by James Blish
“You can’t send that,” I protested. “For one thing, it’s a phony.”
“Julian, your tune never changes,” she said. I think she was genuinely hurt. “It isn’t a phony. It’s essentially true. Of course we haven’t done all of these things yet, but we’re going to. And how often am I going to find time to radio home, once we’re really working?”
“Twice a day?” Harriet suggested. Her smile was scared, but she was trying.
“The deskmen back home will smell it out,” I insisted. “If they don’t, the technically informed people will—including the IGY Committee.”
She sniffed. I had a good idea what I could do with my IGY Committee. Nor could I sway her an inch; Harriet, wisely, didn’t even try. In the end the release went out just as she had written it. I could only hope that the papers would have sense enough to tone it down—except for the Faber chain, which of course would print it verbatim. But if the Times, for instance, printed it with some of those cosy bracketed interpolations of theirs, the wire services would get the interpolations moving as short “adds” to the main story, and even the Faber chain might print those. After all, Jayne was their girl, and any news about the expedition, even if it corrected her copy, would in a sense be news about her….
I was already getting to be expert at whistling past graveyards.
The door opened, letting in a banshee scream of wind and finely powdered snow, and Elvers’ face peered at us from under his parka. Everybody yelled at him and be shut himself out at once.
Farnsworth had jostled his way over to the commandant’s desk, where he spread his charts out and bent over them, frowning, his big forefinger stabbing here and there for Hanchett’s benefit. “It’s not going to be as simple as it looks,” he was saying. “I’d be happier if there were a few small islands north of us to anchor the ice and give us base points. As it is, there’s just no place to drive a bench-mark once we leave Ellesmere.”
“We can’t cross over the Otterloo Current in any case with the machines,” Hanchett said. “It’d be better to follow a curve off to the west, even if it does take us farther from the mainland.”
“You’re going to try to go all the way to the Pole in those moving-vans of yours?” Col. McKinley said incredulously.
“That’s why we brought them up here.”
“You can’t do it,” the commandant said. “Those vehicles are totally unsuitable for summer work on the ice. The cap isn’t continuous in the summer—it’s just pack ice. You can’t put that much weight on it.”
“We’ll manage,” Farnsworth said. “That’s what we’ve got experts with us for.”
“No such thing as an expert up here. The Arctic Ocean is the least explored area in the whole world. That damned ice is untrustworthy in the summer, and that’s that. You’ll never make it in those machines.”
Farnsworth straightened, his face darkening. I realized that I had never seen him really angry before. “Look here, Colonel,” he said evenly. “I’m the man who’s running this expedition. I’m being paid to run it, by some of the biggest businesses in the world; they think I know what I’m doing. So do I.”
“I don’t,” Col. McKinley said, staring back at Farnsworth with an expression as sardonically motionless as an Easter Island statue. “I’ve been up here two years, and I’m not an expert. You got here today. Draw the moral.”
“I have no time for that kind of exercise, nor any patience with it. If I leave my snowbuggies behind, I lose my trademark, which is worth many thousands of dollars. I also fail to fulfill my testing commitments to my sponsors. I also lose most of my ability to be of use to the government, and to the International Geophysical Year. Therefore, the buggies go, and with your co-operation. This is what I say. That makes it so.”
Col. McKinley stood stock still for a moment; then he spread his hands and shrugged. “Those are the orders I have,” he said harshly. “Hell, Commodore, I’m not trying to run your expedition. I’m just trying to keep you from committing suicide. Go ahead, do it your way; it’s no skin off my nose.”
Farnsworth smiled winningly. “Thank you, sir” he said. “I don’t want to be bull-headed either. go along with you this far: Suppose I take one of our planes over the proposed route, first? If there are serious conditions anywhere along the path, Hanchett and I can easily plot a new course around them. That ought to keep us out of trouble.”
“It’ll get you shot down, too,” McKinley said, with a certain relish. “I’m sorry, Commodore, but that’s out of the question. I am empowered to forbid that kind of operation, and I do forbid it.”
“Why, in God’s name?” Farnsworth said, his face changing colour again.
“Because this is a military area—or a theatre of war, if you really want the blunt name for it. For an IGY outfit, you people seem to be pretty light on facts the IGY knows by heart. Were you at the Stockholm IGY meeting in 1956?”
“No,” Farnsworth said. “What has that to do with it?”
“The Russians proposed then that we and they fly alternate daily observation patrols across the Pole, landing at each other’s bases at Nome and Murmansk. Our people weren’t empowered to accept, but later on Washington accepted, with conditions. The Russians accepted the conditions.”
“Well?”
“One of the conditions rules out all unscheduled flights. Only normal commercial traffic and the agreed transpolar patrol are allowed. The violating party is liable to attack on sight. There are fighters up all the time to enforce the rule—we’ve even had a few inconclusive dogfights, and one of those could blow up into something major any time now. If you take one of those crates of yours over the Pole, the Russians will ‘shoot you down, and we’ll just have to sit back and watch, them do it. If we stepped in, in violation of the agreement, we’d start a war—after all, we made the conditions ourselves, Clear enough?”
“Perfectly,” Farnsworth said, unruffled. “All right, no planes. We’ll just have to do it the hard way—in the snowmobiles. Very good. Jayne, come over here and let’s check the crews.”
McKinley was shunted aside, wearing the expression of a man who has won all the battles and lost the war. The manœuvre was purely dramatic on Farnsworth’s part, for there was not a great deal of planning left to do. The lead snowbuggy would be driven by Dr. Hanchett, who had the responsibility of seeing to it that we would follow the proposed path into the interior, and arrive on time at the Pole instead of somewhere on the north coast of Greenland. As the next most valuable members of the party, Elvers and the dogs would ride in the last buggy, which Jayne would drive, because only a total of four people in the party knew how to drive them. This meant that Harriet had to ride in the middle buggy with Farnsworth because she would not be separated from her pay-cheque, so I decided to ride in the middle buggy too, along with Sidney Goldstein, our cheerful cryologist, who professed to be much smitten with Harriet. Wentz was put in with Jayne and Elvers on the theory that he would be in no shape to care whom he rode with, though it wasn’t expressed quite that openly. Wollheim was to go with Hanchett in order to make sure that there was one woman in each buggy, thus dividing the risk to what little of potential American motherhood we had with us.
And so on. It was all very sane and unexcited, like parcelling out passengers for a three-car picnic. All through the allocation the wind howled without let or surcease, and somewhere along the line I found Harriet’s hand curled in mine, like a hedgehog warming its nose in its burrow.
We got up at 5.00 a.m. the next day, but it was nearly noon outside, as it had been for many weeks. I was getting my first taste of what it is like to live in a country where the days and nights are each six months long, and the sun goes down a little and then rises again in the sky without ever having set. Above the Arctic Circle, Kepler and God are superseded by something called Benchley’s Law, which says that the Earth does not really go around the Sun at all, but around Aroostook, Me., and besides there is really no such place anyhow.
When the
re is no Time, you make one up; and man-made time is always fast. At least in the beginning, I would have eaten five or six meals a day, slept twice as often as usual, and wound up the week on only three of four clock-days, had it not been for clocks and the wise condescension of old Arctic hands among the young draftees on the base. My metabolism was enormously speeded up, by the cold perhaps, and. I think, by my drive to get through the calendar months and back home. Without clocks, I would have aged several years in those two months, out of inability to recognize when a given astronomical day actually was over.
By the time I arrived in the cave where the snowmobiles were stored, it was already deafening with the echoes of two of their engines. Mechanics were heating the block of the third engine with a huge blowtorch, and before long it too was slamming noise off the walls. In the darkness after the snow-glare, the buggies looked like crouching animals, their gigantic tyres—almost as high as they were—tucked under their blunt chins like paws.
Inside, however, they were warm and comfortable, and surprisingly roomy. If you take a vehicle almost as big as a two-story house, and apportion the space inside it as economically as you would apportion it in a submarine, you can pack in a lot of living space along with the necessary equipment, and Farnsworth’s designer hadn’t stinted. The impression of being on shipboard was heightened in the tiny driver’s cab, which was laid out like a miniature ship’s bridge.
Farnsworth was up there when I came in, humming something repetitious and full of flatted fifths which I suppose was African, and watching the elaborate dashboard while the engine warmed up.
“Hello, Julian,” he said abstractedly. “Find your cabin all right? Enough room? Got your things stowed away?”
I gave him a blanket yes and watched over his shoulder. The doors to the cave were being swung open now, letting in the intense white glare and lighting up the hunched shoulders of Hanchett’s snowmobile ahead of us. Abruptly the basketwork dish atop Hanchett’s machine began to revolve on its alt-azimuth mounting. The astronomer was testing his radar, the invisible lifeline he would use to keep us together across the ice.
“Geoffrey, this is Number One,” his voice squawked abruptly from the radio imbedded in the dash. “Do you read me?”
“Loud and clear,” Farnsworth said into his hand mike.
“Jayne, come in. Do you read me?”
“Loud and clear, Number One.”
“Number Two to Number One,” Farnsworth said. “Let’s check out on the engines.”
“I’m missing Wentz here,” Jayne said. “Hold it—they tell me he’s here. Evidently he slept here. All right, Geoffrey, call ’em off.”
They were as formal as airline pilots in calling in their oil temperature, magneto readings, and twenty other details, but I was in no doubt that the instrumental ballet was necessary. It reassured me, a little. At last Farnsworth said: “All right, Number One, it’s your lead.”
There was a moment’s pause through which the three snowmobile engines snarled sotto voce. Then Dr. Hanchett sounded his air-horn—a ferocious, inanimate bugling which made my scalp tighten—and his snowbuggy hunched down and rolled out into the intolerable day. Farnsworth Shifted gears, our own engine roared, and I felt us begin to move out after him.
“Here we go,” Farnsworth said detachedly. “You look a little nervous, Julian. Did you sleep poorly?”
“I was awake a good deal,” I admitted. “The wind was noisy.”
“Tcha. Here.” He produced a small round pillbox of transparent plastic, rather like a glass model of a young oyster, from his pocket and handed it to me. It was full of little orange tablets.
“What are these?”
“Tranquizol, ten milligrams. Something Pfistner makes; good for the nerves.”
The hell with that; I handed it back to him. I had successfully resisted the antihistamine craze in the old days when they were being boomed as cures for colds, and I meant to go right on resisting them now that they were being called ataraxics. I don’t exactly enjoy my anxieties, but they are my personal property and I mean to keep them.
“I’m not tense, just tired. And I want to keep alert so l can report accurately. That’s why I’m here.”
“Very good.” He tossed one of the orange pills into his mouth without seeming to notice that he had done it, and stowed the box away. Ahead, Hanchett’s machine crossed the boundaries of the airfield and began to wind north among the heaped drifts. Farnsworth followed him closely.
“It’s a great adventure, Julian,” he said. “We’re coming closer every minute to one of the greatest riddles in creation. I know we are. If we could actually solve it….”
“I admire your faith. You’ve even almost convinced me—and I’m a hard man to convince.”
“Want more facts? Julian, I have them by the thousands. You shushed me when I told the newspapers that we might find evidences of life in any protoplanet fragments we brought up. Did you know then that somebody already has?”
“I didn’t know it,” I said, “and as a matter of fact I don’t believe it.”
“But it’s true. Bacteria were cultured from the interiors of meteorites, more than twenty years ago.”
“Oh, that. I remember those experiments. They were pretty well discredited. The sterile techniques the experimenters used weren’t foolproof by any means, as I remember it. And the germs themselves turned out to be pretty commonplace—Bacillus subtilis, and some other almost universal Earth types.”
“But what do you want a meteoric bacterium to do—sing ‘Stars Fell on Alabama’, or show hotel stickers from Jupiter on its luggage?” Farnsworth demanded. “I’d like to meet the taxonomist today who’d offer me money that those microbes were one hundred per cent identical with subtilis. Doctor Wollheim once told me that she wouldn’t certify the ancestry of any bacterial cell without a phage typing, and even then she still wouldn’t be sure of its orthoclone, whatever that is. What did they know about bacterial genetics in those days?”
“So the experiment was inconclusive; sure. That’s all I’m saying. Ergo, it has no standing as evidence.”
Farnsworth sighed. “You’re indeed a hard man to convince, Julian. Maybe I’d best leave you alone and let you convince yourself. When I try to convince you, you feel obliged to fight back.”
It was, I realized, a disturbingly accurate capsule analysis of how I think. Obviously Farnsworth was not yet done with surprising me.
I never knew when we passed over the shoreline of Ellesmere and went out over the ocean itself. The pressure ridges in the ice along the shoreline extended more than a mile inland, and nearly that far north, too, so that our progress through them was long. It was not, however, monotonous, for these ridges are comparatively long-lasting, and so are sculptured by the wind into sharp, interconnected statues and curious shapes full of oval holes, every one opalescent with captured sunlight. It was like moving through an ocean made, not of water, but of transparent driftwood.
By the time we were facing the serrated ice-field that rolled without visible break over the horizon to the Pole, there was no land under us at all—nor had there been any for several hours.
Here we were able to pick up speed. Hanchett’s snowmobile accelerated cautiously until he was doing about twenty miles an hour, with occasional delays as he spotted some ridge or dip that might mean trouble. Alone, he might have been able to go even faster; but in any train of vehicles there is a whip-crack effect as the last car in line tries to keep up; since the driver of the last car never decides where it is that he’s going, he loses two or three seconds of decision-time on every minor turn, and the only answer to that is speed. The result is that if the head car is doing a steady fifty, the rear car may well be doing ninety at least half of the time—and one of these days we are going to lose a President to just this effect of a motocade.
Hanchett’s machine, with its eternally revolving radar antenna, was the only thing to look at in the whole snow-bound world now. What he could be using to reli
eve his eyes and keep his sense of perspective I could hardly imagine. Now and then he spoke to us, but always only on business. There was considerable chit-chat back and forth by radio between Jayne’s buggy and ours, which Hanchett must have heard—since the channel was always open—but he never contributed to any of the purely social talk; the strain must have been tremendous.
How Farnsworth had managed to get two such different men as Hanchett and Wentz as his astronomers could not be riddled. I kept thinking, with irritation at the irrelevance of the pun, that they were poles apart.
The sky was clear all day, without a trace of snow. A little spume blew off the surface of the ice, but the snow there was too hard-packed to impede visibility much. At noon I went below to eat, and found even Harriet less pale. Our progress had been so smooth that her ready fears were beginning to submerge, and she was parrying Sidney Goldstein’s deliberately outrageous flirting with almost the old Madison Avenue gusto. By the time the three of us left the galley together for the bridge, we were quite cheerful; Farnsworth was as pleased with us as a father.
“No news,” he told us, attacking the corned beef sandwich we had brought him with the tilting of the head and the sudden snap of a striking turtle. “Mm. I was hun’ry. Parm me.”
We settled into crannies and peered out the broad windshield. Farnsworth did for his sandwich in about five bites and drank all his coffee. “I saw one of the patrol planes Colonel McKinley was talking about back at the airfield. An F-one-o-one. Elvers says his dogs are all thriving, and that’s good for huskies. Ordinarily they get carsick within the first hour. Harriet, my dear, are you still angry with me? You look beautiful. I think you’re beginning to enjoy yourself.”
“I’m not angry,” Harriet said. “I’m glad I came along, I’ll admit it. I just wish I believed you’re going to pay me when this is all over, Geoffrey.”