EVEREST by Isaac Asimov [Illustration] =Perhaps you’ve read how Everest has now been climbed? But have you heard of Planetary Survey? Here’s the real truth about it. Everest has been climbed twice.= In 1952 they were about ready to give up trying to climb Mt. Everest. It was the photographs that kept them going. As photographs go, they weren’t much; fuzzy, streaked and with just dark blobs against the white to be interested in. But those dark blobs were living creatures. The men swore to it. I said, “What the hell, they’ve been talking about creatures skidding along the Everest glaciers for forty years. It’s about time we did something about it.” Jimmy Robbons (pardon me, James Abram Robbons) was the one who pushed me into that position. He was always nuts on mountain climbing, you see. He was the one who knew all about how the Tibetans wouldn’t go near Everest because it was the mountain of the gods, he could quote me every mysterious manlike footprint ever reported in the ice 25,000 feet up, he knew by heart every tall story about the spindly white creatures, speeding along the crags just over the last heart-breaking camp which the climbers had managed to establish. It’s good to have one enthusiastic creature of the sort at Planetary Survey headquarters. The last photographs put bite into his words, though. After all, you _might_ just barely think they were men. Jimmy said, “Look, boss, the point isn’t that they’re there, the point is that they move fast. Look at that figure. It’s blurred.” “The camera might have moved.” “The crag here is sharp enough. And the men swear it was running. Imagine the metabolism it must have to run at that oxygen pressure. Look, boss, would you have believed in deep-sea fish if you’d never heard of them? You have fish which are looking for new niches in environment which they can exploit, so they go deeper and deeper into the abyss until one day they find they can’t return. They’ve adapted so thoroughly they can live only under tons of pressure.” “Well-” “Damn it, can’t you reverse the picture? Creatures can be forced up a mountain can’t they? They can learn to stick it out in thinner air and colder temperatures. They can live on moss or on occasional birds, just as the deep-sea fish in the last analysis live on the upper fauna that slowly go filtering down. Then, someday, they find they can’t go down again. I don’t even say they’re men. They can be chamois or mountain goats or badgers or anything.” I said stubbornly, “The witnesses said they were vaguely manlike, and the reported footprints are certainly manlike.” “Or bearlike,” said Jimmy. “You can’t tell.” So that’s when I said, “It’s about time we did something about it.” Jimmy shrugged and said, “They’ve been trying to climb Mt. Everest for forty years.” And he shook his head.