by James Blish
“I loathe that crazy little bastard,” Jayne said, staring after him. “Anyhow, they’re still searching, and hoping to pin down the accident or whatever it was. They say it couldn’t have changed course by itself and that the reasons why it did are probably very important. They say they want us to help, and they’ll reinstate us in return for the favour. In short, complete capitulation! The question is, where do we take it from here?”
That wasn’t the question in my mind. Mine was: Who had taken it from there? Staring down at that meteoric fossil, I was already beginning to wonder crazily whether or not I already knew the answer—and if I did, to whom in all the world I could possibly tell it.
I looked over at Farnsworth. His expression made it perfectly clear that he had been following much the same line of thought. It was a mixture of stunned triumph and genuine alarm.
“I his would be funny, if it weren’t so likely to be deadly,” he said. “Jayne, you’d better come and take a look at the Lump here, so you’ll know just what we’re up against.”
She walked around the grappling rig and looked down curiously while Farnsworth and Fred took turns explaining, and I stamped my feet. The rest of me was warm, thanks to the high reflectivity of the ice, but my boots knew I was at the North Pole. So did the end of my nose, despite the rabbit-skin patch on it.
“I think this is great,” Jayne said. “But I don’t see the connection.”
“You tell her, Julian. Maybe she’ll believe it, coming from you.”
That startled me. I couldn’t help wondering exactly what, other than self-knowledge, lay behind his putting it that way, but I could read nothing into his tone but the same grudging humility that the words seemed to be conveying. It seemed unlikely to me that Jayne would have told him what Joe’s death had surprised us at. While it is true that hell hath no fury, etc., she hadn’t exactly been scorned, either. I put my initial split-second inference down to pure jumpiness.
“We’re in trouble with that wild-eyed guess Geoffrey was broadcasting back in the States, until Harriet made him stop it,” I told Jayne. “The War Between Mars and the Asteroids. The science writers themselves never fell for it, but feature desks and columnists love anything that smacks of the fantastic. Just think back to the play they gave to the flying saucer stuff and you’ll see what I mean.”
“I still don’t get it,” Jayne confessed.
“All right, just add up the facts as they stand now. The satellite has vanished, nobody knows why. We have evidence here that shows there was once a large planet, with life on it, between Mars and Jupiter. What happens if we report that evidence now? The silly-season beat will consider the source, dig into the morgue, and the War Between Mars and the Asteroids will be revived instanter. Half the columnists in the country will call us fools and charlatans and publicity-grabbers—and the other half will be hinting darkly that the satellite was stolen by Martians.”
Across the ice, I could see Elvers creeping back, and I wondered who we’d get this time—the trembling paranoid or the humdrum little albino chiropodist. This time he wasn’t running, but as a datum that wasn’t very illuminating.
“It’s an irresistible hypothesis to the kind of brain that goes in for Flabbergasting Stories—or for Frank Scully and Gray Barker and Jessup and Adamski,” I added. “It’s got our boy Elvers, right now.”
“Is that what all that rambling was about?” the Commodore said, startled. “I wasn’t paying very close attention.”
“I wasn’t either, at first. But the point is this : we’ve got to decide whether or not we want to take the risk of letting that idea get into general circulation. The responsibility’s entirely ours, and whichever decision we make may be the wrong one.”
“Why do we need to bring the matter up at all?” Fred said.
“Fred, it isn’t a question of our bringing it up. Geoffrey brought it up in posse months ago. They’ll think he’s trying to bring it up again, as soon as they get our report on the Lump, and then the business about the satellite having been stolen will follow naturally. There’s where the danger lies.”
“Why?” Fred said, more puzzled than ever.
“Well, first, because it might very well trigger a mass psychosis. The world’s ripe for one. But, more important, because there may be a small possibility that it’s true.”
Fred looked stunned, Jayne angry; Farnsworth only nodded soberly.
“Look at it this way, Fred,” the Commodore said. “That explanation has already been laughed at by the press, and it would be twice as funny coming from us now, even if we only imply it, by reporting what we’ve found. If it does turn out to be true, it will probably also turn out to have been very expensive to have laughed it off. Do we want to take that chance—tiny though I admit it is?”
“I think there’s no such chance at all,” Fred said. “But just for the sake of argument—well, if theft is the explanation, maybe it would be vital to get it on the air and get it circulating, whether people laugh at it initially or not.”
“There’s that,” I admitted. “And that’s why I say that no matter which way you look at it, the responsibility’s ours. I can’t think of any group in the world less competent to handle it, but that’s academic now. It’s in our hands, and there’s nobody else we can shift it to.”
Elvers giggled behind me. I jumped as though I had been stabbed. Some time during the course of the argument he evidently had made a wide half-circle on the ice, and had managed to come up behind all of our backs, or at least out of all our fields of view. We were accustomed to ignoring him, anyhow. I whirled around in a hurry, coming within an ace of falling down.
He had his Parkchester with him, the special magazine-loading model they had given us to shoot polar bears and Russians with. Somehow I didn’t doubt that he had kept it well oiled, unlike mine, with the special low-temperature silicones. It was pointed straight at Farnsworth. Elvers’ hands were trembling, but his aim did not vary enough at pointblank range for the trembling to make any difference.
“I am taking responsibility,” he said, his teeth chattering so hard that it was almost impossible to understand him. I remembered that he had never seemed to be bothered by the cold.
“Elvers,” Geoffrey said in a voice like the rumble of a tank, “drop that thing where you stand and go back to the kennels. If I have to take it away from you, I won’t be gentle.”
In that same voice, Geoffrey must at one time or another quelled whole rebellions, even in the middle of jungles and without any other weapon. You had only to hear it to believe that implicitly.
But it had no visible effect on Elvers. “You, Fred,” he said. “Roll those four rocks back down the hole in the ice.”
Fred’s eyebrows went up for a moment. Then he grinned at Farnsworth’s suddenly anguished expression.
“I don’t want to do that,” the geologist said gently. “Neither do you, Elvers—not after you worked so hard, helping us to bring them up. You’re pretty sick. Better give me the gun, and we’ll see if some rest will help.”
“No,” Elvers said between trembling jaws. “Roll those rocks into the water.”
Fred shrugged. “Roll ’em yourself,” he said.
The rifle swerved and went off. Almost instantly, it was boring straight at Geoffrey again.
A rifle designed to stop a quarter-ton polar bear is no weapon to use on a man at point-blank or any other range. Fred Klein, wearing an expression of infinite surprise, jack-knifed and toppled. Elvers had shot him through the heart with the precision of a master anatomist, but the high-velocity bullet had crushed his whole chest.
Every muscle in Farnsworth’s big, clumsy body was as tight as a drum-cord, but Elvers never took his eyes off his boss; he knew who was dangerous and who wasn’t. I was so sick I could hardly stand, let alone act.
“Jayne,” Elvers said. He was chittering like a terrified squirrel. “Those rocks. Down the hole.”
Jayne looked at her husband. The silence could not have been l
ong, but it was the longest I have ever endured. Those pieces of the Lump were a summary of Geoffrey’s whole life as an explorer, and of the reasons why he had very little life as anything else. He could, had he wanted to, have given Jayne’s life for them; she would have allowed it, and he knew it; he needed only to tell her to stand fast. Or he might have given his own, by telling her to obey, and then charging Elvers; he just might have borne the crazy chiropodist down by sheer momentum even in dying. I am not sure how much good I would have been had he tried it, but I think I would have tried hard—and he must have known that he could trust Jayne in any free-for-all. And of course, he could have told her to obey, and done nothing, in the hope of exchanging the Lump for all of our lives, and for the shadow of another chance to take the responsibility that Elvers had pre-empted.
But in fact he did none of these things. He only stood, his face a huge mask of anguish. He looked utterly paralysed.
As that long second ended, Jayne turned her hooded head toward me. There was an anguish in her face, too, but there was no longer any doubt. Her eyes were half closed, and the look that she gave me through her pain was one of such raw sexual complicity that no other man could have failed to be aware of it.
But Geoffrey was not. He did not seem to be seeing anything. Jayne walked slowly to the four pieces of the Lump, swinging her hips, and knelt deliberately, offering me her rear like a cat in heat. At that moment I wouldn’t have given a rouble and a half for Geoffrey Farnsworth, or any other husband in the world.
It took her a while to get the first piece of rock loose from the ice. At last, however, it rumbled to the lip of the hole and dropped, with a noisy splash. Jayne began to chip at the base of the second chunk.
“Not that one,” Elvers said, gritting his teeth. “The other. With the fossils. You’re saving it till last. Do it now.”
I cleared my throat hoarsely, and his eyes darted briefly toward me. “I—I’d better help,” I said.
“No. Not you. You’re going home.”
Jayne dropped the chisel and pushed. The rock with the crinoids in it bumped away from her thrusting hands, hesitated at the brink, and vanished into the black water. She straightened from her crouch, and, still kneeling, put her hands in the small of her back.
“I can’t get the third piece through there,” she said. “All the spray from the first two closed up the hole. It was half frozen already. You’ll have to cut another.”
Elvers craned his neck, but from where he was standing it was obviously impossible for him to see whether or not what Jayne had said was true. It sounded very likely to me, and perhaps it did to him. To make sure of it, however, he would have had to walk crabwise at least twenty paces, and risk losing his clear shots at one or another of us several times because of the rig in the middle. His eyes still glued to the Commodore, he said: “Leave the other pieces there. Get up. All of you spread out in front of me. Turn your backs.”
Jayne got to her feet. I managed to walk on my rubber legs until I was abreast of her.
“You too, Geoffrey. All three of you abreast. And stay that way If you break rank, I’ll shoot.”
“Where to?” I said around the block of ice in my throat.
“The dog igloo.”
I took a hesitant step forward and then stopped. I could still just barely see both the Farnsworths out of opposite corners of my eyes. Neither of them had moved. Geoffrey seemed almost hypnotized.
“MUSH!” Elvers screamed.
We stepped out. Behind our naked backs, Elvers giggled with soft appreciation.
It was a long scramble, since it had to be done as a march, though singly any one of us could have done it in fifteen minutes. I kept looking for a chance to throw myself down the opposite side of a crest and roll out of the line of fire, or for Jayne or Geoffrey to try it; but each time I saw such an opportunity, I realized that Elvers would shoot Geoffrey first in any case—and the moment’s hesitation was enough. Before we had covered half the ground, I was praying that none of us should slip, let alone try to break free.
We were still three abreast when we came down the boundary ridge of the large floe where Elvers had built his kennels, and began to sidle cautiously through a field of staked-out, snarling dogs.
Somehow I had not remembered that we had brought so many. Their shaggy heads began to strain up from the surface of the ice as soon as we began to walk from the rim toward the kennel. Inside the walls of the floe, the whole ice-floor seemed evenly dotted with those dishevelled, masked animal faces, rising from sprawled bodies so powdered over with snow as to look half sunken in the ice itself. Those we passed closest-to burst up grinning and yelping at the ends of their short tethers, and were answered by ragged cries from all through the eternally frozen, cobalt-domed hollow.
Even I could see without doubt that none of them had been fed in a long time, and had been brooding over their hunger in the ice until they had forgotten everything else. One poor beast that I skirted did not get up to snarl at me; he had somehow broken a hind leg, and was gnawing with horrible deliberation at his own gangrenous flank. The animals staked out nearest him were watching him with jealous, straining earnestness, their muzzles half-buried between their buried paws, only their black eyes and noses showing. When at Elvers’ order we filed one by one, on our hands and knees, into their igloo, the whole floe behind us began to howl with their savage woe.
“This is our chance,” Jayne whispered under the howling. “He’s got to come down that tunnel himself. I’ll kick him in the eyes from this side. You can kick the rifle out of his hands. Geoffrey, for God’s sake get your carcass out of line with the tunnel. Julian?”
“Sure,” I said shakily. We waited.
But Elvers did not come for several minutes. Finally, after the muted howling had died back a little, we heard a scrambling in the tunnel. I tried to lift my foot and keep my balance.
A dog came out of that tunnel as though it had been fired from a circus cannon. Neither of us even came close to catching it with a kick. It was going straight for Geoffrey, but we had no time to watch it. Another was already in the igloo, circling around the walls toward me; and another, and still another. Jayne was screaming. She had never told me tint she was afraid of the dogs, and it was too late now. I went down, grabbing blindly, and caught the one that had hit me by the ears. His breath stank of fish and desperation. Teeth came down on my boot at the ankle, and ground the bones together——
A whip-end came out of the boiling air and took the dog whose head I was mauling off my chest, with a tremendous jerk. I grabbed instinctively at my foot, but my aim was bad; while I was still trying to get my gloves around the oily neckfur, the whip sounded in the igloo like the crack of judgment.
I still have no idea how Elvers managed to crack so long a lash inside that igloo, oversize though it was; you need lots of room to bring the tip of a whip past the speed of sound. But at the crack, however he managed it, the dogs flinched and dodged away from all of us. One of themthe one Elvers had snatched free of my hands with the whip—was huddled halfway across the floor, its back broken.
But the other three left it alone. They slunk on their bellies into a huddle, as close to the tunnel as they thought the whip would allow them, and as far away from the corpse. There they crouched panting, flank to flank, their tongues out and dripping, like a litter of pups in high July.
Farnsworth rolled over and sat up, blowing the snow out of his nose and mouth. In the dim light it was hard to tell whether or not he had been hurt; he was breathing in convulsive snorts, but at least he seemed to be conscious. Jayne was leaning against the wall and sobbing, with her hands pressed to her face. I prodded my ankle cautiously, trying to discover whether or not my boot had been bitten through where the pain was. It had; there was blood leaking down inside it around my foot.
Elvers squatted down on his haunches beside the quivering dogs, holding his rifle more easily than he had before. He was still aiming it squarely at Geoffrey.
; “Be careful of the dogs,” he said. “They mind me. They won’t mind you. If you try to rush me, you might make it. But none of us would live through it. These are close quarters —and you shouldn’t excite the dogs outside. They’re not securely tethered.”
“You’re a crazy damned slob of a murderer,” Farnsworth whispered. “I’m going to kill you, Elvers.”
“No,” Elvers said, almost regretfully. “I’m not that crazy, Geoffrey. And I’m not a man at all, not in your sense. I’m a Martian. I find it hard to remember sometimes. We’re all of us a little mad, but we’re not men. I mean all of the people like me—not like you, Geoffrey. You’re not a mad Martian, you’re just a crazy man. I hope you see the difference.”
Geoffrey said nothing. After a moment’s wait, Elvers added:
“And that’s why you’re not going to kill me. No Earthman could. The Nferetetans tried hard while you were all still in caves, and even then they were more powerful than you are now. But we killed them instead. Understand, I don’t want to have to kill you. You forced it on me. It’s your own fault. I want you to understand that. We don’t like to kill people. We’re so tired of wading in blood, so tired of drinking blood, so tired of dreaming about blood“
His voice went scooping up into the falsetto. The dogs yelled and scrambled to their feet, but the whip-lash came flicking out of his sleeve—I was now certain, even in this dim green-white light, that he really did keep it coiled up there—and they cowered back again after a moment’s grim dance. The answering howl outside the igloo, however, rose and rose, like snowflakes picked up by a twister, flowering into an echoing fountain of savage dolor and falling drop by drop, petal by petal, back down on the whole Polar Basin. You have never known a countryside until you have heard it howl.
The dogs were sitting against him now, one on one side, two on the other, like broken wings in the dimness. I could think of nothing but Elvers’ five words back beside the hole Not you. You’re going home. In the igloo they were not a promise, but a judgment and a sentence.