Fallen Star

by James Blish

  I discovered that I had been on my feet for some time, though I couldn’t remember having stood up. I sat down again, noting with mild surprise that I was shaking.

  “By God,” Farnsworth said softly. “He’s right. Thanks, Julian. I wish you’d been able to convince me sooner, but you sure as hell tried. But maybe it isn’t too late. Does anybody have anything to add?”

  “Yes,” Fred Klein said. “In the eight years that I’ve known you, Geoffrey, I’ve never before heard you admit you were wrong. And I think that you’re a bigger man for the admission than you could possibly be by being right all the time.”

  Farnsworth nodded grimly. The meeting hung in stasis for a long second, and then we were all getting up.

  I wanted to hit my cabin right away; I was drained dry and I ached from neck to feet. But Wentz stopped me in the companionway.

  ‘That was fine,” he said, looking at me with his bloodshot, upsetting eyes, like those of a St. Bernard. “It’s been a long time since I last heard a man throw all his emotions right out on the table like that. I’m a lousy old bum without a conviction to my name any more, but by God even I was moved. That took doing.”

  “Well—thanks, Joe. I surprised myself. I’m glad it helped.”

  “It was the making of us all. Come on over to the other buggy with me. I’ve got some baggage to dispose of; we’ll have a small party.”

  My heart sank. I was more than tired; I was disgusted, and astonished that I had enough reserve left to feel anything at all. “No, thanks,” I said through a grey fog. “I’m not thirsty, Joe. I just need sleep.”

  “You don’t dig me,” the astronomer said. “I’m not thirsty either. I don’t want to drink the stuff, I want to burn it, out on the ice. It’s mostly brandy. You’re the strongest of us all, Julian. I can’t do it by myself. Will you help?”

  He wasn’t pleading. He continued to look at me from under his shaggy eyebrows with an expression that was almost fierce. I knew that the best thing I could do would be to tell him that I trusted him to do the job by himself, but I was too moved to play the all-father, especially to this man who was twice as old as I was and who commanded so many skills I could only admire, never command for myself. There are times when what you know is right feels all wrong, and this was one of them. I said, “Sure, Joe.”

  And so I spent part of my first “night” on the surface of the Arctic Ocean helping to tend a nearly invisible blue bonfire. It was indeed a party, but such a party as I’ve attended neither before nor since—half solemn and half gay, like a combination of High Mass and a saint’s-day festival on Mulberry Street. We made a puddle first and lit that, and then we took to tossing the bottles in whole, with only the caps off. They would whistle like little rockets until the glass cracked, and then there was a soft explosion as all the rest ignited at once, and the blue fire would rise high enough to make the sky waver.

  After a while, Elvers came over from his nearly-completed igloo and squatted down between us, looking at the growing depression in the ice with slow-blinking curiosity. He made my skin crawl, but you don’t exclude celebrants from this kind of ceremony.

  “Hot,” he said at last. “What’s the purpose?”

  “None at all,” Wentz said. His hollow eyes were gleaming. “We just thought we’d like to see a fire.”

  Elvers nodded, and then went on nodding for what seemed to be a long time, as though his head, once put into motion, had, forgotten while he thought about weightier matters. Then he got up and went away. Though the wind was rising, he was still bare-legged.

  “That guy,” Wentz said, “gives me the creeps. But he’s good with the dogs, I’ll give him that.”

  He uncapped the last bottle and threw it into the fire. The sun had stopped setting and was hovering in the west: midnight. The bottle went fffffooosh-plink, phung! We watched until the flames began to die; then we shook hands and trudged back toward our respective snowmobiles.

  Behind us, Elvers was carefully settling into place the capstone of his igloo. It would have no dogs in it after tomorrow.

  We had managed to put well over a hundred miles of ice behind us before the disaster, but that left us with nearly four hundred still unaccounted for. Without really stopping to think about it, I had imagined that getting the rest of the way travelled by sled would need weeks, all of them filled with privations I would rather not anticipate. Most of these unformed apprehensions turned out to be wrong, based as they were on nothing more than how much I didn’t know about dogsleds and the North.

  It’s true that a team of dogs makes heavy going of dragging a heavily loaded sled into motion, especially if the sled is carrying not only many full packs, but also a heavy, useless bundle of flesh named Julian Cole. Their blunt claws slip and scrabble and nothing seems to be happening. Once it is actually under way, however, a sled is the closest thing in the world to a frictionless vehicle. As soon as its inertia has been transformed into momentum, pulling it is no problem for seven strong dogs, because it runs not on ice, but on the thin film of, water its weight melts as it passes over the ice.

  We had not been sliding forward more than two minutes before Wentz had to trot to keep behind the sled. At this point he stepped on to the left runner with one foot, still holding on to the high grips at the back, gave a few pushes with the other foot—for all the world as though making a scooter go—and then was only an additional passenger.

  “Mush!”

  In all, we did seventy miles on the first day of travel, in three stints of four hours each, with frequent stops of five minutes or so. This, as I found out thereafter, was an unusual distance, and due entirely to the fact that the dogs were fresh; but we made the entire run from snowmobiles to Pole in six days, which by my figuring means that the dogs averaged about seven miles per working hour, or a little better than that.

  Oh, it was a cold, miserable trip, and inexpressibly dreary. In contrast to what I had been expecting, however, it was almost a pleasure, and I would have passed out Dog Yummies every night if I’d had any with me. It was just as well that I didn’t. The dogs got fed once a day, after work, and that was that—and they didn’t get any igloo to sleep in on the way, either. They slept staked out, well separated so they couldn’t get at each other and start fights.

  When they weren’t working, they were a savage lot, snarling even at Elvers upon very small provocation. He concentrated on keeping on terms of armed truce with the three lead dogs, apparently realizing that it was hopeless to expect the whole pack to be obedient. Even then, in the morning it was Elvers’ team that got hitched up first, and then the others. As long as the two trailing teams knew Chinook was leading on the first sled, the subordinate lead dogs would obey Farnsworth and Wentz well enough—especially if they had a chunk of ice thrown at them now and then, and got roared at every few moments. Both Elvers and Farnsworth also had whips, but Elvers seldom used his; as for Wentz, he wouldn’t have known how.

  The strangest aspect of all this is that the dogs liked it. When Elvers would kick them awake in the morning they would skulk and snarl and snap, but they would head for the first sled all the same, and stand stock still while the traces were being hitched to them. If they tried to take a piece out of Elvers’ ear in the process, he cuffed them—and instead of taking his hand off, they would lift a foot to allow a chest strap to go under, or show some other astonishing flash of co-operation. Farnsworth bullied them unmercifully, and they took it, and were working better for him at the end of the six days than I would have imagined possible on the first day.

  It was quite different with Wentz. He had no whip, he seldom cuffed, never kicked, never threw things at them. He never had to, because they were afraid of him on sight. If they were co-operative with Elvers and Farnsworth only because they knew they’d be beaten if they didn’t, then it’s impossible to account for how they behaved with Wentz. They were afraid of him most of all—and they worked very badly for him, constantly nipping at each other’s hocks, pulling free of
the traces, ignoring orders, and turning surlily mule-like when we least expected it. When that happened a few good kicks in the ribs from Elvers not only brought them back into line, but somehow made them seem more cheerful (if it’s possible for a Malemute to be cheerful).

  I think now that, for the dogs, it was a question of knowing who the boss was. Elvers and the Commodore always smelled the same, but Wentz, in the grip of his abrupt withdrawal from alcohol, was untrustworthy: a different man every day to their condemnatory noses.

  These dogs are almost all that I remember about our push to the Pole, and I remember that partly because I had my eyes closed against the wind much of the way, and partly because all the fiction about the North I had read when I was a kid had never told me how incredibly noisy a dog-team is while it’s working. Eskimo dogs begin to yap and holler the moment they put their shoulders into the straps and start pulling, and they keep it up all day long, no matter how hard the going is. Such a team “talks” like a roomful of Siamese cats, until you wonder how it has any breath left. When I think back to those six days, I “see” very little—a few anonymous men pitching or striking tents, the shapes of sleds, an anomalously hot sun that never went away; but my God, how incessantly that memory barks and barks and barks !

  We made it about noon. We had paused to eat somewhere around eleven, and Farnsworth showed his compass around; it was pointing almost due south by Wentz’s reckoning. That meant that we were nearly on the plumb line with the magnetic Pole, and couldn’t be far away from the geographical Pole. Wentz consulted his clock and his log and did a little quick figuring.

  “About ten miles to go,” he said.

  Nine

  WE were tired, but not exhausted. After another raid on the E-rations, we got busy putting up the tents and cutting ice. I was assigned to help Wentz build his igloo, about which he had special ideas: he wanted it so ventilated that it was always as cold inside as it was outside, but at the same time protected from wind and snow. I thought this a most peculiar taste, and I said so.

  “You don’t understand telescopes,” Wentz said, chipping away at a block which he was holding, tailor-fashion, in his lap. “It isn’t good for them to change temperature rapidly, for one thing, and for another, they don’t work at all unless they’re at the same temperature as the air they’re looking through. If I allowed my observatory to warm up inside, I’d just have to cool it down to the outside temperature when I wanted to work—and the drop here would be so sharp that it might ruin the optics in the process.”

  So we built Wentz’s igloo with two crossing slits in it, each one interrupted, necessarily, by the one keystone ice-block at the summit. Tarps kept the wind and snow out, except when the instrument—a six-inch Newtonian reflector—was in use.

  “The transpolar satellite must be near launching now,” I said. “We didn’t exactly intend to get up here this late. Aren’t they launching it tomorrow?”

  “Yes. But she won’t get here until the evening, presuming that she gets into her orbit all right. The equatorial missile was supposed to have been launched four days ago—maybe Harry Chain’s heard how that one made out.”

  “What interests me more is how you’re going to see the one that’s going over here, with the sun up all the time.”

  “Oh,” said Wentz, “I’ll see it, providing they get the coordinates up here on time. The trick is partly just knowing where to look. That’s up to you; you stick to Jayne until those figures come through and then rush ’em right over to me. What about Minitracking? Is Jayne going to do that?”

  “No, I am. I’ll get the antenna set up tonight.” I paused a moment and then added, “Joe, I don’t mean to needle you, but you know how important this is, don’t you? We can’t afford any flub on it.”

  Wentz gave me a long, steady look. His trip across the ice had changed him in a great many ways, but individually I found it hard to define them. He looked a little more leathery, a little more alert, a little less sardonic, a little less bloodshot —small changes, and I could not say what it was that I thought they added up to, let alone how well his alcoholic’s soul was taking to abstinence. One thing was certain : whatever it was that he had been trying to drown by drinking was back full force, and it was hurting.

  “I know what’s at stake,” he said, and tapped his own chest gently three times. “I don’t suppose you ever heard of Wentz’s Runaway Giant. A star discovered by another man named Wentz. He’s been out of circulation for years. I think I know where he is.”

  I had blundered, I could see that. That was a button I hadn’t meant to touch again; and I made a bad job of pretending I hadn’t. I gave him a salute, said, “Roger,” and got the hell out of there.

  A great deal of work got done during the rest of that day and the succeeding night. You would not believe what eight men and one woman can accomplish in primitive surroundings, and with too few tools, when their lives and their pride depend upon it. No less than four igloos, each of specialized design, were built, and the equipment each was to receive un-packed and installed. Three tents were erected and anchored. Of course, we had no engineer-mechanic any more to man the grapples and the corer, nor any oceanographer either, but we got the igloo built, and the corer and the grapple and winch set up beside it. That would be Farnsworth’s baby. The radio shack was for Jayne, and for me; atop it was the dish antenna with which I would catch the satellite’s identification signal and feed the co-ordinates into the Minitrack system, if I could; Jayne checked my circuits for me. She turned out to be very good at it, not to my great surprise. The fourth igloo, of course, was for Elvers. It was standard in design, but it was the biggest of the lot, and the strangest noises of the whole expedition came from it.

  Wentz took movies of some of the building operations and of the completed camp, and Jayne struck a few poses, but she didn’t seem to be enjoying it much, and I’ll bet that that stuff would have looked ghastly had we ever gotten around to printing it up. We tried the radio and found that the equatorial satellite had indeed been launched and was a howling success, now circling the Earth at roughly a thousand miles straight up, in an orbit which varied rhythmically between 40° N. and 40° S. latitude. The Minitrack net along the seventy-fifth meridian was checking it in on schedule.

  Mankind had taken the first step into interplanetary space —and where was Julian Cole, science writer, at the time? Why, at the North Pole; where else?

  In Florida, the Naval Research Laboratory crew was ready to flash us the co-ordinates of the transpolar moon as soon as it settled into its orbit, which would be about ten minutes after it took off from Cape Canaveral. Harry Chain would then get them to us, and I’d rush them to Wentz in time for him to set them up on his telescope drive.

  Harriet was fine, and there was no news. We dossed down.

  I was awakened in the morning by the snoring of the grapple engine, and discovered again one of the singular advantages of sleeping in virtually unheated surroundings in a permanent winter: you never have to get out of bed into the cold. When you get up, so does the bed—you’re wearing it.

  I wandered into the radio igloo, where Jayne had managed coffee; everyone was there, except Elvers, who was so often absent from such gatherings that I had almost stopped noticing it. It was warm enough inside for me to slip my hood back, and we all talked at once—I don’t remember about what. Then Farnsworth left to resume his blind groping on the floor of the Arctic Ocean. He had already brought up two cores, but apparently they had contained nothing exciting; I recall his remarking that he’d used them to fill our quota of soil samples for Pfistner. The mention of Pfistner reminded me belatedly of another loss that we had sustained with the first snowbuggy: a bundle of first-day covers that Pfistner’s Will Claflin, an ardent philatelist, had consigned to us for cancellation at the Pole. Claflin had put up the money out of his own pocket, and had published an article about it in one of the major collectors’ magazines. Obviously there was no point in bringing this up now; in fact, it even
amused me, for stamp-collecting has always struck me as only the next best thing to lint-picking.

  The rest of us got at the thousand-headed chore of just keeping the camp in operation. There were no real hitches. Even the satellite’s flight over the Pole was unremarkable, though it did cause a brief flash of alarm. I never saw it, of course, but what was more important, I never did get any signal from it, though Cape Canaveral reported it launched on schedule, orbital height 676 miles, etc., and Harry Chain got every necessary figure to us at the Pole within minutes after he received the relay from Alert. I ran the figures to Wentz, and tracked along them faithfully myself, but no signal came through.

  Full of apprehension, I ran back to Wentz’s igloo. He laughed in my face.

  “We got it cold,” he said. “The radio transmitter in it must have cut out, that’s all. Nine gravities of acceleration are hard on instruments. But it came right up over the horizon, right on schedule, going like a bat out of hell, and I had it dead centre in my field of view for about forty degrees. I would have had more, if I’d been able to run the ’scope outdoors, but not in this wind; there would have been too much tremble. The seeing was lousy as it was.”

  “Did you get the figures?”

  “Sure. Here they are—send ’em on.” He grinned suddenly. “I also got five plates. There’s nothing we can do with ’em here, but once we got back to Farnsworth’s snowbuggy we can develop them and nail the thing down to within three seconds of arc, maybe closer.”

  “Well, thank God. Good for you, Joe. I was scared for a minute there. I never got a peep out of it, and I was tracking it along the same co-ordinates, I’m positive.”

  “Radio astronomy,” Wentz said solemnly, “will never replace the horse.” And again he tapped his own chest.