To explain the silence which followed, Henry said, “Yes, this is Mad Jack, the man who climbed Everest at twenty-three and every other pile of rocks worth mentioning since that time. At thirty-one, he became the only man to conquer the highest mountain in the known universe–Mount Kasla on Litan–elevation, 89,941 feet. My book–” “Yes,” said the reporter. “My name is Cary, and I’m with GP. My friends represent two of the other syndicates. We’ve heard that you are going to climb the Gray Sister.” “You’ve heard incorrectly,” I said. “Oh?” The other two came up and stood beside them. “We thought that–” one of them began. “–you were already organizing a climbing party,” said the other. “Then you’re not going to climb the Sister?” asked Cary, while one of the two looked over my pictures and the other got ready to take some of his own. “Stop that!” I said, raising a hand at the photographer. “Bright lights hurt my eyes!” “Sorry. I’ll use the infra,” he said, and he started fooling with his camera. Cary repeated the question. “All I said was that you’ve heard incorrectly,” I told him. “I didn’t say I was and I didn’t say I wasn’t. I haven’t made up my mind.” “If you decide to try it, have you any idea when it will be?” “Sorry, I can’t answer that.” Henry took the three of them over to the bar and started explaining something, with gestures. I heard the words “…out of retirement after four years,” and when/if they looked to the booth again, I was gone. I had retired, to the street which was full of dusk, and I walked along it thinking. I trod her shadow even then, Linda. And the Gray Sister beckoned and forbade with her single unmoving gesture. I watched her, so far away, yet still so large, a piece of midnight at eight o’clock. The hours that lay between died like the distance at her feet, and I knew that she would follow me wherever I went, even into sleep. Especially into sleep. So I know, at that moment. The days that followed were a game I enjoyed playing. Fake indecision is delicious when people want you to do something. I looked at her then, my last and my largest, my very own Koshtra Pivrarcha, and I felt that I was born to stand upon her summit. Then I could retire, probably remarry, cultivate my mind, not worry about getting out of shape, and do all the square things I didn’t do before, the lack of which had cost me a wife and a home, back when I had gone to Kasla, elevation 89,941 feet, four and a half years ago, in the days of my glory. I regarded my Gray Sister across the eight o’clock world, and she was dark and noble and still and waiting, as she had always been.
II
The following morning I sent the messages. Out across the light-years like cosmic carrier pigeons they went. They winged their ways to some persons I hadn’t seen in years and to others who had seen me off at Luna Station. Each said, in its own way, “If you want in on the biggest climb of them all, come to Diesel. The Gray Sister eats Kasla for breakfast. R.S.V.P. c/o. The Lodge, Georgetown. Whitey.” Backward, turn backward…. I didn’t tell Henry. Nothing at all. What I had done and where I was going, for a time, were my business only, for that same time. I checked out well before sunrise and left him a message on the desk: “Out of town on business. Back in a week. Hold the fort. Mad Jack.” I had to gauge the lower slopes, tug the hem of the lady’s skirt, so to speak, before I introduced her to my friends. They say only a madman climbs alone, but they call me what they call me for a reason. From my pix, the northern face had looked promising. I set the rented flier down as near as I could, locked it up, shouldered my pack and started walking. Mountains rising to my right and to my left, mountains at my back, all dark as sin now in the predawn light of a white, white day. Ahead of me, not a mountain, but an almost gentle slope which kept rising and rising and rising. Bright stars above me and cold wind past me as I walked. Straight up, though, no stars, just black. I wondered for the thousandth time what a mountain weighed. I always wonder that as I approach one. No clouds in sight. No noises but my boot sounds on the turf and the small gravel. My small goggles flopped around my neck. My hands were moist within my gloves. On Diesel, the pack and I together probably weighed about the same as me alone on Earth–for which I was duly grateful. My breath burned as it came and steamed as it went. I counted a thousand steps and looked back, and I couldn’t see the flier. I counted a thousand more and then looked up to watch some stars go out. About an hour after that, I had to put on my goggles. By then I could see where I was headed. And by then the wind seemed stronger. She was so big that the eye couldn’t take all of her in at once. I moved my head from side to side, leaning further and further backward. Wherever the top, it was too high. For an instant, I was seized by a crazy acrophobic notion that I was looking down rather than up, and the soles of my feet and the palms of my hands tingled, like an ape’s must when, releasing one high branch to seize another, he discovers that there isn’t another. I went on for two more hours and stopped for a light meal. This was hiking, not climbing. As I ate, I wondered what could have caused a formation like the Gray Sister. There were some ten and twelve-mile peaks within sixty miles of the place and a fifteen-mile mountain called Burke’s Peak on the adjacent continent, but nothing else like the Sister. The lesser gravitation? Her composition? I couldn’t say. I wondered what Doc and Kelly and Mallardi would say when they saw her. I don’t define them, though. I only climb them. I looked up again, and a few clouds were brushing against her now. >From the photos I had taken, she might be an easy ascent for a good ten or twelve miles. Like a big hill. There were certainly enough alternate routes. In fact, I thought she just might be a pushover. Feeling heartened, I repacked my utensils and proceeded. It was going to be a good day. I could tell. And it was. I got off the slope and onto something like a trail by late afternoon. Daylight lasts about nine hours on Diesel, and I spent most of it moving. The trail was so good that I kept on for several hours after sundown and made considerable height. I was beginning to use my respiration equipment by then, and the heating unit in my suit was turned on. The stars were big, brilliant flowers, the way was easy, the night was my friend. I came upon a broad, flat piece and made my camp under an overhang. There I slept, and I dreamt of snowy women with breasts like the Alps, pinked by the morning sun; and they sang to me like the wind and laughed, had eyes of ice prismatic. They fled through a field of clouds.