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 heartbreaking 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.”