Six Blind Men & an Alien by Mike Resnick Page B

would put him in the record books. No member of his race had ever climbed a mountain on a chlorine world before.
        It had been a long, hard month. The mountain offered very little shelter from the fierce winds, and handholds and footholds were difficult to find on the final ascent. He stood at the summit, hands on hips, reporting everything he saw into the tiny recorder that was built into his helmet, activating the camera atop the helmet, turning his head slowly from side to side to capture the view.
        He spent a day and a night at the mountaintop, then began the precarious descent. By the time he was halfway down he was already planning his next adventure, his next pursuit of the immortality afforded him by the record of his accomplishments. He wasn’t limited to mountain climbing; that was simply his most recent passion. His first major triumph had come nine years earlier when he circumnavigated Balinoppe II’s murky ocean, not in a vessel but on foot, on the ocean floor, emerging only eight times to replenish his oxygen supply.
        He had been back from Balinoppe for only three days when he was off again, this time to far Perradorn, home to the galaxy’s largest known carnivore species. They presented no serious problem to anyone armed with a modern weapon-an energy pulse rifle, or something similar-but no one had ever hunted one armed only with a poison-tipped spear. He spent four months in hospital recovering from his wounds-but the carnivore would spend an eternity stuffed and mounted in the Great Museum on his home world of Thandor IV.
        After that had come the conquests of more mountains and oceans, more entries in the record books. He had mapped and captured holographs of worlds no one else had ever set foot on, and had become a hero to his people, idolized by most of them.
        And while adults created entertainments about him, and children worshipped him, and grown males envied him, and females adored him, he spent a few days in his private dwelling. It had actually become unfamiliar to him, so infrequently did he spend more than a single night there. His computer kept going through its database, suggesting possibilities for his next adventure. Mavorine rejected them all.
        "It is just another mountain," he would say. "Bigger than the last, but just a mountain."
        Or: "I have walked across the floor of an ocean. I don’t have to do it again."
        After an hour had passed, he gave the computer a new order: "Just show me a series of worlds and their most dangerous or challenging features. Let us see if we can find one that is sufficiently interesting."
        For the next two hours the computer showed him methane worlds, chlorine worlds, ammonia worlds, oxygen worlds, and airless worlds.
        "Stop," he said at last. He sighed deeply. "I would not have believed it possible, but I have run out of challenges. These worlds are not without their interest and their challenges, but in truth it is just more of the same."
        "Perhaps you should set yourself a different task," suggested the computer.
        "What else is there?" he asked. "I have climbed, and swum, and mapped, and killed, and explored."
        "The difference is in the matter of approach," answered the computer.
        "Explain," said Mavorine.
        "In every endeavor, it has been your goal to triumph, to succeed, to accomplish ."
        "What else is there?"
        "Survival."
        "I do not understand," said Mavorine.
        "Ignore the record books," replied the computer. "Set yourself a task where merely surviving will be the ultimate triumph. Do not publicize it until you have survived and returned here to Thandor IV."
        "Why not?"
        "Because if you do, some other member of your race will doubtless try to emulate you, and he will surely die."
        "Why does a machine care if a sentient being dies?"
        "There is a chance that they will blame you,