Six Blind Men & an Alien by Mike Resnick Page B

thought. I have organized far more difficult and complicated protests . They messed it up. But how?
        He lay there for three days. He knew he was dying, and he found he didn’t mind that at all. If he was forbidden from doing what he was born to do, then life was meaningless anyway. But before he expired, he had to find out what had gone wrong.
        He got shakily to his feet, and was overwhelmed by dizziness and nausea. He leaned against a cave wall for a moment, then another, and finally he emerged onto the glacier. He walked laboriously for ten minutes, having difficulty balancing on the ice. The sun seemed exceptionally bright, and his eyes began tearing. He reached a hand up to wipe them off-and as he did so he lost his balance and fell heavily to the ice.
        He tried to get up and found that he couldn’t. He could feel his life ebbing away. Breathing became more difficult. He tried to focus his eyes, but everything remained blurry.
         It shouldn’t have come to this, he thought bitterly. It was a perfect plan. Whatever happened, I wasn’t the one who failed. You should have been cheering me and singing my praises by now.
        He knew he would be dead in another few seconds, and one final thought crossed his mind:
         I hope the Germans kill you all.
        

2038 A.D.
        
        "I’m starting to think that Hemingway never got up this high," said Ray Glover. "After all, he was an out-of-shape boozer. I’m in great shape and I still can’t catch my breath."
        "He was a fiction writer," said Jim Donahue. "So it’s possible he made it up. After all, in The Green Hills of Africa , which is still being sold as non-fiction, he seems to run into someone who wants to discuss literature every time he’s hiding in a blind waiting for some animal to come by, and no one ever called him on that."
        "If you go up and down the Coast, you can still find half a dozen hotels that brag that ‘Hemingway Slept Here," said Gorman. "According to the stories that have been passed down, he mostly drank there and slept where he fell or passed out."
        "Still, wouldn’t it be something if we could find the leopard?" I said.
        "We’ve already found something a thousand times more important," replied Donahue. "Maybe ten professors of literature give a damn whether the leopard was real or not, but if this "-he indicated the frozen body-"is what we all think it is, everyone will care."
        "Could it have been a snow leopard?" asked Glover. "I remember seeing one in a zoo once. That wouldn’t be so hard to believe, would it?"
        "You find a snow leopard up here and you got a real story," said Gorman. "They only live in Asia."
        Glover turned to me. "Is that right, Professor?"
        "Doctor," I said. "Or just Tony. And yes, it’s right. There are no snow leopards in Africa."
        "Papa would never have bothered writing the story if there were," added Gorman.
        "I wonder," said Donahue. "Could he have seen this fellow from a distance and thought it was a leopard?"
        "Always assuming that it’s been on the mountain that long, if Papa was close enough to know it was a body why didn’t he walk the last couple of hundred feet and see what it was?" asked Gorman.
        "Too drunk?" suggested Donahue.
        "If he was that drunk, he wouldn’t have spotted it or remembered it," said Gorman.
        I noticed that Bonnie wasn’t paying any attention to the conversation (not that it was worth listening to), but instead was staring intently at the body.
        To be continued-
        
***
        
         They’re all wrong, she thought. The important thing isn’t what he was doing atop Kilimanjaro, but what he was doing on Earth at all. I don’t see any weapons, or any pouch or holster that might hold a weapon. Surely he didn’t come here just to see the top of a mountain-and if he did, then why not Fuji or Everest or