Fallen Star

by James Blish

  Both Fred and I joined to give Geoffrey a hand on the dredging, which was now about the only project—except for weather recording—that we had both the manpower and the skills to prosecute. Essentially we were using Farnsworth’s coring rig, with the donkey-engine; but for the heavier loads brought up by the bucket, we had to mount the glass line. The stuff was very light in weight, despite the fact that it would outpull steel cable, which was what had made it possible for us to ship it in on the sleds; but it had come with us wound on a flat, so that unshipping the nylon line from the reel and rewinding the glass line was as tedious as carding wool.

  Under those circumstances, it could hardly matter what I thought about Farnsworth’s protoplanet, but I went right on thinking about it anyhow. As far as the outside world was concerned, I had decided to suppress the discovery until the evidence became absolutely overwhelming. On the surface, it was a reasonable decision, since I was sure anything less in the way of evidence would be useless, our credibility as scientific observers and reporters being now at its lowest possible ebb. I was painfully aware, all the same, that evidence that I would consider “overwhelming” would now have to be something so spectacular as to be virtually beyond attaining—and that such an outcome would take me off the hook without my having to face the problem over again, except inside myself.

  But whenever I thought of my future, I kept seeing instead a vision of Jaime Feliz, a one-time hero of science writing, and now one of the NASW’s principal whipping-boys. After writing a book about chemical research called Molecules and Their Masters which became a best-seller, poor Jaime became so carried away by the taste of money that he fell into the clutches of MACB(eth), and was now touting anything he was told to tout in a syndicated column circulated throughout Latin America—not, of course, as a MACB(eth) staffer, but as an apparently independent science writer. (“Chemistry in Your Life, by the author of Molecules and Their Masters.”)

  Farnsworth and I worked outside for the most part, Fred inside; it was Fred’s job to do every subtle thing he could to validate that sedimentary-rock meteorite before it was submitted to his colleagues back home, and it was ours to bring up another one by brute force, if we could. It was this latter event that I was almost sure would not happen, and consequently—despite the constant spectre of Jaime Feliz—it became my test for “overwhelming evidence”. I think, too, that I was hoping, without voicing the hope precisely to myself, that Fred’s tests might so reduce the existing tiny sample as to make it a doubtful object for other geologists—or perhaps obliterate it altogether. Had I thought this wish out consciously, I would have known that it was idiotic, since I knew that Fred was too experienced a man to run any such risk. As it was, however, it remained in my mind as a vague, half-formed faith that the whole question would go away of itself if only I ignored it.

  Almost nothing was said about Elvers. I could see that Geoffrey was worrying, but he simply would not talk. Somewhere behind his theatrically impassive face he was mulling over some theory while we worked over the winch, and it was sure to be a beaut when he finally let us know what it was, I was positive; but I could not draw him out; my first attempts at probing drew only abstracted scowls, and soon even these stopped appearing. I gave it up, for the time being.

  But I could hardly stop thinking about it, especially since Elvers himself took to showing up while we were working, even on days when he was supposed to be out fishing (as he had to be pretty regular now, to keep the dogs fed). There was something about the grappling operation that seemed to be drawing him toward it more and more often—though he never told us what it was, and Farnsworth didn’t ask him; indeed Farnsworth gave a convincing imitation of a man who didn’t know that Elvers was there. I knew he was there, all right. He doubled the amount of work I had to do, since I was obstinately determined never to turn my back on him no matter how many extra manceuvres that involved.

  And, as it turned out, it was a good thing—from Farnsworth’s point of view—that Elvers had become fascinated with the winch, and was there on the spot the Sunday that we hit the Lump. Otherwise, we would never have been able to get it free of the ocean bottom.

  Not that the Lump turned out to be terribly heavy. Once we had cleaned it, it didn’t quite make fifty pounds. All the same, it was a big piece of rock for our donkey-engine to handle. We had to wrench it out of a bed of gluey clay which resisted us with hundreds of foot-pounds of drag, and then pull it through layer after layer of overlying bottom soils, many of which stuck to it in thick gobbets all the way through its upward passage in the cold waters to the ice itself. Not even Elvers could have helped us to save it alone; during the last fifteen minutes of fighting that cold stone fish out into daylight, we had to call Fred out too. What we would have done had we needed a fifth pair of strong arms, I don’t know.

  Oh, I suppose we would have called Jayne, whom I knew to be quite as strong as I was; I doubt, however, that she could have gotten there in time. The crucial moment came when the grapples slipped, when—according to the pay-in marks on the cable—we had the Lump within fifteen feet of the surface. Geoffrey slipped the clutch, dropping line, and made another grab. He secured it—though he might just as easily have lost it for good—but the thump when the thing took up the slack again broke one of the poles of the rig. During the rest of the haul, we had to hold the rig rigid by hanging on to it with all our combined weights and with every dyne we could command from our exhausted muscles, making of ourselves human buttresses through which the snorting donkey-engine could pass its stubborn horses of drag.

  The Lump came out into the air and we swung it on to the ice, where it lay oozing slow runnels and leaking a grey-brown stain, like the severed head of a great mud statue. I had never in my life seen anything less likely to launch a whole new era of knowledge. It had no shape, no particular colour, no special texture, no integrity as an object at all. It was just a large, heavy wet mark on a frozen white ground.

  “Cripes,” I said disgustedly, trying to wipe the sweat off my forehead before it froze to the lining of my hood. “That’s the ugliest notion the Creator’s had since the Surinam Toad. Let’s chuck it back in.”

  “Why?” Fred Klein said. He didn’t seem to be paying much attention, which I suppose was just as well.

  “Oh, give any reason you like. Say it’s out of season. Or that it’s about to become a mother. Or that the question violates your right of free assembly.”

  “It’s pretty big,” Fred said slowly. “About four feet through, wouldn’t you say? Obviously it can’t be homogeneous, or it would have been even heavier. It must have a light core of considerable size.”

  He approached it cautiously, and sank the sharp rounded end of his spatula into its side. It cut like stiff cheese. In only a moment, the knife ground against some harder surface inside, and he began to cut laterally. As soon as he had cut himself a hand-hold, he was able to peel the rind of clays free of the inner surface, in long, cohesive strips. Underneath, there was rock : rough, dirty, disreputable-looking stuff, but inarguably rock.

  “Graywacke,” Fred said, almost inaudibly. “Almost a smooth ball of it, with a vitreous surface—you can hardly see the grains. And look : a flow-apron! It’s been broken and most of it’s been eaten away since, but it begins here—see and there’s enough left of the curve to reconstruct it. This must have fallen relatively slowly, otherwise it would have exploded.”

  “Fred,” I said, “what’s graywacke?”

  “Why, it’s an aggregate, like sandstone, but much harder and finer-grained. When the grains and the paste are of the same mineral class, it’s often difficult to tell graywacke from igneous rock without a microscope. This one looks like a mixture of quartz and porphyry, in a felspathic cement. I wonder if we’ll find any ripple-marks? Rock of this kind on Earth came mostly from the Palaeozoic sea-beds. I don’t quite see how it could be formed otherwise.”

  “Now wait,” I said. “Do you mean that this is a meteorite? of sea-formed rock?”
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  “Well, it’s certainly a meteorite,” Fred said cautiously. “It can’t very well have gotten where it was, and into the shape it’s in, unless it fell from a standing start from a long distance. By the same token, ‘from a standing start’ is important; this thing wasn’t part of any swarm, with an orbital velocity of its own. It started at infinity and fell straight down.”

  “How do you know?” Farnsworth said in a tight, intense voice.

  “By the fact that it still exists,” Fred said, looking a little surprised. “If it had been going any faster than escape velocity when it hit the atmosphere, the heat would have exploded it into thousands of little pebbles, damn few of which would have hit the ground at all. Not even graywacke is compact enough to survive the velocity with which most meteors hit the air; you’ll never find a meteorite of conglomerate, even presuming that any such meteors exist.” He looked sidelong at the Lump. “And I’m beginning to believe that they do.”

  “How old is it?” Farnsworth demanded urgently.

  “That depends on what you mean by old. Graywacke takes millions and millions of years to form. If you mean, how long has it been down under us, well—ten thousand years would be about the right order of magnitude, give or take a thousand. Certainly no longer that that; not even the clay capsule could have preserved the glazing any longer.”

  “Elvers,” Farnsworth said, “go get a sledgehammer. There’s one in the radio shack. And pick up a cold chisel and a mallet from the tool cache. We’re going to split this thing open.”

  “Geoffrey, don’t do that!” Fred said, watching Elvers scamper off with anxious eyes. “You’ll spoil the configuration if you split it. And that’s all we have to prove that it’s a meteorite.”

  “Never mind,” Farnsworth said grimly. He shoved the shorting flange on the donkey-engine up against the protruding spark-plug head with the toe of his boot; the engine died in mid-splutter. “It’s got a vitrified surface, hasn’t it? Let them explain that away. I want that damned Lump split. If it’s a bottom-formed rock, I want to know about it right now. If there were seas on the protoplanet, and they lasted long enough to produce a rock this old, then the planet must have been even bigger than anybody ever dreamed. And my God, Fred, if it was destroyed only ten thousand years ago—! That’s almost within recorded history. We can’t let that hang in doubt.”

  “I don’t think you ought to split it,” Fred said doggedly. “Let’s get it back home and go at analysing it slowly. We’ll need plenty of consultation, and fully equipped laboratories. This is no job for a sledgehammer, Geoffrey. Think what it is you’re doing.”

  “I know what I’m doing,” Farnsworth said between white lips. “If that Lump has ripple-marks in it, I want to see them now. Elvers, give me that hammer. And stand back.”

  Farnsworth kicked aside the disintegrating peeled clay rinds, and set his feet solidly on the ice. As he slid one hand down to the head of the hammer, I knew at last what his keg-chested, long-legged frame had been trying to remind me of : that long-vanished, harbour-straddling wonder of the ancient world, the Colossus of Rhodes, toppled from its brass eminence by an earthquake more than two centuries before Christ at the age of fifty-six, and sold for scrap eight centuries later by the Saracens to the first man able to muster nine hundred camels to carry it away___

  The hammer came down.

  The Lump split with a crack as loud as a pistol shot, and collapsed on the ice into three rocking, irregular pieces. Farnsworth dropped the sledge and knelt. Fred, shrugging his shoulders, walked over to stand beside him, looking down fatalistically.

  “Well?” Farnsworth said in a tight voice. “See anything?”

  “Nothing much,” Fred said slowly. “If there are ripple marks in there, the rock ought to have split in a flat plane—the ripples form on the surface of the ocean-bottom, so there ought to be a sharp division between the top of that layer and the bottom of the next. Of course, maybe you didn’t hit it in the right spot.”

  “I’ll hit it again. Where would you suggest?”

  “I’d suggest leaving it alone,” Fred said, with the first trace of asperity I had ever heard from him. “It’s going to be of no use to you as a pile of rubble.”

  “It’s no use to me as anything else if it’s only a sedimentary meteorite,” Farnsworth growled. “I’ve already got one of those. What’s that squiggle there?”

  His gloved finger traced over about an inch on one of the exposed faces. I couldn’t see what it was; from where I was standing, it was masked by the rest of his hand.

  “I don’t know,” Fred said. He got reluctantly down on his own knees. “It’s a flaw of some sort. Maybe part of a dendrite, though they’re anything but common in graywacke. Odd.”

  The geologist’s hand groped about on the ice until it encountered the mallet. Farnsworth put the chisel into his other hand. He set the edged tool carefully and hit it a short, firm blow.

  The fragment of the Lump parted again, this time in an even plane, as though Fred had knocked upon a door. He peered intently at the exposed surfaces, his nose only a few inches from the fresh rock.

  “There are your ripple marks,” he said at last, almost in a whisper. “But you can discount them now___”

  “Discount them!” Farnsworth shouted, springing to his feet. “Great Jehosephat, Fred, we’re going to rub every nose in the world in those ripple-marks! I knew we had to split that goddam Lump!”

  “Listen to me, Geoffrey,” Fred said, his voice even lower and more intense than before. “There’s something here that’s far more important than ripple-marks. Look here.” He pointed. “Look closely. Do you know what those are?”

  Farnsworth dropped down again and leaned over the rock. I still could not see what it was that they were looking at, but the expression of dawning, fanatical triumph on the Commodore’s face was more than frightening enough. He said nothing for a long time; then, huskily :

  “Fossils, Fred?”

  “Yes,” the geologist said. “Fossil crinoids. Two of them. And possibly two or three tentacles from a third.”

  I overcame my paralysis of alarm almost instantly. I don’t even remember running over there; suddenly, I had my nose as close to that opened face of the Lump as either of them.

  I am no geologist, but I’ve seen fossil crinoids before, they’re hard to mistake. They look like miniature dust-mops with flexible handles. These were small, and one was imperfect. The intact one, too, was atypical, but the differences were not as great as I would have expected, considering where the Lump had come from. When you thought about that gap of millions upon millions of miles of dark vacuum, what was surprising was how much the fossil resembled Palaeozoic types evolved on the Earth.

  Farnsworth had made it. The asteroidal protoplanet was a fact—complete with “evidences of life”.

  Twelve

  THE first one to break the silence was Elvers, who said:

  “That reminds me, Julian. I promised to tell you the legend about the copper dawn.”

  “Not now, for heaven’s sake. This is no time for that. Geoffrey, if——“

  “It’s one of the oldest legends we have,” Elvers said. “People say that in the time before the war there was much more air to breathe than there is now, and it was warmer most of the year, even at night. But as a result of the weapon we used against Nferetet, we lost a lot of that air. That brought the ice-crystal cloud layer down to within sixty miles of the ground. Since then we see the copper dawn almost every day, except during sandstorms, of course.”

  Farnsworth stood up and looked toward the radio igloo, shading his eyes with his hand. “He’s out of his mind,” he said with abstracted irritation. “Jayne’s coming this way. That’s timing it neatly, I must say.”

  I was watching Elvers closely now. He didn’t sound much crazier than he had before, which had been quite crazy enough to suit me; but he was plainly in a terrible state of the trembles. Something seemed to have frightened him profoundly—and what could it have
been but the Lump? Why that should be I could only dimly guess, but he was the only one of the four of us who had yet to move a step closer to it, let alone touch it. Even his face was turned away; he was looking at the horizon, though there was no copper dawn visible now.

  “Is that all there is to it, Elvers?” I said.

  “That’s all there needs to be,” Elvers said in a sing-song voice. “It’s the brand on our brows. It reminds us of all the blood we shed. No, that isn’t all. It reminds us that we will yet have to wade in more blood, to keep the secret.”

  Under those conditions I would have thought it impossible to feel a chill, but I did. “I see,” I said cautiously. “Is that what the voices say?”

  He turned and looked at me blankly. “What voices?” he said. “It’s only a legend. And a warning. That’s all.”

  That was far from enough, but I had no chance to draw him out further, for Jayne was topping the nearest hummock and sliding down toward us.

  “You’re just in time,” Geoffrey said. “We’ve got it, Jayne. We’re made. Come take a look.”

  “In a minute. Listen, I’ve got news, and I couldn’t get it all written out fast enough, there was so much of it. I’ve got to tell you right now before I garble it.” She turned to me with a beaming smile. “Julian, Joe Wentz has been vindicated by your IGY friends—or forgiven, anyhow. It seems that he wasn’t the first man to lose the satellite. He was probably the last man to see it, instead. They backtracked his figures, and it seems that his object came into sight at just the proper place and at the proper velocity, and that it changed course while he was watching it. None of the other observing teams have picked up a trace of it anywhere, and I gather that they’ve really combed the skies for it. I couldn’t get all the details, but the essence of it is that it’s vanished, just as though somebody’s stolen it right out of the sky.”

  Abruptly, Elvers began to giggle. Jayne swung a furious,. astonished glance on him. Without a moment’s hesitation, he ran, scuttling over the hillocks toward the kennels.