his position. "However, we've voted to grant you a kind of leniency. In exchange for a little further service from you, you can remain here on Mars after we leave. You'll be left food-concentrates to last a long time."

"What kind of service?"

"Stay by the radio and take down what we report as we go up the mountain."

"Why not?" Bruce said. "You aren't certain you're coming back, then?"

"We might not," Terrence admitted calmly. "Something's happened to the others. We're going to find out what and we want it recorded. None of us want to back down and stay here. You can take our reports as they come in."

"I'll do that," Bruce said. "It should be interesting."

Bruce watched them go, away and up and around the immediate face of the mountain in the bleak cold of the Martian morning. He watched them disappear behind a high ledge, tied together with plastic rope like convicts.

He stayed by the radio. He lost track of time and didn't care much if he did. Sometimes he took a heavy sedative and slept. The sedative prevented the dreams. He had an idea that the dreams might be so pleasant that he wouldn't wake up. He wanted to listen to Terrence as long as the captain had anything to say. It was nothing but curiosity.

At fifteen thousand feet, Terrence reported only that they were climbing.

At twenty thousand feet, Terrence said, "We're still climbing, and that's all I can report, Bruce. It's worth coming to Mars for—to accept a challenge like this!"

At twenty-five thousand feet, Terrence reported, "We've put on oxygen masks. Jacobs and Drexel have developed some kind of altitude sickness and we're taking a little time out. It's a magnificent sight up here. I can imagine plenty of tourists coming to Mars one of these days, just to climb this mountain! Mt. Everest is a pimple compared with this! What a feeling of power, Bruce!"

From forty thousand feet, Terrence said, "We gauged this mountain at forty-five thousand. But here we are at forty and there doesn't seem to be any top. We can see up and up and the mountain keeps on going. I don't understand how we could have made such an error in our computations. I talked with Burton. He doesn't see how a mountain this high could still be here when the rest of the planet has been worn so smooth."

And then from fifty-three thousand feet, Terrence said with a voice that seemed slightly strained: "No sign of any of the crew of the other four ships yet. Ten in each crew, that makes fifty. Not a sign of any of them so far, but then we seem to have a long way left to climb—"

Bruce listened and noted and took sedatives and opened cans of food concentrates. He smoked and ate and slept. He had plenty of time. He had only time and the dreams which he knew he could utilize later to take care of the time.

From sixty thousand feet, Terrence reported, "I had to shoot Anhauser a few minutes ago! He was dissenting. Hear that, Bruce? One of my most dependable men. We took a vote. A mere formality, of course, whether we should continue climbing or not. We knew we'd all vote to keep on climbing. And then Anhauser dissented. He was hysterical. He refused to accept the majority decision. 'I'm going back down!' he yelled. So I had to shoot him. Imagine a man of his apparent caliber turning anti-democratic like that! This mountain will be a great tester for us in the future. We'll test everybody, find out quickly who the weaklings are."

Bruce listened to the wind. It seemed to rise higher and higher. Terrence, who had climbed still higher, was calling. "Think of it! What a conquest! No man's ever done a thing like this. Like Stromberg says, it's symbolic! We can build spaceships and reach other planets, but that's not actual physical conquest. We feel like gods up here. We can see what we are now. We can see how it's going to be—"

Once in a while Terrence demanded that Bruce say something to prove he was still there taking down what Terrence said. Bruce obliged. A long time passed, the way time does when no one cares. Bruce stopped taking the sedatives finally. The dreams came back and became, somehow, more real each time. He needed the companionship of the dreams.

It was very lonely sitting there without the dreams, with nothing but Terrence's voice ranting excitedly on and on. Terrence didn't seem real any more; certainly not as real as the dreams.

The problem of where to put the line between dream and reality began to worry Bruce. He would wake up and listen and take down what Terrence was saying, and then go to sleep again with increasing expectancy. His dream took on continuity. He could return to the point where he had left it, and it was the same—allowing even for the time difference necessitated by his periods of sleep.

He met people in the dreams, two girls and a man. They had names: Pietro, Marlene, Helene.

Helene he had seen from the beginning, but she became more real to him all the time, until he could talk with her. After that, he could also talk with Marlene and Pietro, and the conversations made sense. Consistently, they made sense.

The Martian landscape was entirely different in the dreams. Green valleys and rivers, or actually wide canals, with odd trees trailing their branches on the slow, peacefully gliding currents. Here and there were pastel-colored cities and there were things drifting through them that were alive and intelligent and soft and warm and wonderful to know.

'... dreams, in their vivid coloring of life, as in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife of semblance with reality which brings to the delirious eye more lovely things of paradise and love—and all our own!—than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known....'

So sometimes he read poetry, but even that was hardly equal to the dreams.

And then he would wake up and listen to Terrence's voice. He would look out the window over the barren frigid land where there was nothing but seams of worn land, like scabs under the brazen sky.

"If I had a choice," he thought, "I wouldn't ever wake up at all again. The dreams may not be more real, but they're preferable."

Dreams were supposed to be wishful thinking, primarily, but he couldn't live in them very long. His body would dry up and he would die. He had to stay awake enough to put a little energy back into himself. Of course, if he died and lost the dreams, there would be one compensation—he would also be free of Terrence and the rest of them who had learned that the only value in life lay in killing one's way across the Cosmos.

But then he had a feeling Terrence's voice wouldn't be annoying him much more anyway. The voice was unreal, coming out of some void. He could switch off Terrence any time now, but he was still curious.

"Bruce—Bruce, you still there? Listen, we're up here at what we figure to be five hundred thousand feet! It is impossible. We keep climbing and now we look up and we can see up and up and there the mountain is going up and up—"

And some time later: "Bruce, Marsha's dying! We don't know what's the matter. We can't find any reason for it. She's lying here and she keeps laughing and calling your name. She's a woman, so that's probably it. Women don't have real guts."

Bruce bent toward the radio. Outside the shelter, the wind whistled softly at the door.

"Marsha," he said.

"Bruce—"

She hadn't said his name that way for a long time.

"Marsha, remember how we used to talk about human values? I remember how you seemed to have something maybe different from the others. I never thought you'd really buy this will to conquer, and now it doesn't matter...."

He listened to her voice, first the crazy laughter, and then a whisper. "Bruce, hello down there." Her voice was all mixed up with fear and hysteria and mockery. "Bruce darling, are you lonely down there? I wish I were with you, safe ... free ... warm. I love you. Do you hear that? I really love you, after all. After all...."

Her voice drifted away, came back to him. "We're climbing the highest mountain. What are you doing there, relaxing where it's peaceful and warm and sane? You always were such a calm guy. I remember now. What are you doing—reading poetry while we climb the mountain? What was that, Bruce—that one about the mountain you tried to quote to me last night before you ... I can't remember it now. Darling, what...?"

He stared at the radio. He hesitated, reached out and switched on the mike. He got through to her.

"Hello, hello, darling," he whispered. "Marsha, can you hear me?"

"Yes, yes. You down there, all warm and cozy, reading poetry, darling. Where you can see both ways instead of just up and down, up and down."

He tried to imagine where she was now as he spoke to her, how she looked. He thought of Earth and how it had been there, years ago, with Marsha. Things had seemed so different then. There was something of that hope in his voice now as he spoke to her, yet not directly to her, as he looked out the window at the naked frigid sky and the barren rocks.

"'... and there is nowhere to go from the top of a mountain,

But down, my dear;

And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley

Will never seem fresh or clear

For thinking of the glitter of the mountain water

In the feathery green of the year....'"

The wind stormed over the shelter in a burst of power, buried the sound of his own voice.

"Marsha, are you still there?"

"What the devil's the idea, poetry at a time like this, or any time?" Terrence demanded. "Listen, you taking this down? We haven't run into any signs of the others. Six hundred thousand feet, Bruce! We feel our destiny. We conquer the Solar System. And we'll go out and out, and we'll climb the highest mountain, the highest mountain anywhere. We're going up and up. We've voted on it. Unanimous. We go on. On to the top, Bruce! Nothing can stop us. If it takes ten years, a hundred, a thousand years, we'll find it. We'll find the top! Not the top of this world—the top of everything. The top of the UNIVERSE!"

Later, Terrence's voice broke off in the middle of something or other—Bruce couldn't make any sense out of it at all—and turned into crazy yells that faded out and never came back.

Bruce figured the others might still be climbing somewhere, or maybe they were dead. Either way it wouldn't make any difference to him. He knew they would never come back down.

He was switching off the radio for good when he saw the coloration break over the window. It was the same as the dream, but for an instant, dream and reality seemed fused like two superimposed film negatives.

He went to the window and looked out. The comfortable little city was out there, and the canal flowing past through a pleasantly cool yet sunny afternoon. Purple mist blanketed the knees of low hills and there was a valley, green and rich with the trees high and full beside the softly flowing canal water.

The filmy shapes that seemed alive, that were partly translucent, drifted along the water's edge, and birds as delicate as colored glass wavered down the wind.

He opened the shelter door and went out. The shelter looked the same, but useless now. How did the shelter of that bleak world get into this one, where the air was warm and fragrant, where there was no cold, from that world into this one of his dreams?

The girl—Helene—was standing there leaning against a tree, smoking a cigarette.

He walked toward her, and stopped. In the dream it had been easy, but now he was embarrassed, in spite of the intimacy that had grown between them. She wore the same casual slacks and sandals. Her hair was brown. She was not particularly beautiful, but she was comfortable to look at because she seemed so peaceful. Content, happy with what was and only what was.

He turned quickly. The shelter was still there, and behind it the row of spaceships—not like chalk marks on a tallyboard now, but like odd relics that didn't belong there in the thick green grass. Five ships instead of four.

There was his own individual shelter beyond the headquarters building, and the other buildings. He looked up.

There was no mountain.

For one shivery moment he knew fear. And then the fear went away, and he was ashamed of what he had felt. What he had feared was gone now, and he knew it was gone for good and he would never have to fear it again.

"Look here, Bruce. I wondered how long it would take to get it through that thick poetic head of yours!"

"Get what?" He began to suspect what it was all about now, but he wasn't quite sure yet.

"Smoke?" she said.

He took one of the cigarettes and she lighted it for him and put the lighter back into her pocket.

"It's real nice here," she said. "Isn't it?"

"I guess it's about perfect."

"It'll be easy. Staying here, I mean. We won't be going to Earth ever again, you know."

"I didn't know that, but I didn't think we ever would again."

"We wouldn't want to anyway, would we, Bruce?"

"No."

He kept on looking at the place where the mountain had been. Or maybe it still was; he couldn't make up his mind yet. Which was and which was not? That barren icy world without life, or this?

"'Is all that we see or seem,'" he whispered, half to himself, "'but a dream within a dream?'"

She laughed softly. "Poe was ahead of his time," she said. "You still don't get it, do you? You don't know what's been happening?"

"Maybe I don't."

She shrugged, and looked in the direction of the ships. "Poor guys. I can't feel much hatred toward them now. The Martians give you a lot of understanding of the human mind—after they've accepted you, and after you've lived with them awhile. But the mountain climbers—we can see now—it's just luck, chance, we weren't like them. A deviant is a child of chance."

"Yes," Bruce said. "There's a lot of people like us on Earth, but they'll never get the chance—the chance we seem to have here, to live decently...."

"You're beginning to see now which was the dream," she said and smiled. "But don't be pessimistic. Those people on Earth will get their chance, too, one of these fine days. The Conquerors aren't getting far. Venus, and then Mars, and Mars is where they stop. They'll keep coming here and climbing the mountain and finally there won't be any more. It won't take so long."

She rose to her toes and waved and yelled. Bruce saw Pietro and Marlene walking hand in hand up the other side of the canal. They waved back and called and then pushed off into the water in a small boat, and drifted away and out of sight around a gentle turn.

She took his arm and they walked along the canal toward where the mountain had been, or still was—he didn't know.

A quarter of a mile beyond the canal, he saw the high mound of red, naked hill, corroded and ugly, rising up like a scar of the surrounding green.

She wasn't smiling now. There were shadows on her face as the pressure on his arm stopped him.

"I was on the first ship and Marlene on the second. None like us on the third, and on the fourth ship was Pietro. All the others had to climb the mountain—" She stopped talking for a moment, and then he felt the pressure of her fingers on his arm. "I'm very glad you came on the fifth," she whispered. "Are you glad now?"

"I'm very glad," he said.

"The Martians tested us," she explained. "They're masters of the mind. I guess they've been grinding along through the evolutionary mill a darn long time, longer than we could estimate now. They learned the horror we're capable of from the first ship—the Conquerors, the climbers. The Martians knew more like them would come and go on into space, killing, destroying for no other reason than their own sickness. Being masters of the mind, the Martians are also capable of hypnosis—no, that's not really the word, only the closest our language comes to naming it. Suggestion so deep and strong that it seems real to one human or a million or a billion; there's no limit to the number that can be influenced. What the people who came off those ships saw wasn't real. It was partly what the Martians wanted them to see and feel—but most of it, like the desire to climb the mountain, was as much a part of the Conquerors' own psychic drive as it was the suggestion of the Martians."

She waved her arm slowly to describe a peak. "The Martians made the mountain real. So real that it could be seen from space, measured by instruments ... even photographed and chipped for rock samples. But you'll see how that was done, Bruce, and realize that this and not the mountain of the Conquerors is the reality of Mars. This is the Mars no Conqueror will ever see."

They walked toward the ugly red mound that jutted above the green. When they came close enough, he saw the bodies lying there ... the remains, actually, of what had once been bodies. He felt too sickened to go on walking.

"It may seem cruel now," she said, "but the Martians realized that there is no cure for the will to conquer. There is no safety from it, either, as the people of Earth and Venus discovered, unless it is given an impossible obstacle to overcome. So the Martians provided the Conquerors with a mountain. They themselves wanted to climb. They had to."

He was hardly listening as he walked away from Helene toward the eroded hills. The crew members of the first four ships were skeletons tied together with imperishably strong rope about their waists. Far beyond them were those from Mars V, too freshly dead to have decayed much ... Anhauser with his rope cut, a bullet in his head; Jacobs and Marsha and the others ... Terrence much past them all. He had managed to climb higher than anyone else and he lay with his arms stretched out, his fingers still clutching at rock outcroppings.

The trail they left wound over the ground, chipped in places for holds, red elsewhere with blood from torn hands. Terrence was more than twelve miles from the ship—horizontally.

Bruce lifted Marsha and carried her back over the rocky dust, into the fresh fragrance of the high grass, and across it to the shade and peace beside the canal.

He put her down. She looked peaceful enough, more peaceful than that other time, years ago, when the two of them seemed to have shared so much, when the future had not yet destroyed her. He saw the shadow of Helene bend across Marsha's face against the background of the silently flowing water of the cool, green canal.

"You loved her?"

"Once," Bruce said. "She might have been sane. They got her when she was young. Too young to fight. But she would have, I think, if she'd been older when they got her."

He sat looking down at Marsha's face, and then at the water with the leaves floating down it.

"'... And the springs that flow on the floor of the valley will never seem fresh or clear for thinking of the glitter of the mountain water in the feathery green of the year....'"

He stood up, walked back with Helene along the canal toward the calm city. He didn't look back.

"They've all been dead quite a while," Bruce said wonderingly. "Yet I seemed to be hearing from Terrence until only a short time ago. Are—are the climbers still climbing—somewhere, Helene?"

"Who knows?" Helene answered softly. "Maybe. I doubt if even the Martians have the answer to that."

They entered the city.

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Table of Contents

- THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN

- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE