by James Blish
At this point Harriet sat on him so firmly that you could almost hear the air going out of him. He wouldn’t have allowed it if he hadn’t enjoyed the process, but obviously he did. But in the nature of things it was impossible to sit on Jayne, ‘Though Harriet stopped Farnsworth’s flow of tosh to the press through normal channels, she couldn’t prevent Jayne’s purveying it in even more highly supercharged form to the Faber chain—after which, of course, it became common coin anyhow.
The reaction was inevitable. A week before the scheduled take off date, I got a telegram from Canada. I had been expecting it. It said:
WHATS GOING ON 2WPBE STOP NEWSPAPER STORIES HERE HIGHLY INACCURATE SENSATIONAL NONSENSICAL STOP IGY COMMITTEE DISTURBED ASKING CLARIFICATION STOP WIRE ME CARE CHUBB CRATER STATION E FREMD
I could hardly blame her. I wired back:
COMMODORE DRINKING HEAVY PR WINE AIDED ABETTED SPONSORS PR AGENCIES AND MISS WYNN STOP WILL BE OFF AIR IN WEEK UNTIL THEN WILL TRY SHOOSHING HIM JULIAN COLE
Her reply was short, sharp and pointed:
SHOOSH FIRMLY STOP IGY SPONSORSHIP VERGING WITHDRAWAL B FREMD
After some long and difficult pondering I took all the telegrams—the copy of mine included—to Farnsworth and shoved them at him, without saying a word. He began to bluster almost at once, but the last wire stopped him in mid-eruption.
“Does she mean it?” he said, peering at me sharply. “Surely she’s bluffing?”
“Ellen doesn’t know the meaning of the word. She never dealt with anybody in her life on any basis but that of the straight goods.” I had this from Ham, of course, not from personal experience; but Ham is a reliable observer. “In some respects it’s made her very unhappy, but that’s how she is. She says exactly what she means.”
“Um.” The Commodore chewed at his lower lip. “That’s a strange way to deal with people, I must say. But…. What do you think I ought to do?”
“Just lay off a little, Geoffrey. Don’t let the papers trap you into thinking that everything that gets into print is good for us. If you said tomorrow that you were throwing up the expedition because you’d fallen in love with the Ranee of Krajputni, you’d be on page one of every paper in town—but that kind of publicity isn’t worth having. If you can just drop the Space Cadet angle for one more week—and persuade Jayne to drop it, too—we’ll be on our way, and the IGY won’t be able to yank the rug out from under us. Can’t you do that?”
“Uh, yes, I guess I can,” Farnsworth said, somewhat mollified, but rather gloomy too. “Nobody in this country has any sympathy with creative imagination any more. It isn’t as if I said anything impossible. You know, Julian, this is another piece of the pattern. We’ve been harassed and bedevilled from the moment we conceived of this expedition. There’s no longer any question in my mind about it. Somebody doesn’t want us to get to the Pole.”
“Meaning Ellen Fremd?” I said acidly, against my better judgment. “Horsefeathers, Geoffrey.”
“No, not Ellen Fremd directly. But she’s being used. It all adds up. She’s another piece in the jigsaw puzzle.”
“Jigsaw puzzles are pictures that have been cut apart in patterns that have no relationship to the original,” I said frostily. “As a model for logic they lead straight to the straitjacket. Any man who tried to ‘use’ Ellen Fremd would wind up with blackened stumps where his hands used to be.”
“You may be right,” he said, in the tone of a man who knew I was wrong.
“Anyhow, Geoffrey, look here, it’s very simple. Just lay off the War Between Mars and the Asteroids from now until take off. That’s all I ask.”
“All right, Julian.”
But he was still brooding when I left. I wouldn’t have put any money on the staying power of his agreement.
Somehow, all the same, the appointed hour crept closer. That whole week was hotter than Purgatory; I wonder now how any of us lasted it out. Yet take off time did at last arrive.
Were I writing a novel, I would give you here a touching farewell scene between Midge and the kids and me. Under the actual circumstances, nothing could be more inappropriate—not because there wasn’t such a scene, but because when take off time arrived, we didn’t take off. Bad weather shut in early that morning: thick fog, coupled with a muggy heat more intense than we had had to suffer earlier. There was no chance at all of our getting off the ground, let alone rising above the weather. The planes were so heavily loaded that the heat-rarified air wouldn’t have allowed us to reach flying speed before we hit the end of even the longest of Teterboro’s runways.
We sat on the field, swearing, while it got hotter and hotter and thicker and thicker, listening with our minds’ ears to the expensive aviation petrol evaporating from the tanks. Farnsworth was in a foul mood, but the dogs were in a fouler; not even Elvers could get near them without being snapped at savagely. The result was that after my final farewells I had to trail ingloriously back to Pelham to the unbelieving and disapproving stares of almost the whole brood; only the baby was glad to see me back, and she only because she was too little to understand that I wasn’t supposed to be home at all.
The next day was worse, if such a thing is possible. The newspapers, abruptly recalling last year’s fiasco, gave us a good going-over, concentrating particularly on the Commodore. He took it badly. Nobody likes being transformed from a hero into a charlatan overnight, and Farnsworth was less well equipped to take such a transformation philosophically than almost anyone else I can think of. He blamed Harriet for it, out loud and at length.
Harriet’s nerves had been as thoroughly fried by the heat as his had been. Nothing in the world is so hot as a hot day at an airport. She got up off the packing box she was sitting on and took the stunned (and, of course, seated) Commodore by both ears.
“Don’t you lay your infant troubles on me, you big piece of cheese,” she said shrilly. “Anything I did for you I did for free. When was the last time you paid me? What right have you got to complain about volunteer work? Where the hell is my salary?”
The Commodore freed his ears, stood up, and tried to turn his back. Harriet promptly lifted her skirts and kicked him. “Where’s my money?” she shouted. “I haven’t had one nickel out of your pockets since you took me on.”
“Now, Harriet,” he said, turning belatedly. “I’m sorry. I spoke hastily. It isn’t really your fault, I know that.”
“How nice of you to say so. Where’s my money? When are you going to pay me my salary? Answer me that!”
A flashlight bulb winked silently. It should be a good picture, I thought, but the photog will rue the day he missed that kick. It had everything, including legs.
“You’ll get your money,” Farnsworth said. His voice had turned harsh. Evidently he had seen the bulb go off, and he was none too sure whether or not a picture of the kick existed. After all, his back had been turned. “But not if you make a scene, Harriet. Other people trust me. So can you. You’ll have to.”
“In a pig’s eye,” she said. Though her voice was now almost as quiet as his, it would have been evident to anyone who knew Harriet as well as I did that she was already on the borderline of hysterics. “You’ll pay me, all right. I’m going to stick to you like a burdock. You won’t see the last of me until you’ve coughed up every nickel.”
“You won’t like the Pole much,” Farnsworth said edgily.
“I’m going there, all the same. I’m going to be on your back for the rest of your life—or until I get my salary.”
“There isn’t room for you.”
“Yes there is. I’ll sleep with the dogs if I have to. You don’t want me to go? All right, pay me. Or lump me. What’ll it be?”
Farnsworth shrugged. “I can’t pay you now,” he said. “Come along if you like.”
Harriet burst into tears of triumph. To my utter astonishment Jayne took it upon herself to comfort her and calm her down. The Commodore removed himself to look at the weather.
And the newspapermen broke for the telephones
like stampeding cattle.
Luckily, we got off well before the early-bird editions of the papers could reach Teterboro: just at dawn the next morning. I emerged from phoning my family to find Farnsworth in an almost childishly sunny mood; he had just been told that the temperature had dropped enough to permit his planes to get airborne. He was so pleased that he stopped to pat Chinook, Dr. Elvers’ lead Malemute; Chinook promptly bit him, high up on one ham, but he responded with nothing more than a desultory kick. (He didn’t miss, though. Chinook was still ki-yi-yi-ing over his injured dignity back in the cargo hold when our plane warmed up and drowned him out.)
Only one reporter—a Times man—was on hand to watch us tumbling aboard. I found myself seated next to Dr. Eleanor Wollheim, the expedition’s bacteriologist and the only other woman involved. She was a strictly utilitarian type, about as glamorous as a potato-masher, and clearly disapproved of men who kicked dogs, or men who were amused by men who kicked dogs. I strapped myself in, secured my oxygen mask in its rack on the back of the seat before me, and looked out the window.
The engines got louder; the plane was trembling markedly as Farnsworth tested each pod in turn. But I wasn’t, for once, totally preoccupied with my clammy palms and last-minute urgency to be on the way. Instead I was watching someone running: a wildly gesticulating man, pounding across the field toward us from the direction of the administration building, flourishing what looked to be a roll of blue paper.
Never in my life have I seen anyone so easily identifiable as a process-server. I knew it in the first three seconds after I saw him. Harriet settled down belatedly in the seat immediately in front of me and began to buckle her safety belt. I leaned forward and bellowed in her ear:
“Harriet! Did Farnsworth ever pay Robert Willey, either?”
She looked startledly over her shoulder at me, and then frowned for a moment over my question.
“No,” she said.
At the same instant, the plane’s engines hit max RPMs, the dogs howled balefully amid the baggage, and Farnsworth let go of the brakes. I was slugged back into my seat, and the gesticulating man vanished instantly. The plane roared down the runway into the lightening mist, noisy, confident, and tail-heavy. As the end of the runway came at us, Farnsworth screwed the flaps down and we went clumsily into the air in one immense bound.
The Second Western Polar Basin Expedition was on its way.
Six
TIMID though I am, I have always loved flying, and we had no sooner broken through the cloud-cover than I forgot all the imbroglios of the past months. That flight still sticks in my mind as one of the most beautiful things that has ever happened to me. We emerged over a vast, still sea of clouds flooded with dawn-pink, rolling all the way north to the horizon; after a while I got out of my belt and went forward to watch from the control cabin—a privilege sternly denied passengers on a commercial airliner.
Farnsworth was still piloting, though he could have put the ship on autopilot much earlier had he wanted to. It was evident from his expression that he simply liked flying a plane, and would take a long time further to become bored enough to relinquish manual control. Dr. Hanchett, one of the astronomers, was doing the navigating; he was of course qualified for it, but I rather doubted that he was also properly licensed. Farnsworth was gloriously negligent about little legal details like that; still, who could catch Hanchett operating without a licence up here? He was just saving Farnsworth the trouble.
When the cloud-cover finally thinned and vanished, a little over an hour later, we were over Canada by a hair, and forests were rolling away under us. Our air speed was pushing 275, which is good cruising for a B-29; we seemed to be quartering into a strong southeasterly wind. The Commodore was holding us straight-and-level at 13,000 feet—whether zeroed at sea level or-at Teterboro I couldn’t tell, but it could hardly have made more than 50 feet of difference, not enough to throw off a contact landing for a plane that size. Behind us and to the left was our other plane, cruising just below 10,000—the maximum height at which it’s safe to fly without masks in an unpressurized plane.
Farnsworth shot a glance at me and caught me looking at the altimeter. “We’ll have to begin climbing for it tomorrow,” he said. “There are mountains all along the D. E. W. line here in the east—not as high as the Baffin range, but plenty high enough for these crates.”
The plane dipped one wing and he corrected for it, watching the horizon contentedly. I could hardly believe that he was the same man. He seemed almost gentle. All the flamboyance and boisterousness was gone: he was quiet, preoccupied, intense, and yet without a trace of complacence —a man going quietly about a business he knew well.
Abashed, I left him alone. Obviously he could do without being distracted by sightseers like me. I was even beginning to become convinced that he might have managed better if he’d been allowed to have the Flying Tail.
Unused to such an access of humility, I went back to my seat prepared for any self-abasement, even if it involved being polite to Dr. Wollheim. The potato-masher, however, was looking rigidly out the window and needed no help from me. So was Harriet, with a kind of frightened resignation; air travel was old stuff to her, of course, but the destination to which she had committed herself this time was obviously beginning to bulk larger and larger to her. I couldn’t help her, either. As for Dr. Wentz, our other astronomer, he had produced a fifth of bourbon from his kit and was getting quietly fried. This was perfectly in character—I had yet to see him sober—and it was obvious that he would be happiest left alone. I knew nothing about him, anyhow, except what I had been able to find in Vol. I of American Men of Science —which noted, in cryptic abbreviationese, that his honorary doctorate from the University of Lisbon had been revoked, in the same year that he had been granted it. As for Elvers, he was sleeping with the dogs.
I sat down, feeling perfectly and completely useless. The rest of the human staff was flying behind us with Jayne Wynn. I wondered who was actually piloting that plane. Perhaps she was, considering the broad spectrum of talents I already knew her to have. If so, nevertheless, I was glad not to be with her.
We flew all day and well into the evening. Night fell before we crossed the Sixtieth Parallel, but the ground cover was already sparse by the time the last light failed. This far north, only a few dwarf spruces struggled up against the cold, and at the Sixtieth we would cross the “tree-line”, that line which not only divides the trees from the snows, but in Canada traditionally divides the Indians from the Eskimos.
The cabin door opened and the Commodore came out, I suppose because there was nothing more to be seen that day, and came down the aisle. He settled in the seat across from mine, looking pleased with himself.
“Who’s minding the store?” I asked him.
“Hanchett. We’re on autopilot, and he’s watching the instruments. If anything goes wrong he’ll call me; he knows enough to detect any trouble.” He reached into one of his jacket pockets. “Tell me, Julian, have you ever seen anything like this before?”
“This” proved to be a piece of crudely shaped glass, dark green in colour, about as big as my hand. It was roughly crescent-shaped; on one wing of the crescent, on the outside curve, there was a sort of pool or apron of the same glass, circular when looked down upon.
“No,” I said, hefting it. It weighed perhaps a quarter of a pound. “Doesn’t look much like bottle-glass. What is it?”
“It’s Darwin glass—australite.”
“Sorry, I’m no geologist. What is it supposed to tell me?”
“Darwin glass,” the Commodore explained, “is meteoric. It’s one member of a whole family of such glasses, called tektites. They’ve fallen all over the Earth, probably long ago —paleolithic man used them as weapon points. See that puddle?” He pointed to the apron on the back of the crescent. “That’s where the surface fused in flight, and the glass flowed back to that point because of the wind-pressure.”
Now I was beginning to get his drift. He was back
on his favourite hobby-horse, the asteroidal protoplanet. “Do you think they’re parts of Planet Four-and-a-half?”
“They couldn’t be anything else. Whether or not they were in this glass form when they were actually part of the planet is a tough question. It’s possible that glass pools formed on the surface while the planet was still hot, if you assume a world about the size of the Earth, as you pretty well have to. You need a planet with a nickel-iron core, surrounded by a mantle of triolite and olivine, with a top coat of silicates—just like us. Otherwise you can’t account for the distribution of meteor-types in any systematic way.”
“A planet with a glass skin!” I said. “That would be a novelty.”
“I didn’t say that,” the Commodore objected. “I said silicates—which could mean sand, granite and so on. It’s my notion that the tektites were originally parts of comets that passed through the outer layers of the sun’s atmosphere, and got converted into glass there. I don’t see any other way to account for the low gas pressure they show.”
“Then that would indicate that they weren’t once part of the asteroidal planet, wouldn’t it? Comets are supposed to be formed independently.”
“Unproven,” he said. “I think it’s a lot likelier that meteors are just the debris of comets, and that they all came out of the asteroid belt originally.”
“Then what happened there originally?”
“Probably a collision,” Farnsworth said broodingly. “If there were originally two planets in that area, Jupiter would have been shifting their orbits constantly. After all, the accident had four thousand million years to happen in. The very first tektites fell on the Earth no more than fifty million years ago—and the same seems to hold true of all meteorites, of every kind. You never find them in strata older than that. So the accident was recent.”