by James Blish
“What are you going to do next?”
“I’m going to start spotting emulsions all over the snow around here. We’ve lost Hanchett, but somebody has to do the cosmic-ray work. Who knows, maybe there’s an anti-chronon or two scooting around here waiting to be trapped. I’m a little rusty at that stuff; time I got back into practice.”
He pinned the tarps back up very carefully, put a dew-cap over the business end of his telescope, stowed his oculars away in their velvet-lined cases, and began to unpack foil-covered photographic plates out of a small, lead-lined box. I doubted that anything would come of this operation, for the plates couldn’t have been part of Hanchett’s equipment; and if they were Wentz’s, they were old, and hence useless. Emulsions for cosmic-ray work preferably should be prepared on the spot and used within twenty-four hours; cosmic rays, especially the heavy primaries, go through an ordinary lead lining as though it were cheese. Nevertheless, I was more than satisfied, and I left Wentz happily programming his experiment.
I went back to the radio igloo and had Jayne put Wentz’s figures on the air toward home, and then walked the necessary half-mile to see what Farnsworth was up to. He was out in the open, squatting over a glistening fifteen-foot cylinder about four inches in diameter, which he was splitting longitudinally with an ordinary paring-knife. It was, of course, a core—a thin cylinder of oozes and clays brought up from the ocean floor. It was remarkably colourful, each layer of sediment carrying its own chalky whiteness, or mustard-yellow, or mauve or brick-red or blue; here and there, too, a layer was marbled with another colour.
Farnsworth didn’t seem to notice me, so I watched silently. He was now cutting the core like a long loaf of bread, into a series of chunks, each one representing one stratum. He had almost reached the bottom end of the core when he grunted like a man who has been struck. The blunt nose of the paring-knife dug into the stiff mud and flicked something out into Farnsworth’s hand. After looking at it a moment, he rolled it energetically in the snow to clean it, and then held it up to the sun.
In so doing, he saw me. “Hello, Julian. Did we get the satellite?”
“Joe Wentz got it. I missed it clean. I don’t think it was signalling by the time it went over us, but Joe got photos. What have you got, Geoffrey?”
“Jackpot. Take a look.”
When I was young, a girl I was going with shocked me profoundly by quoting at a party the article in the old Britannica about the testicle, which it described as being “about the size and shape of a plover’s egg”. To a chorus of outraged laughter, she had said: “Well, now we know how big a plover’s egg is.”
The object Farnsworth handed me was about the size and shape of a plover’s egg. It was made of dark brown glass, and its surface was etched into a series of crawling, rounded ridges, like copulating worms. I had never seen anything like it before, but I knew enough now to be suspicious of odd bits of glass. I said:
“This is a tektite?”
“Right,” Farnsworth said. “I pulled this core from about seventy-five feet below the surface of the ocean bottom. Evidently there’s never been a turbidity current this far north; I haven’t found any traces of sand or gravel, so the bottom can’t have been silted over under the ice-cap since the cap last re-formed. This is a part of the original fall, just as I’d hoped.”
I turned it over in the unvarying sky-glare. “What are these worms all over the surface of it?”
“Water erosion. That’s what all tektites look like if they’ve been imbedded in wet soil since they fell. The glass is slightly soluble, you see.”
He was elated, that was obvious. I could hardly blame him.
“What next?” I said.
“Well, I’m going to have to date it pretty closely. I get only a rough date from the clay-layer I found it in. With the microscope, I can check the matrix for shells, but I’m not enough of a biologist to learn much from that; I’ll take photomicrographs home and let the experts do that part of the work. Maybe they can get a better date by Libby’s radio-carbon system, too. But above all, I want more tektites, so I can be sure there was a major fall here when the protoplanet broke up. That much, at least, is a certainty.”
“Why?”
“Because I found this one so quickly,” Farnsworth said patiently. “The odds are hugely against my hitting one this early, unless the substrata around here are literally riddled with tektites. If I get confirmation, I’ll drop the grapple and see what we can bring up with a really big bite out of the bottom.”
“You’d do that anyhow,” I pointed out.
“To be sure,” he said, grinning like a small boy. “But it’d be pleasant to be doing it with some assurance that there’s something down there to grapple for. Come now, Julian, you’re more than three-quarters convinced already; admit it. You could even give me a hand, if you like.” He stood up. a little creakily.
“Euer Gnaden, zu Befehl.”
“Eh? Oh. Very good. Let’s take some of these sections into the igloo.”
So I got down on my hands and knees and crawled. Unfortunately, there is no other way to enter an igloo. Farndsworth pocketed a number of the oozing hemi-cylinders he had cut from the core and came huffing down the truncated entrance tunnel after me.
The light inside the igloo was dim and just barely adequate, for only enough light from the overcast sky was transmitted by the blocks of compressed snow to provide a sort of pearly twilight inside. On a low bench, Farnsworth had a few basic tools set upa microscope, a scleroscope, a balance, some small bottles of reagents with etched labels. There was also a tripod with a pot sitting on it, under which a can of Sterno flickered with dismal blue-violet. I pointed to it.
“Coffee?”
“No, just water. It won’t stay liquid otherwise, you know.” Well, I’d have realized it if I’d thought about it a moment longer, I suppose. The trouble, of course, was that I was still not used to thinking in terms of permanent sub-freezing temperatures, indoors and out. Farnsworth spread his core-sections on the bench, and then chucked the one in which he’d found the tektite into the pot.
“Like to screen these?” he said. “What you can do, Julian, is to keep stirring that mess until the matrix is evenly dispersed. Then pour it all off through the mesh here, and give me anything that stays behind. Then you put a chunk of ice in the pot and we do it all over again with the next segment.”
He heated a short length of metal rod over the flaming jellied alcohol until it was glowing, and then plunged it at an angle into the wall of the igloo just above the bench. After three such operations—each one producing a screaming hiss—he had holed through, and there was a little patch of unobstructed daylight on the surface of the bench. I continued to stir, watching puzzledly until he slid the microscope into a position where he could catch the incoming light on the instrument’s substage mirror.
“Have to do that almost every hour,” he said abstractedly. “Just breathing in here makes the bore frost closed.” He heated a slide briefly, pipetted a few drops of the sludge from the pot on to it, and slipped it on to the microscope stage.
“What’s to keep your little puddle from freezing?”
“Well, it’s got sea water mixed in with it, of course,” he said. “But it’ll freeze soon enough, all the same. Hmm…. Globeriginae. That’s logical. Wish I knew them by species.”
My own mud-puddle seemed to be completed now, so I picked up the pot with a pair of tongs and poured the contents into a slop-bucket through the piece of fine screening Farnsworth had indicated. Sure enough, several small solid bits remained on the screen.
“Geoffrey?”
“Mmm?”
“You’ll have to pardon the implication, but—you seem to know pretty well what you’re doing.”
His head came up from the microscope like a shot at that, and I got the benefit of a 250-watt Farnsworth glare.
“What the hell, man,” he said. “I’ve been all over the world, and all my treks have had some scientific purpose or
other—sometimes many at once, like this one. Do you think people hand out such jobs to total idiots?”
“I guess I thought so until pretty recently, in your case at least,” I admitted. “You do act like an idiot, when you’re not at work.”
“The world is full of newspapermen whose attention can’t be captured by anything else,” he said. “If you don’t act like an idiot they’ll turn you into one anyhow. I remember an incident back in the thirties, when the high-and-mighty American Rocket Society was still in its infancy. They ran some kind of a proving-stand test on a small engine, out on Long Island, one Sunday afternoon. It yielded quite a lot of data. But all the ARS members in those days were just dedicated amateurs, for all that many of them were engineers—they had to be amateurs, because there wasn’t any such thing as a profession of rocketry in those days, at least not in this country.
“So the next day, the New York Ledger Columbian gave the test a two-column box on its front page, headlined, ‘Shot At Moon Is Fizzle’. Of course, it wasn’t a shot at the Moon, or at any place; the engine was tied down to the proving-stand. The text of the story was supposed to be funny. That’s the kind of reporter whose attention I have to capture—because it’s publicity that pays for my expeditions, and because the projects I try to investigate are just as off-trail these days as rocketry was back then, so I’m not respectable. I have to make a fool of myself to keep the press from making fools of my sponsors, and making a mock of my projects. And for what? Do you think that reporter ever went back to Larry Manning and Ed Pendray and the rest of that little hard core of rocketry experimenters and apologized for that verminous story? Did it enter his mind when the V-2s began falling on London? Of course not. That same reporter is probably now yellow-paging one or another of those same men as suspected ‘Reds’ who might give away vital rocketry secrets to Russia. That’s the kind of paper he works for, and that’s the kind of reporter he is.”
He stopped and looked down at the little pool of mud on the microscope slide. Even from where I was standing, I could see that it had turned a dirty yellow; it had frozen while he was talking. He looked back at me.
“What’s more,” he said through his teeth, “you’re another.”
I stood there and took it. The National Association of Science Writers might have expected its past president to make him a rebuttal speech about how much more responsible science reporting has become since the thirties, but it never even crossed my mind. Because, you see, I knew he was right.
And suddenly, paradoxically, I wasn’t sorry any more that I’d been at the North Pole when the greatest science story since nuclear fission had broken. Right here in this Sternostinking foggy little igloo, standing in my sweaty furs, melting a lump of ice to make another mud-puddle like the one that had stained the ice in brown spatters around the slop-bucket, I was beginning—just beginning—to learn my trade.
Evidently my expression must have been openly stricken. Farnsworth took the slide from under the microscope’s stage clips and set it aside. “I can melt the damned thing again,” he said gruffly. “Let’s see what you’ve got there on the screen. Here’s another chunk for the pot.”
We swapped. I put the new piece of core in the pot, and he set the screen on the bench and turned the small irregular objects on it over With a pencil-point.
There was quite a long silence; and then, almost under his breath, he muttered:
“Sorry.”
“Forget it,” I said hoarsely. “Find anything?”
“No. These are just ordinary igneous rock, very much water-worn. There are two little shards that might be tektites, but they’re too small to identify except chemically. And that’s all. Let’s try it again.”
We tried it again, and then again. Nothing came out but pebbles, until the fourth try, when we found one other inarguable, wormy-surfaced tektite, about half the size of the first. Farnsworth was mildly pleased, but he grumbled all the same; it could have been a coincidence.
After that, his luck appeared to have deserted him completely, and after the ninth or tenth sample had come out of the pot he snuffed the Sterno can and just sat in front of the bench for a while, poking moodily at the motley collection of pebbles. He seemed to have a pet hate among them: a pock-marked, forlorn bit of rock about as big as his first tektite, but not half as pretty. Finally he picked it up and glared at it, as though attempting to will it out of existence. It seemed so lost in the palm of his heavy glove that for a moment I thought he’d gotten his wish.
“What the hell,” he said disgustedly.
I didn’t really know what to say, but keeping my mouth shut is not one of my talents. “As a matter of fact, Geoffrey,” I said, “I think your luck’s been excellent, for this early in the game. Two tektites and two possibles in one sampling operation——”
“Shut up,” he said suddenly. “I’m sorry, but by the living Buddha, look at this. And it was right under my nose all the time!”
“What? What is it?”
He ignored me; suddenly, he was all arms. He took a hardness test on the pebble, and swore at the scleroscope for not being a Rockwell tester. He sampled his pebble and ran chemical tests, and swore at his reagent shelf for not being the complete warehouse stock of Otto Greiner & Co. He rubbed grains off it and scowled at them through the microscope. At one point, he put a drop of something or other on the pebble and smelled it, which made him sneeze and swear like a top sergeant.
Then he sat down and just stared at the pebble. By this time, I was holding my breath, but he didn’t seem to know I was there. He just turned the pebble over and over again in his fingers.
“Geoffrey, what the hell? What is it?”
“It’s what I’ve been looking for—or part of it,” he said in a husky voice. “It’s the last bit. the inner core, of a meteorite made of sedimentary rock. It’s the very first such meteorite ever discovered. When I think of how long it’s been lying down there, dissolving away …”
His voice traded off shakily. He got up, opened the Sterno can and lit it again. “It goes into a paraffin block, right now —no, there’s too much helium in paraffin. Let’s see; better make it ordinary ice. My God—cosmic history in an ice-cube ! What a break !”
I was just about to say, Are you sure? when I realized that I was sure. I said instead, “But what does it mean?”
“It means,” Farnsworth said gently, “that meteorites come from some place in the solar system where there was once a large body of water in the liquid state. Ergo, the asteroidal protoplanet—or one of them—was Earth-like at one time. It supported seas, over a long geological period. It was warm then, warmer than Mars—which means that it had an atmosphere too, and a thick one, as thick as Earth’s; so it must have been bigger than the Earth. And it means that it was destroyed within the lifetime of man.”
He looked at me levelly for a moment more, and then added:
“It also means, Julian, that there’s more of it down below, where there’s been less water in the soil—but still quite close to the bottom. I’m going to bring up some substantial bits of it on the first grab. What are you going to tell your friend Ellen Fremd and those pinheads at the IGY? Or the newspapers, for that matter?”
I didn’t know; I had to spread my hands helplessly.
“I can suggest a headline,” Farnsworth said. “ ‘Shot At Stars Is Dribble’ would be standard, wouldn’t it?”
It was at that moment, I think now, that I really began to hate him. I had no other choice; he was getting too close to home.
Ten
SINCE I couldn’t talk to Harriet without the whole world hearing what we said, at least potentially, I had to sweat it out all by myself. As it turned out, I had plenty of time, for that night the overcast sky turned to mud, and it began to snow. The fall took less than half an hour to turn into a blizzard, and the blizzard went on for nearly a week, as’ though the whole notion of snow had just been conceived and the Powers wanted to know how far it could be pushed. At long last
I had darkness aplenty.
During the first three or four hours of that howling maelstrom, I thought of nothing at all but what I was doing, and I’m sure nobody else had any time for philosophical questions, either. The tents were ballooning alarmingly in the wind, which ran up to forty miles an hour even then, and we had to secure them with deep-driven pitons along every margin, and rig new guy-wires to keep their telescopic masts from toppling. The coring and grappling rigs were too heavy to be in danger from the wind, but they were going to be buried in the snow, and there was nothing we could do about that but spike tarps over them; we simply lacked the manpower to heave them into any sort of shelter, and we couldn’t hitch up the dogs to help us on this short notice. Staggering it the gusts, leaning against the wind when it was steady, almost totally blind, we got everything inside that would go inside, and after that there was nothing we could do but wait it out, nursing our raw faces.
Wentz and I spent that night in the same tent we had been sharing since we had arrived, but it was no longer a tent; it was a huge and menacing jellyfish. The walls of it fluttered like eardrums; the wires howled and sang; the mast thrummed. The heat-reflective aluminium foil-cloth lining was almost no good at all, because it was impossible to keep the wind from blowing around the edges of the entrance-flaps and carrying the radiant heat off as fast as it accumulated. Only the Davy stove kept us from freezing that week, along with the pressure lamp we lit when we got up in the morning. That burned kerosene and put out considerable heat—enough to make it go off like a bomb if we goaded it too far. But it was better than the flying ice and snow, no matter how dangerous it was. Outside, the temperature was minus 34° and still falling. Had the tent been ripped away over us while we slept, we would have frozen without waking, as fast as a Birdseye flounder.
And so I had nothing to do but either prepare myself for death—a project I could not advance one inch before having to abandon it to a blind determination to see Midge and the kids again—or else think about the portentous pebble at the heart of Farnsworth’s ice-cube. The noise and the slashing cold made it impossible to talk to Wentz except in snatches of two or three words, and he seemed to begrudge even that: I don’t think the storm bothered him much, but something was on his mind; we lived through that siege like deaf-mutes So I huddled, and thought.