by James Blish
I got nowhere. Like it or not, I believed Farnsworth’s protoplanet notion now, and it didn’t matter that I was beginning to dislike him personally. That pebble in the ice-cube was important—it was, in fact, a great discovery, and there would be confirmation to follow if we all lived through this inferno of ice. And it was up to me, as the closest thing the expedition had left to a reputable observer, to report the discovery back——
—which would cut my throat, ruin the expedition finally and completely, and insure that the discovery itself would be added to the long list of historic scientific hoaxes: Piltdown Man, the Cardiff Giant, bioflavenoids for colds, dianetics, the Moon Hoax, whatever it had been that Wentz had pulled, the Haeckel scandal, the saucer craze, Lysenkoism, ESP, antihistamines for colds, Salamandra, Orson Welles’ Martians, scientology, the chlorophyll boom …a long list, and due to grow longer as the years grew. There would be no sense in contributing another term to that open-ended series, even if the term were indeed a fact.
No reputable scientist would dare to believe a word out of Farnsworth’s expedition now. The best that he could hope for was to become another of the Fortean Society’s pre-lost causes. Bad means had totally corrupted good ends.
And yet, and yet … Farnsworth’s discovery was important. If I failed to report it back, I was through—not at home, but inside my own skin. As for home, wasn’t I through there already? I couldn’t possibly serve as historian to the IGY for an expedition that wasn’t IGY any longer; nor would Pierpont-Millennium-Artz be likely to accept a book about the expedition from me now that the IGY tie-in was dead. The second book Artz might have taken was of course already out of the question, and so was any marginal income I might have made from magazine and newspaper articles about the trip. Most of the periodical space had already been soaked up by the public relations shops of Farnsworth’s sponsors, and that was all free copy; I couldn’t hope to get paid for more of the same, unless I told the truth, which would destroy us all. The best that I could hope for was to get back home more than seven thousand dollars in debt—and I knew better, now, than to hope to get off so easily.
I slept badly.
The snow slackened off at the end of the second day of the storm, but that was hard to detect for a while. The wind kept on blowing, picking up the little needles and pouring them in horizontal torrents along the white air. We were still pinned down, and our kerosene was almost gone; we gave up the pressure lantern and lived in darkness, nursing the oven. It was so cold that we couldn’t even smell each other, though we both stank mightily, as I was reminded by the puff of air out of my neckline each time I sat or lay down. On the third day, the wind dropped abruptly to about fifteen miles per hour, the temperature rose to five above zero, and it began snowing all over again, great fat flakes like those common in temperate-zone winters.
I found that I could talk to Wentz again, and I took full advantage of it to tell him what was on my mind. His face was sallow as he listened; now and then he coughed.
“I can’t help you,” he said when I was through. “Maybe later. We’re out of fuel, Julian; we can get to the radio igloo on a line, if you want to try it.”
“Sure. Right away. I’ll be glad to get out of this trap. But, Joe, I’ve got one more question—and you can tell me it’s none of my damn business if you want to. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was pertinent.”
“I don’t know,” he said, his glance straying slowly to the floor. “I’ll try, Julian. That’s the best I can do.”
“Good for you. What I want to know is: What was Wentz’s Runaway Giant? Was that what they cashiered you for, and why they took away your degree? Was it really a hoax, or did they frame you?”
He looked out from under his hood at me with suffused eyes, and the most frightening expression I had ever seen.
“Hands off,” he said. “It was no hoax, but …Hands off, that’s all.”
Good advice, and I should have taken it—but I may never learn to keep my mouth shut. I said, “Then it’s a real star, Joe?”
Wentz coughed until he choked and had to turn away. After a second or so he said in a strangled voice, “It’s not in the catalogue. Let me alone, can’t you?”
“Sure, Joe, I’m sorry.” I put myself together and pulled my goggles down over my eyes. “Hold the fort; I’ll be back.”
He nodded, still without looking at me, and got his pack out from behind his bedding. He was still working on the straps when I ducked out into the whirling snowstorm.
I found the line that led to the radio igloo after only a minute of groping, but in that minute I came close to dying. There was no East or West, no North or South, hardly any up or down—there wasn’t even any time out there. Every atom of the whole world was in white motion around me, and I had the illusion that I could feel it turning on its axis underneath me. Without the line, I would have staggered in circles until I froze.
Once I hit it, I crawled along it as blindly as though I were an aerialist sliding down a wire, suspended only from a rubber bit between his teeth. I knew damn well I shouldn’t be trying it by myself, not even over this short a distance and on a guide-line; but Wentz certainly had made no move to go along with me, despite the fact that it had been he who had made the initial suggestion, and I wanted to talk to Jayne too badly to wait his mood out. The trip lasted only a little short of for ever.
Then I was emerging inside the igloo, on my hands and knees. It was warm and light in there, but I was going to have no chance to talk to Jayne. Her husband was with her, and so was Fred Klein, who was Farnsworth’s tentmate—I did not then know why. Both the Farnsworths were wearing earphones and intent expressions; Fred was standing on a packing box, inspecting the circuits on my Minitrack antenna. He saw me first.
“Here’s Julian now,” he said, climbing down. “You did a good job here, Julian. I can’t find anything wrong, at least. There just wasn’t any damn satellite to track—that’s the answer.”
“No satellite? But Joe Wentz___”
“God only knows what Wentz saw. Pink terns, maybe.”
“That,” I said, “is a damn lie, Fred. He’s off the stuff entirely. If he says he saw it, he saw it. Hell, he even got pictures of it !”
“Have you seen them, Julian?” Jayne said grimly.
“Yes. Well, I haven’t seen anything but the plates; he can’t develop them here. But what’s going on here, anyhow? I thought we were all through with that satellite hassel.”
Farnsworth took off the earphones and gave me a long look. “I don’t really think it makes a nickel’s worth of difference anyhow,” he said. “But Joe missed it clean, Julian. Look here.”
He handed me a piece of paper torn from a scratch pad. I was getting to hate those chits—and sure enough, this one carried the same kind of bad news that the one I’d gotten from Harry Chain had, back at the base camp. It said :
ATTN 2WPBE COMMANDANT STOP FIGURES YOU SUPPLIED FOR TRANSPOLAR SATELLITE TRANSIT CORRELATE CLOSELY BY CHI-SQUARE TEST WITH ROUTE OF DAILY STOCKHOLM-TOKYO FLIGHT INAUGURATED 1955 BY SCANDINAVIAN AIRLINES STOP NO VISUAL OR MINITRACK OBSERVERS AVAILABLE TO CONFIRM INSIDE EMERGENT CONE THIS UNPREDICTED TRAJECTORY STOP PLEASE RECONFIRM AND VERIFY WITH PREDICTIONS IF POSSIBLE SIGNED WHIPPLE IGY VANGUARD
My heart sank. I had, I knew, been expecting something of exactly this sort … and yet at the same time I couldn’t even begin to believe it.
“This can’t be Joe’s fault,” I said. “He picked the thing up just where they said it would cross over us. And he had the telescope on it all the way—he couldn’t have mistaken an airliner’s lights for a celestial object. Airliner riding lights blink, for Christ’s sake—and why would an SAS plane be flying riding lights in the summer here anyhow?”
“Don’t ask me,” Farnsworth said. “Maybe he just caught the glare off the side or the wings. He’s the very man to do it. I’m just as pleased that it worked out this way, anyhow. We tried, we missed, and that’s that. Now we can get down to business.”
“Geoffrey, you’re out of your mind. Why won’t you give him a chance? Who’s going to believe in your sedimentary meteorite, if you allow Joe to be discredited? Don’t you want to be believed?”
“I don’t think it will make a particle of difference one way or the other,” Farnsworth said disgustedly. “The meteorite is inarguably just what it is. I’ve had Fred working on it, and he confirms my views.” I looked at the geologist, who nodded —a little reluctantly, I thought, but perhaps I only imagined it. “What difference can it make whether or not Joe got squiffed and missed their damned tin can? They expected to lose half of them, anyhow, didn’t they?”
“Joe wasn’t drunk. He doesn’t have anything with him to drink. I saw him burn it all, myself. As for the satellite, the IGY wants its course plotted because any deviation it shows from prediction will help provide evidence for the true shape of the Earth. In other words, they’re charting the Earth’s gravitational field—which governed the course your meteorite followed as it fell. That in turn will be a clue to where it came from.” I didn’t at all know whether or not this was true; I was counting on Geoffrey’s not knowing, either. “Anyhow, that’s all beside the point. You’re not even giving Joe a chance—that’s what counts. You’re the guy who dragged him up here, and took advantage of his being down on his luck—and now that it looks like he’s in more trouble, you’re all set to ditch him without even listening to him. Is that what you call being a human being?”
“In a minute I’m going to lose my temper,” Farnsworth said edgily. “This is no country for being free with dangerous accusations, Julian.”
“Agreed,” I retorted. “And you’re being mighty free about accusing Joe of fluffing. Why won’t you give him a chance?”
“Oh, all right. I’ll talk to him. It can’t do any harm.”
“Good. Come on then. You can help me haul some fuel back.”
“In this weather?” the Commodore said. “I’ll talk to him, Julian, but stop pushing. He’ll keep, after all.”
Jayne stood up. “I’ll go, Geoffrey,” she said. “Think it over while I’m gone. Maybe it won’t pay to be bull-headed this time. It didn’t pay before.”
He scowled at her, but offered no objections.
“Thanks,” I told her. “Geoffrey, do me the favour of remembering that you admitted I was right the last time. Believe me, this thing is the very last blow as far as the expedition’s prestige is concerned—unless Joe really saw that satellite and can prove it, pix and all.”
“Julian,” Farnsworth growled, “stop pushing. Don’t you ever recognize when you’ve won an argument?”
Alarmed, I shut up and got to work.
Jayne helped me drag the fuel-cans willingly enough, but it seemed to take hours. Out in the open there was a complete “whiteout”—an even glare of daylight on flying snow and ice-crystals which obliterated not only the horizon but the very distinction between the ground and the sky, so that our vision was as useless as if we had been crawling with pillowcases over our heads. By the time we got back to the tent we were nearly snowblind despite our goggles, and stumbled and bumped into each other and against anonymous objects, and spilled kerosene on the ground trying to load the stove and the lantern until I was almost afraid to strike a match to make them go. At last, however, the stove thumped softly and began to compete with the all-pervasive cold; and a moment later, another pop, a droning hiss and a glare of yellow light announced that Jayne had gotten the lantern into operation.
At first, even after my eyes got used to the new change in illumination, I failed almost completely to understand what I saw. The inside of the tent was a shambles, but not at all the kind of shambles that might have been explained in terms of the storm. My first wild assumption was that a polar bear had broken into the place, though we had yet to see one.
The whole floor of the tent was littered with scraps and wads of paper, and with large, rectangular pieces of grey glass, on one of which somebody had stepped—probably Jayne, since I didn’t remember having crunched down on anything while we were groping. There were also wads of aluminium foil, and a good many scattered heaps of clothing, all the latter apparently from Wentz’s pack, which had been torn open.
Then I saw Wentz. He was lying on his sleeping bag—not in it—with his eyes open, staring cloudily at the pinnacle of the tent. His mouth was open, his breathing loud and bubbling.
“Joe! Joe!”
“It’s no use, Julian,” Jayne said, with a sort of amused regret. “I’ve seen it all before. The first time we took Joe Wentz on safari with us, he had only one piece of luggage with him—containing one change of clothing, a bottle of Scotch, a bottle of rye, a bottle of gin, a bottle of dry vermouth, a bottle of sour mash bourbon, a bottle of brandy, a bottle of perfume, a bottle of ink and a bottle of ketchup. Geoffrey was right; he never changes.”
“It can’t be. He must be sick.” I dropped to my knees beside him and bent to listen to his chest.
We were, as it turned out, both right. He was drunk, without doubt; this close to him I could smell the stuff. After a moment of rummaging, I even found the bottle: a half-litre of straight ethyl alcohol, either from our medical stores or from Farnsworth’s or Fred’s stock of reagents. It still contained an oozing lump of cloudy crystals about as big as my fist. I was obscurely glad to discover that it wasn’t whisky—or perfume, for that matter—though the fact made Wentz not one whit less drunk.
But he was sick, too. It didn’t take much guessing to figure out what was the matter with him—not in this country, and with Wentz’s history
Like most long-confirmed alcoholics, he was a pushover for pneumonia.
I handed Jayne the empty flask without comment. “He’s got so much congestion in his chest now that he’s damn near drowning,” I said huskily. “Now’s our chance to see if all that tabascomycin Pfistner gave us is as good as they said it was. Drunk or sober, we’ve got to bail him out of this—to save his life, and to hear what his story is on this satellite foul-up.”
She nodded and looked around; I pointed out our first-aid bundle.
“Are you in any doubt about the story?” she said, gently.
“I sure as hell am. So, all right, he’s drunk now, that’s plain to see. But I know he wasn’t drunk during the satellite transit. If he’s back on the stuff now, it’s nobody’s fault but mine.”
“Really, Julian?” she said. “Oh hell, this is one of Pfistner’s Mechaniject syringes—I keep forgetting how you open them…. Ah, there it is. I can’t quite see you pouring raw alcohol down him against his will.”
“That isn’t what I mean.” I wasn’t entirely sure what I did mean, for that matter; all I had was a gnawing suspicion, and I was fighting that as hard as I could. I felt for Wentz’s pulse; it was way up, and his forehead was burning.
Jayne loaded the syringe with a cartridge like a professional and knelt beside us. “Rump or arm?” I asked her.
“Just roll up his sleeve. He’s chilled enough already without taking his pants down.” She sank the needle into his triceps muscle with the neat precision of a marksman placing a dart, and the plunger went home. I swabbed the puncture with the drippings from the alcohol bottle and rolled Wentz’s sleeve back down.
“Are you a nurse too, Jayne?”
“Hell no,” she said abstractedly, lifting the sick astronomer’s eyelids and looking under them. Deprived of its forced animation, her face, I could see now, was so rounded in contour as to be downright motherly; her professional photographs had given her bone-highlights that she just didn’t have when her face was relaxed. “But in the jungle everybody has to know how to give shots, if you want to keep your bearers…. He’s damn sick, all right…. Even the healthiest boys can turn up with tropical ulcers between one day’s trek and another. We used to burn penicillin like gin, some weeks.”
She settled him into his bedding, and sat down on mine to watch him. There was, of course, nothing else that could be done for a while but watch.
I couldn’t stay still, all the same, and instead I began to pick compulsively about in the litter. The scraps and wads of paper turned out to be reprints from an issue of Astronomica Acta, dated ten years ago. They were all headed :
AN N-CLASS HIGH-LUMINOSITY STAR SHOWING HIGH PROPER MOTION
A Preliminary Report
J. Wentz
(Ph.D., Utrecht)
Evidently he had had a cache of the pamphlets in his pack along with the filched alcohol—and had been spending his time since I had seen him last drinking and brooding over his paper. The year-date was right for the year his honorary doctorate from Lisbon had been both awarded and revoked; God only knew what that meant. But it was clear that before he had passed out, he had begun to destroy the copies one after another, but had not been able to bring himself to do a complete job of it. In the end, the lantern must have gone out while he was still at it; the four undamaged pamphlets I found fanned out at the foot of the bedding must have evaded his groping hands in the frigid darkness.
Thereafter, he had had no choice but to sit alone in the invisible wreckage, thinking about Wentz’s Runaway Giant, and sucking the sludge from the ice crystals through the neck of the bottle. After a while, he had groped about for something else to destroy, and had found it : the pieces of glass on the floor.
They were photographic plates, deprived of their covers, which were also amid the litter. The aluminium foil belonged to the cosmic-ray emulsions; the red-and-black paper sheets to the optical plates; he had missed neither. I suppose that, even in his fury of self-loathing, he had not begun to strip the plates until after the lantern sputtered out and left him in the cold darkness, but it did us no good to speculate about that now; for even had the plates been safe as long as the tent had been dark, they had been exposed the moment that Jayne had lit the lantern.