by James Blish
“You make a good case,” I told him sincerely.
“I haven’t scratched the surface,” he said. “The evidence is overwhelming now. Take Ceres, for instance. It was the first planetoid to be discovered, and it’s still the biggest one known. It’s also the only one that’s known to be spherical. Why is that?”
“Why shouldn’t it be? Most planetary bodies are.”
“Ah, yes, but no asteroids are, except Ceres. The sphericity of a planetary body is its sign and seal that it was in on the original formation of the solar system. You can’t heat up a large mass of rock sufficiently by a flash process—such as would be involved in a collision between planets—for it to retain its heat long enough to round off before it cools. You need a temperature of more than three thousand degrees absolute to do that. Ergo, Ceres was not involved in the collision and is not a fragment of either of the colliders. It was a moon belonging to one of them.”
“Wow,” I said. I meant it. The man’s imagination was astonishing.
“Well, what else could it have been?” he said. “It’s of exactly the proper size to be a moon of a planet the size of Earth. Our own Moon is enormously too big for us—it’s more of a sister planet than a true satellite. If all the planets had been doled out moons on an average basis, ours would be just about five hundred miles in diameter—which happens to be the known diameter of Ceres. And by the way, the tektities weren’t formed by any flash process either. Their forming temperatures range from fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred degrees Centigrade.”
I hastily handed the winged bit of dark green glass back to him. I was in no position to weigh his argument on its merits, or even to know whether or not the facts he was spouting at me were really accurate (though where his facts were matchable against those I was carrying in my own head, the agreement was very good). Principally I was beginning to see that this protoplanet obsession of Farnsworth’s was going to take up even more of his time and effort at the Pole than I had suspected, very probably to the detriment of the jobs he had been assigned to do by the IGY. I couldn’t help being intrigued by what he said, but nevertheless the deeper his preoccupation became, the more likely it was that the expedition would be a fiasco from my point of view; indeed, it could well bankrupt me if I came back with nothing to write about that Ellen Fremd considered worth putting on paper. To be sure, she was interested in Farnsworth’s protoplanet too, but she’d lose interest in a hurry if it caused the bulk of the IGY programme to go unfulfilled.
“It’s a fascinating logical structure,” I said. “I wish I could think we’d be likely to find anything to bolster it up. But frankly, Geoffrey, I doubt that very much.”
He put his tektite back in his pocket, his expression abruptly moody. “We’ll see,” he said. He got up and walked back to the control cabin. I was sorry for him, but glad to see him go; I was suddenly, overwhelmingly sleepy.
Sometime during the night we landed, to take on fuel. I remember dimly hearing the distant howling of dogs, to which only a few of our well-fed animals bothered to respond; then the almost equally-distant jammering of a pneumatic hammer. I looked sleepily out my window over the sprawled bones of Dr. Wollheim. I saw a great expanse of flat snow gleaming under brilliant airfield lights, and black figures and muttering trucks moving about, but I had no idea where we were. In a few moments I was back asleep.
When I woke again, we were airborne, and I had joined the Ancient and Honourable Order of Bluenoses without benefit of initiation. We had crossed the Arctic Circle while I slept. I peered out into the blinding morning.
Have you ever thought of the far North as a luxuriantly colourful country? I certainly had not, nor, to be truthful, did it strike me that way at first. Yet even in the first shock of brilliance I was astonished at the deep blue-violet of the sky against the endless expanse of white, and the radiance of gold, like the leaf in an illuminated manuscript, that the sun laid prodigally over both. Then, gradually, I began to notice tones of blue in the snows, and to realize that they were shadows. The land below me was a true desert, mile after mile of gently undulating, wind-fashioned dunes, made of powder-dry snow instead of sand. The shadows were not evident at first not only because of the dazzlement, but because of “fill”—the light reflected into them from the illuminated sides of the dunes.
Fill not only lightens shadows; it colours them—as the plein-air French painters had discovered nearly a hundred years ago. As my eyes continued to adapt to the light, I became more and more aware that what I was seeing thousands of feet below me was truly white only at the peaks of the dunes. There was no true whiteness anywhere else. As the contours of the land changed, as the angle from which I was looking changed with the flight of the plane, as the sun continued to rise, each patch of light and shadow took on a new and even more subtle hue: blue-white, grey-white, pink-white, gold-white, ochre-white … as though this mixture of all the components of visible light was constantly giving up first one component colour and then another under the heatless regard of the sun.
The plane’s intercom crackled. “We’re climbing now,” Farnsworth’s voice said. “Those of you that are new to this country—Harriet, Julian, Wollheim—don’t forget your goggles.”
Guiltily, I looked away from the window, and found that I was indeed as blind as a bat. I clawed my way by feel through my kit for my snow-goggles, and then looked out the window again through them until I could once more see the snows; only then was I ready to take them „off and look inside the plane. It was still as dark as a coal-pit there, but gradually I was able to make out large objects, and then, with painful slowness, smaller details. It was as frightening as coming out from under ether. Nobody who has undergone snow-blindness is likely to forget it.
Then the mountains began to rise before us, rank on serried rank of them, piling up into the sky in motionless waves of ice-covered, jagged crags. Here and there they were pocketed by lakes—lakes frozen solid all the way down to the bottom, many swept clean enough of snow by the winds to show almost black against the crinkled whiteness of the mountain ranges. Some of these were quitted by river-like, crevasse-knotted extensions which wound down through the valleys ‘ for a while toward the south-east and then quit, as sharply as if sheared off like cheese: glaciers. But as we got farther north these too disappeared, leaving us a shimmering universe of grandiose peaks.
We were all alone in this tumbled, cruel ice-scape. Evidently the other plane had taken some more circuitous but easier route. The sense of loneliness was almost tangible. Finally, however, the mountains began to fall behind, and Geoffrey was able to lose altitude little by little.
Though the ice continued for a while without a break, it was easy to tell when we crossed the shoreline of the Arctic Ocean, for the whole character of the surface below changed sharply. It looked now as though it had been coated with clear shellac, and then coated again, layer upon layer, age upon age, until the very earth was covered with a network of fine cracks. After a while I saw the reason for the effect: the ice-sheet here was not continuous, but was instead broken into uncountable thousands of blocks and cakes, which were constantly becoming separated from each other and refreezing again. Each of those “cracks” was a pressure-ridge between two cakes. Here and there I began to see little threads of open water, like pieces of creeks that had somehow gotten lost; and occasionally there was quite a sizeable pond.
There were not many such, however, for the ocean here was chopped up into thousands of islands, each one as snowcapped and desolate as the last, though some of them were as large as Connecticut. Even now, in the summer, it looked as though one could have walked from any one to any other, though the ridges would have made it more of a scramble than a walk. Soon the patches of ice-choked water vanished entirely.
“Coming around on Ellesmere,” the Commodore’s voice said abruptly. “Fasten your belts, all. It’s going to be bumpy.”
The engines changed their note. They had been cut back, and the carburettor heaters were l
abouring to keep from icing; or did a B-29 engine operate by injection? I realized that I just didn’t know. In any event, we were now obviously on the first leg of a long landing approach. I had just begun to strap myself down when something prompted me to look back at Wentz. The astronomer’s eyes were like black holes in his skull, but he was awake and not too hung over to have understood the instruction; he even managed a ghastly sort of grin when he saw me looking at him.
At five thousand feet the engines broke blue wind and Farnsworth put the flaps down. The terrain did not look any different, except that off to the right I could see tiny black dots that might have been a settlement of some kind. It occurred to me belatedly that Hanchett had by-passed having to cross a second mountain range at the south end of Ellesmere by routing us along the west coast of the big island. If so, that collection of black dots was Alert; indeed, we were banking in that direction now.
Despite Farnsworth’s warning, the landing was not very bumpy—certainly no more so than the normal airline landing at a small city. Alert was too cold to provide any thermals large enough to bother a B-29. Farnsworth did supply us with a good high bounce when we first touched ground, but he was bold enough to feather the props and roar us into a power stall almost before we touched again. We smacked down promptly and rolled to a stop at the head of a huge white comet
By that time I was convinced enough of Farnsworth’s piloting skill to be a little surprised to see, after the snow had settled, that there were ambulances and fire-trucks boiling toward us from all sides. Nobody was so much as bruised, so we sent them all away again. Some of the crews looked a little disappointed; living inside the Arctic Circle was, apparently, dull most of the time, and they had thought they had a sure thing when they saw Farnsworth belly-whopping on to a field as slippery as oil on asphalt.
I enjoyed sneering at their disappointment. I felt like an old Polar hand already.
I felt like a freeze-dried Brussels sprout ten seconds after I had stepped into that wind for the first time. My parka, goggles and patches—on my cheeks, nose and chin—seemed to make no difference at all. I might as well have been naked. It was 30 below out there. The figure tells you absolutely nothing; either you’ve felt it, or you haven’t. And this, mind you, was spring.
Farnsworth gave us no time to think, had the cold left us any such ambition. We were all hustled into a Quonset at the edge of the field, heaped neatly inside with the supplies which had been cached on the preceding trip. The stove had been fired in advance of our landing; I was propped next to it on one side, to thaw, and Wentz on the other to cook sober; somehow he had managed to get another edge on during the landing run. Then the place was empty, very suddenly. The rest of the crew had gone off either to the operations hut to monitor Jayne’s plane in, or to service the snowmobiles in their snow-blanketed hangar.
I was now warm enough to shiver without fear of chipping myself, and I went at it like a man with malaria. Wentz watched me owlishly for a few moments and then produced a bottle from somewhere inside his parka. Theoretically he had been deprived by Farnsworth of the bottle he had been working on, so this one must represent an emergency cache; but the flat pint was already a third empty.
“Have some,” he said with childlike directness. “Warm you up.”
Bourbon is not my idea of a breakfast juice but I squeezed that bottle manfully before returning it, all the same. After a while I either stopped shivering or stopped noticing it. “Thanks,” I said.
“Don’ mention it. Good for you. Don’ ever do that onna ice, though. Freeze you stiff b’fore you feel it. Happened t’ many a man.” He took a swig himself, his Adam’s apple working up and down. He must have had an oesophagus sheathed in vanadium steel; the raw stuff went down like orange pop.
“Believe me, I won’t,” I said. The whisky had bit me hard; I was already making glib resolutions for my tomorrow’s sober self. Somewhere in the back of my head, however, was secondhand confirmation of Wentz’s advice; all the authorities say that it is fatal to drink to warm yourself up while you’re in the field. I wondered how a man with his thirst would be able to knock off when we, in turn, were actually out in the weather.
“When do you think Mrs. Farnsworth will get here?”
“Jayne? Inna while. I don’t miss her. More damn foolishness with the movies.”
“Movies? Are we going to take films?”
“We already took plenty,” Wentz said gloomily. “Last time we were up here. Last year, you know, with the snow buggies.”
He stretched out both his feet in front of him and looked at them as though he had never seen them before. “Geoffrey hadda cameraman with him then. To take shots at the Pole. Took a lot of ’em right here, just in case we din get to the gawdam Pole. We din get there, all right.”
“Who’s the cameraman? I guess I didn’t meet him.”
“Oh, he isn’t here now,” Wentz said. “Geoffrey din’t pay him. Gave him fifteen hundred on account and his fare back stateside, on a TCA plane. He sued us for his other ten thousand. Got two hundred fifty bucks and glad to get it, that’s a cinch. Vanother?”
I hadda nother. “Why did he want so much?”
“Well, Geoffrey offered him that much,” Wentz said moodily. “Besides, it was four months out of his life. And my God, the film. Thousands of feet. Jayne puttin’ on lipstick witha glacier inna background. Jayne puttin’ on lipstick witha snowbuggy inna background. Jayne puttin’ on lipstick witha nicefield inna background. Jane puttin’ on lipstick witha gawdam dogs inna background. Jayne____”
He was beginning to sound more and more like Finnegans Wake. “Who’s going to take the films if we really do make the Pole this time?” I cut in hastily.
“Me.” Glug, glug
“Oh.” I thought about that for a moment. “Tell me something, Dr. Wentz. Does Farnsworth pay you? He doesn’t seem to pay anybody else very regularly.”
“Now an’ then he pays me,” Wentz said. “Thass all right. I’m a lush, you know? No ob-ser-va-tory’s goin’ to hire me. Ol’ Geoffrey, he hires me. Pays me sometimes. Now and then, you know? Thass all right. I’m chief of ’stronomy for the whole ex-pe-di-tion, thass who I am. An’ director of photography for the film, when we show the film. Right there onna title cards. Thass who. Bassar that sued ol’ Geoffrey gets a lil line in agate type, says he’s cameraman’s assistant. Show him, you know? Secon’ Wessern Polar Bassar Ex-pe-di-tion, thass who. Le’s havva drink.”
But the bottle continued to hang there from his hand, its bottom nearly touching the splintery floorboards. He went on watching his shoes, as thought he were afraid they might get him up and take him somewhere. When, cautiously, I peered more closely at him, I saw that he was out with his eyes open.
And I was alone. An impenetrable barrier of alcohol and frustration between me and the nearest human being; an expedition full of madmen between me and sanity; hundreds of miles of ice and wilderness between me and the rest of the world; hundreds of hours of desolation between me and the future … and north of me a rock slumbered—I could almost believe it now—millions of miles from the planet that gave it birth, with the very bones of Creation frozen at its core….
A plane passed low overhead, but I hardly heard it. For the first time, now that I was all by myself, I was listening to the wind.
Seven
THE incoming plane had been Jayne. She and her party had almost frozen solid, despite their furs and masks, during the last half of their flight in their unpressurized craft; the biting winds on the airfield must have seemed almost mild to them. Luckily there were no frostbites. They came trooping into the thawing shack, where they made a great to-do flapping their arms about, stamping and blowing on their fingers. None of this noise disturbed Dr. Wentz in the least; he sat slumped where he was, seventy per cent unfrocked astronomer and thirty per cent bourbon (“This whisky guaranteed to be at least three months old—Coloured and flavoured with wood chips”).
“That’s enough,” Jayne said at las
t. “Let’s get this show on the road. Coming, Julian?”
She did not seem in the least tired, though the flight must have been gruelling. I shrugged and got up. I didn’t relish the notion of going out into that cold again, but at least the trip would be short—and I was glad to have conscious company once more, even if it had to be Jayne. Some of the other members of her group were not so willing:
“Hey, have a heart, Miss Wynn.”
“Can’t we wait another five or ten minutes, at least? I’m still blue right down to my boots.”
“It’s warm in the operations hut,” Jayne said. “I’ve got to get a release on the air in time for the bulldog editions, and there’s no radio in this damn hole. Let’s move.”
They grumbled, but they climbed back into their togs. “What about him?” Fred Klein said.
Jayne barely bothered to glance at Wentz. “He’s as useful here as he’d be over there,” she said scornfully. “Let him alone.”
“Well, but let’s at least pass the bottle,” Sidney Goldstein suggested. Nobody waited for Jayne to okay this idea; the bottle was plucked at once from Wentz’s dangling hand. By the time it got to me it was empty, but I’d already had my share. Then we ploughed out into that blinding cold again.
The operations hut was already crowded when we got there, and after that it was close to impassable. I counted noses with difficulty and found that everyone was there but Elvers (and, of course, Wentz). Evidently Farnsworth had conned help from the enlisted men of the base complement for the job of finishing servicing the snowmobiles. Maybe Elvers was supervising. The base commandant, Col. McKinley, was also there, with two aides; all three of them watched us mill around with expressions that varied between amusement and alarm. I could understand how they felt; there was something about the gathering that resembled children just arrived at a party which was on the verge of being too large to control.
Jayne unpacked her typewriter and got right to work on top of a foot-locker. She had a preposterous release about our landing and our further preparations all written in about ten minutes. She showed it proudly to both Harriet and me.