by James Blish
Jayne was obviously very close to losing her temper; only the fact that Harriet had already lost hers had kept the older woman in control of herself this long, as far as I could see. Since the problem obviously was insoluble unless one of them gave way completely—it was that kind of problem, either Jayne kept her exclusives or she relinquished them, there was no middle course—the argument could well have gone on indefinitely. Inevitably it would have involved me, since I thought Harriet in the right, and Harriet wouldn’t have hesitated to ask me for support.
Luckily, at this point Geoffrey Bramwell-Farnsworth erupted into the room.
“Well, well,” he said in his booming bass voice. “Hello, Harriet, nice to see you; sorry to be tardy. And you, sir; welcome, I’m Commodore Farnsworth.”
I stood up and introduced myself; Jayne was too busy glaring at Harriet. The Commodore’s handshake was powerful, but not deliberately bone-crushing—which was a good thing, for he could have ground bones if he had wanted to. He was a huge man, at least six feet four, with a figure almost as exaggerated as that of a keg sitting on a camera tripod. He didn’t have three legs, of course, but the two he had were long and relatively slender, and his hips were narrow too. His trunk and chest, however, were enormous and it was impossible for me to see both his shoulders at once while I was standing at handshaking distance. His head was the bullet dome of the Prussian or Scandinavian, on a thick neck, reminding me instantly of the familiar bust of Spengler; his hair was fire-red except for the grey at the temples, and in the middle stages of regrowth from a crew cut, rather like a shaving-brush which had been set afire. He was a most peculiar physical type, suggesting instantly that his glands must have been—and might still be—considerably out of whack: the bullet head, generally a product of sexual precocity, at war with the long extremities of delayed adolescence, the huge hands and feet and the prominent bony ridges over the eyes obvious stigmas of early acromegaly—a real endocrinologist’s nightmare. Without foreknowledge, I would have said he was forty.
But I bring this up only by hindsight. At the time, I believe, I noticed only that he was big, and that he was wearing the button of the Explorers’ Club in the lapel of a white linen dinner-jacket.
“Glad to meet you, Julian,” he said warmly. “Quite a party we’re going to have. Forty days at the Pole—the busiest forty days in exploration history, I’m going to see to that. Jayne, these people have no drinks ! What’s yours, sir?”
“Scotch if it’s available,” I said gratefully. I had no objection to being waited upon by the Commodore, and I wanted the drink.
“Of course it is, of course. Harriet, a bit of Gin and It, eh?”
“Fine, Geoffrey.” She was smiling, I noticed.
“I suppose Jayne’s been filling you in,” he said from the sideboard. “Sorry to have missed it. Arguing with suppliers—sometimes seems to take up the whole damned day. Arguing about credit, if you can imagine that—with our blue-chip backers? I say shame, then I say Schade, then I say vergogna, and then I just yell at ’em. I’m a good yeller.” He grinned and handed me my drink. “Usually it works.”
I grinned back. The fact is that I liked him at once. He had a tremendous magnetism, and I was happy to find he had a sense of humour to go with it, and could deprecate himself in front of strangers. There was no doubt that he was deliberately flamboyant; it stuck out all over him. But then, Byrd had had more than a touch of the grandstander in him, too— which ha simply been the icing over an essentially brave and serious-minded man. Who’s perfect?
“Forty days doesn’t seem very long to me,” I said, after a long, grateful pull of exceptionally good, smoky Scotch. “Between your commercial commitments and all the observations the IGY needs—”
“Julian, let me tell you that the IGY is at the very bottom of my priority list,” he said, sitting down in a heavy armchair and hitching it closer to me with one hand. “I didn’t want this expedition to be an IGY project from the beginning; it was forced on me. I made that very clear to everybody, from Kaplan right on down, last year. They think that they’re forward-looking and adventurous and God knows what else because they’re going to send up some satellites during the Year—after the American Rocket Society kicked them repeatedly into doing what should have been done ten years ago. D’you know the kind of interplanetary data I’ll be looking for? No, of course you don’t. I’ll tell you. It has nothing to do with whether the Earth is thirty feet bigger around the middle than we thought it was. What good is the Earth? What I want is a piece of Planet Number Four-and-a-half.”
He had me there. The fourth planet, of course, is Mars; Earth is the third, counting outward from the Sun. The fifth is Jupiter. But four-and-a-half? It didn’t exist. The space between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter is an endless elliptical river of cosmic junk, made up of rocks of all shapes and sizes. There are thousands of them; the biggest is some five hundred miles in diameter, the smallest may be no bigger than pebbles; the average size is about that of a free-floating mountain. These little nuisance-worlds are usually called “asteroids”, but they are not stars and have nothing in common with stars; “planetoids” is a better term.
“Four-and-a-half?” I said incredulously. “You expect to find an asteroid at the North Pole?”
“I expect nothing, Julian. An explorer learns to have hopes, but no expectations. I think that the asteroids all belonged to a single planet once; and that it exploded not so long ago. I hope to find evidence of that at the Pole—evidence that will nail, the hypothesis right down into known fact.”
“Why at the Pole particularly?”
He leaned forward and gazed earnestly into my face. Evidently Jayne’s similar and overwhelming approach had been copied from him, with the slight modifications necessary to take fullest advantage of deep decolletage. The notion that he had copied it from her was out of the question; compared to him, she was a palimpsest subject to anyone’s erasure and inscription.
“Look at it this way,” he said. “We know that some sort of a break up occurred out there. There used to be a larger body between Mars and Jupiter. Now it’s gone, and there’s nothing left there but thousands and thousands of rocks. Some of those rocks enter our atmosphere as meteors; usually they burn up before we can study them, but some that we have analysed show that they were recently part of a much larger body. Are you with me so far?”
I was, more or less. I dimly remembered some papers in Nature which had suggested something of the sort. But it was based on highly disputable evidence, as I recalled; Whipple and other experts still stuck to the hypothesis that almost all meteors are the debris of comets. I said so.
“Whipple’s got to be cautious, he’s an astronomer with a reputation to protect,” the Commodore said. “I’m only an explorer. If you want a scientist who supports my position, I’ll give you Urey. But let’s not pair off experts. Why, man, the bottom of every ocean in the world is littered with minute round grains of iron, and everybody agrees that those came here from space, and that they had to be the result of the break up of the asteroidal planet. They’re even called ‘cosmic granules’ in the literature. Isn’t that so?”
“I think it is.”
“Very good. Now the granules are too small to tell us anything much, and the meteors get such rough treatment when they pass through our atmosphere that it’s hard to agree on what analysis of them shows. But the granules and the meteors are still falling. They’re late products of the explosion. What happened right here on Earth immediately after the explosion—only a few million years ago? What a dusting we must have gotten then! What a bombardment! How” else do you account for Meteor Crater, Chubb Crater, the Carolina potholes? And then came the last glaciation—and of all the seas, only the North Polar Sea has been capped with ice ever since! Doesn’t that suggest anything to you, man?”
“Not very much, I’m afraid.”
“I’m disappointed in you,” he said solemnly. “Suppose a really big fragment of that protoplanet—big eno
ugh to get through our atmosphere with only its skin burned off—wound up at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. Then the ocean froze over. There can’t be any recent dust or fragments on the floor of that ocean. And what fell a few million years ago has been resting there under constant refrigeration, so chemical changes in it would be at a minimum; and physical wear-and-tear from thermal currents, exfoliation and so on has had no chance to destroy the evidence it contains. Why, man, anything could be down there in that deep-freeze. And that’s what / want to look for; I’m not interested in the IGY’s piddling little satellites. It’s a whole planet I’m looking for!”
It was an impressive notion, all right. But it still didn’t convince me, except as a notion—something for a science-fiction writer to play with. After all, if there had never been any protoplanet between Mars and Jupiter—and as I recalled, if there had been, the bottom number of such planets had to be three, and the probability was that there had been scores —then any granules and meteorites the Commodore found under the Arctic ice-cap would be just like those everybody else already had under study.
As a research project, competing with all the others for a chunk of our forty days at the Pole, it wasn’t a fortieth as important as the IGY satellite programme. We knew what we were likely to get out of that.
“I see it doesn’t inspire you,” the Commodore said, taking my glass away for a refill. “But it will, it will. You need imagination in this exploring trade, Julian.”
“Like mokele-mbembe?” I ventured.
“Exactly, exactly!” He seemed genuinely pleased. “You must look for the possible. Never mind that it’s also the unlikely, as far as the rules of evidence are concerned. Suppose you never find it? You cover a lot of territory while you’re looking; isn’t that so?”
“It certainly is,” I said. “I still don’t much credit the idea, but I endorse the principle. And at least you’ll dredge up Pfistner’s soil samples in the process.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. “That’s a part of the programme that intrigues me too. It isn’t even certain that there’s any life down there at all. If there is, I doubt that Pfistner will ever get an antibiotic out of it; competition between microorganisms can’t be very keen at those temperatures. But in the antibiotics business, where there’s life there’s hope, I should think.”
Harriet was watching me with an expression of virulent disapproval, but there was nothing I could do about that. What the hell; I liked the guy. And I think he could sense it. Underneath his flamboyance, he seemed to be in search of approval—not at all an uncommon thing in adventurers of all kinds. And obviously he warmed to even the slightest show of it, as though he was genuinely ignorant of how hypnotic his vitality alone could be to a new acquaintance.
“Geoffrey,” Jayne said, putting her hands behind her and leaning back on the hassock to look up at him. The pose was as deliberately provocative as any press agent could have asked, but Farnsworth frankly didn’t notice. “Show Julian our aeroplane.”
“Oh, the plane!” he said enthusiastically. “Now there’s a whale of a piece of apparatus. It’s been out of service for years—nobody wanted it—but it’s still airworthy and it’s perfect for Polar operation. Let me see, where are those pictures? Rupert Hawkes built it as a prototype for the Air Force, but they had bad luck with it, and it was their own fault. The first thing they did—Jayne, what did I do with those pictures?—was to build another one twice as big, and of course it was unstable; turned turtle on its first flight, killed a damned good test pilot who didn’t want to have anything to do with it in the first place. But the prototpe—ah! here they are—is a perfectly stable medium transport, and the Air Force has given us the use of it. Here it is, sir. The Hawkes Flying Tail—a bizarre aircraft to be sure, but incredibly capacious, and with enormously high lift—just the thing for low-temperature flying. I’m going to pilot it myself, and I am not a reckless pilot.”
I looked at the pictures, at first with flat incredulity, and then, gradually, with dawning recognition. It had been years since the Hawkes Flying Tail had dropped out of the publicity limelight, and since nothing like it had ever been flown since, let alone adopted into mass production, I had almost forgotten that such a thing had ever existed. It looked like nothing so much as a powered box kite, or—as the newspapers’ name suggested—the tail of an ordinary aircraft detached, enlarged, slightly redesigned, and put into the air on its own.
None of the photos Farnsworth had given me showed it in flight, though presumably Hawkes had flown it; but Hawkes has flown everything, and is alive today only by virtue of multiple miracles, like all the Quiet Birdmen who survived the barnstorming era. To me, the Flying Tail looked in Farnsworth’s photos to be about as airworthy as a child’s jack, for all its massive size.
And I was going to be flying to the North Pole in that crate. Of course it was airworthy if the CAA had granted it an airworthiness certificate—but I noticed that it bore an X-series licence number on its airfoils, meaning “experimental”, which meant the CAA would consider it airworthy until events proved it otherwise. I was not reassured.
“Is this the plane you got to Boston in last year?” I said.
“No, we couldn’t get it certified in time. Last year we flew a C-Forty-Seven—a flying boxcar. But I’ve taken this plane up. She handles very well once you get used to her; the main problem is in landing, because of the odd configuration. I don’t anticipate any trouble.”
I didn’t anticipate any specific trouble either. But I had a hunch that a man who invariably gets kicked when he bends over to pick up a ten dollar bill had no business boarding the Hawkes Flying Tail, even on an inspection tour.
“I’m afraid Dr. Elvers isn’t going to make it,” Jayne was saying. “It’s too bad. We did so want the two of you to meet.”
“There’ll be another time,” the Commodore said abstractedly over the pictures. Jayne’s remark, however, reminded me that it was getting late. I looked at my watch.
“Oh, oh,” I said. “If I’m going to catch my train home, I’ll have to hump for it. Thanks very much for the drinks. I’ll be seeing you again shortly, of course. When is the take off scheduled for?”
“Monday, April twenty-ninth,” Farnsworth said. “Glad you’re going with us, Julian.”
“I’m sure your scientific training will be a great asset,” Jayne said, uncoiling, and giving me a glowing smile of a kind I have never before seen bestowed on scientific training.
“I’ll go along with you,” Harriet said.
And she did; and so I missed my train after all. Harriet insisted that we stop off in a bar for another drink, and since I was indebted to her, I couldn’t very well refuse.
“You can catch a later train,” she insisted. “I want to talk to you.”
Once we had our drinks, she came at me directly. “Are you really going to go along with that big blowhard?” she demanded.
“It looks that way,” I said. “I’ll admit that I see a few drawbacks I hadn’t seen before. I don’t like the looks of that aircraft one bit. And Jayne rather alarms me, too. But on the whole I think the Commodore’s rather likeable. And the expedition’s worth while, after all.
“That I don’t see at all. It’s just a grandstanding stunt. Him and his asteroids.”
“The asteroids are at least harmless, and he might even be on the right track. And the IGY seems to think the expedition will be valuable.”
Harriet scowled into her drink. “What is this IGY, anyhow? I keep seeing stuff about it in the papers, but I never did find a coherent account of what it’s all about. Is it just this artificial satellite business Ike announced in ’55?”
“No, there’s a lot more to it than that. The period itself runs from July 1st, 1957, to December 31st, 1958. Essentially it’s a world-wide co-operative study of the Earth itself. Geophysics covers the land, the atmosphere, the oceans, and all the things outside the Earth that affect it—the sun, for instance, and cosmic rays. During the Year, the scientists a
re concentrating on fields of study that require simultaneous observations to be made all over the world. I can’t give you the whole list—it keeps growing constantly, anyhow—but some of the problems they’re tackling are the aurora borealis and the airglow, the magnetism of the Earth, its gravitational field—let me see—glaciers, and the weather, oceanography, earthquakes…. I forget the rest, but it’s a large order. There’s a rocket programme for studying the upper atmosphere, and of course the satellites—they ought to yield all kinds of basic information.”
“I can’t quite picture the Commodore as part of a vast fellowship of dedicated basic research men,” Harriet said gloomily. “But I suppose it takes all kinds. I was hoping you’d see through him, and give me some ammunition for separating him from his Pfistner sponsorship. I can’t do it by myself, I’ve proven that. But you let me down.”
“Sorry, carrot-top. He’s peculiar, but I think his expedition is worth while. Otherwise I’d be backing out of it as fast as ever my little legs could run.”
“Well, the least you can do is to see me home.”
I had had just enough to drink so that the idea tempted me, but I didn’t need much Super-Ego to see what my personal devil would make of such an opportunity. I backed out, ungraciously but fast.
I was half-way back to Pelham on the 8.35 before I realized that I had completely forgotten to ask the Commodore about salary.
Four
JUST to be on the safe side, I called Ellen Fremd the next day and gave her the meat of Farnsworth’s pet idea. To my surprise, she was interested, though she showed her usual intellectual caution.
“I think the chances are very much against his finding anything,” she told me over the phone. “I he whole idea of an asteroidal protoplanet is speculative. It’s just as likely that the asteroids are the debris of a planet that failed to form in the very beginning, because the mass of Jupiter kept scattering the components. But there is this recent work on the helium content of meteorites; that’s what you saw in Nature. It suggests that certain types of them were molten only a few million years ago, and that they weren’t exposed to space at the time. It’s difficult to understand how that could be possible, unless they were part of some quite sizeable solid body back then.”