Fallen Star

by James Blish

  “I didn’t tell you the whole legend,” Elvers said, in a normal conversational tone. “Actually it’s history, but only oral history. It may have been written down at one time, but of course all those records were destroyed. You see, not so long ago, about fifteen thousand of your years, there were two planets where the asteroid belt is now. One of them, Nferetet, was larger than the Earth, and had a moon nearly four hundred and eighty miles in diameter. The other one, Infteret, was two thousand miles through, about the size of your Moon. There was no life on Infteret; but on Nferetet we could see great seas, and vegetation. And in due course we could see lights at night there.

  “And on one night we also saw lights on Infteret, and we knew that the Nferetetans had crossed the distance between them. This was something that we had known how to do long before, but we had found nothing interesting and the art had declined from disuse. And so we asked ourselves questions, because we knew that the Nferetetans would soon be crossing to our world.

  “It was known that Nferetet and Infteret were doomed, because their orbits were perturbed by Fgath—Jupiter. And so some among us said, wait, and they will die by the hands of the gods. And others said, strike now, for the Nferetetans will seek to escape destruction by overrunning us. So because it was a little thing to move Infteret a little out of the way in its orbit, and a great thing to wait perhaps a million years more for Fgath to do it, we moved Infteret with an art we knew; and in a year it collided with Nferetet, and the lights went out, and both were shattered. And through this feat we also threw great quantities of our own air into space, and many of us died also.

  “But we knew that there is life in many places, and that some day someone might come from some star who would be more powerful than we; and so we took up crossing space again, and found a small colony of manlike beings under a dome on Nferetet’s moon, which still survived; and we destroyed the dome; and also all other evidences. And some day the asteroids themselves will be gone, and then the thing that we did will finally cease to exist, and we will never have done it at all.”

  “And is this,” I said hoarsely, “all that you’ve been thinking about for fifteen thousand years? Just hiding a crime? What else have you been doing?”

  “Nothing,” Elvers said. “What else was there to do?”

  “Bringing your own planet back to life. What are the canals for, if they’re not for that?”

  “There are no canals,” Elvers said. “The marks you see are volcanic faults, left behind by the catastrophe, when we used the great force against Nferetet. We could bring our world back to life if we wanted to. But first there is the evidence.”

  “How does this affect us?” Jayne said in a low voice.

  “We thought we were in control,” Elvers said. “We knew. you were learning spaceflight, and we marked the day on our calendar. We were ready to discourage you. We stole your satellite, as a beginning.

  “But what Geoffrey has done was beyond all prediction. When I heard what he was looking for, my friends and I made every effort to keep him from the Pole, but he was stubborn, and we could not show our hands too far. Very well, I said, he is a fool; let him go. He will only fall over his own feet and kill himself. And if he somehow survives, he will find nothing under that ocean but mud. Yet somehow he has survived, and he has found evidence of the crime. We had thought evidence of that kind existed only in the asteroid belt, and we meant to prevent your ever getting there. But Geoffrey found otherwise, and so all must die but Julian.”

  “Why not me?”

  “You will go back and tell everyone that the expedition found nothing.”

  “And what about you?” I said.

  “I will stay here,” Elvers said. “My friends will take me off. It is quite comfortable here—for me.”

  Thirteen

  HOWEVER I looked at it, I knew I had heard my own death-sentence as well. It did not really matter whether or not I believed a word of what Elvers had said. He had a System. I might have raised all kinds of objections to it, but that would have been a sterile exercise even had I had the time and the courage. Whether I believed it literally or not, it was logical and self-consistent for Elvers, it fittted some of the facts, it provided some of the answers—and above all, he was committed to it. It would have been impossible to talk to him on any other grounds, the objective truth of falsity of the System was almost wholly beside the point.

  In the world inside Elvers’ skull, then, it was obvious that his “Martians” had changed in fifteen thousand years. They were not criminals now, though they still thought of themselves as criminals. They had become fanatical moralists. I didn’t think it would be consistent with this character for them to compound their ancient crime by wiping out the life of still another planet, even to conceal the murder of the first one. (People in the fantasies of madmen are always more self-consistent and logical than real human beings; but then, if this was not just a fantasy, the people involved weren’t human beings, either.) But Elvers was perfectly capable of completing the slaughter of the expedition, if he thought it would do any good. We had Fred Klein’s perfectly real corpse as evidence for that.

  “Elvers,” I said, ‘your friends won’t pick you up. They won’t look kindly on your failure.”

  “Failure? I shan’t fail, Julian.” For a moment I thought he was smiling.

  ‘You’ve already failed. I half suspected that you were going for your gun, when you ran away from Jayne. Just to be safe, I got the report about the Lump out on the air while you were gone. I wish I’d told you that then—it might have saved Fred’s life.”

  “That is not true,” Elvers said tonelessly. ‘That is not true.”

  Jayne cleared her throat. “It’s true,” she said. “I saw Julian run to the shack.”

  “Thanks, Jayne. So if you kill us all now—and you’ll have to, because I’m not going back without these people—that report will remain hanging in the air. It will become one of the great questions of the International Geophysical Year. You know what’ll happen then. Sooner or later, there’ll be a huge force up here, dragging the Arctic Ocean from one side to the other for more meteorites.”

  “They will find none,” Elvers said. But he said it almost like a question.

  “You know they will. Look how quickly and easily we found the Lump. The bottom must be littered with them.”

  “Never mind,” Elvers said. “You will deny all this.”

  “In a pig’s ear I will. I’m staying here; I won’t be home to deny it.”

  “You won’t stay, Julian,” Elvers said. “You’re a reasonable man. You have no stake in Geoffrey’s expedition, or his protoplanet. You won’t want to die for it.”

  “The protoplanet has nothing to do with it,” I told him. “You know nothing about me, Elvers. I knew nothing about myself, as little as a month ago. You’d better strike a bargain with me.”

  “We never bargain,” Elvers said simply.

  “You’d better be glad I’m giving you the chance, this time. It’s in your interest. If you let us live—all three of us—we’ll take the hounds off your trail for good. We will forget the protoplanet.”

  Farnsworth looked up sharply at this, but I ploughed ahead. “When we get back home, we’ll ‘admit’ that our original report was incorrect. In fact, we’ll say that it was a deliberate fraud. You know what the people back home think of this expedition already. They’ll believe an admission of fraud on sight. And then your friends can put their plans for keeping men out of space right back on the original schedule.”

  “You are tricking me,” Elvers said, scowling. “You have a reputation to protect. You will never admit to such a fraud. And Geoffrey would be unable to keep any such promise.”

  At least he was arguing with me; it was a small enough sign, but a good one as far as it went. If he was as human as he looked, the notion of leaving three people alive who knew his power and his triumph would be hard to resist. If he was not human, of course, I had no criteria to go by at all.
r />   “Whatever Geoffrey says won’t matter, if I say it was a fraud,” I said.

  “But why would you do that?”

  “Because I think we’ll win in the long run,” I said. “I think your people have gone frozen in the brains. No matter how powerful they are, they’ve stopped growing; they haven’t thought a single new thought in fifteen thousand years, by your own testimony. That isn’t true of the human race. The human mind is still unfrozen. We’ve only just barely tapped it. I’ve got the utmost confidence in our ability to out-think you people six ways from Sunday, in any long-term competition. But I don’t want to see the two races clash head-on now, while your people are millennia ahead of us technologically. We’ll catch up in due course. Right now, I’m going to keep your secret, for the benefit of my own race—even if it does make me an accessory to your mass murder.”

  I was caught up in the thing myself by the time I finished speaking. For those few moments, I really believed in those Martians and Nfertetans. Perhaps it was just as well. Madmen are intensely suspicous of being humoured, and intensely sensitive to play-acting.

  He started to speak, hesitated, and for the very first time turned his head to look directly into my face.

  That was what I had been praying for all along, but I almost lost the opportunity; the shock of looking into those eyes was paralysing. Yet somehow I got out of my squat and dove headlong for his belly.

  He squealed like a pig. The gun went off with a blast like the breaching of a fortress. I took it full in the face and was instantly blind and deaf. All I could do in the roaring blackness was to hang on, butting and kicking and using my weight as best I could. Even my sense of balance was gone. I was conscious only of blows being rained all over me, and my strength and my breath running out of me. Finally somebody caught me by the hair and threw me back on the ground. It knocked the wind out of me. All I could do was double up and gasp.

  For long ages, nothing else happened at all inside my limited consciousness; I was utterly cut off from the world outside my own wretched skin. Then the roaring in my ears began to subside, and I could hear someone sobbing, far off in the distance. At first, I thought it was myself.

  “Julian. Julian.”

  I moaned and tried to sit up. I didn’t make it.

  “Julian. Wait a minute.”

  “Jayne?”

  “Yes. My God. Are you hurt?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t see. What happened?”

  She sobbed again. “Geoffrey’s …Elvers clubbed him with the gun. He’s d-dead.”

  “Elvers is dead?”

  “Yes, him too. The dogs…. My God.”

  “But how did Elvers——?”

  I was hearing better, but not seeing at all, and my eyes were beginning to burn. I touched my face tentatively. There did not seem to be any blood.

  “He … didn’t hit Geoffrey when he fired. Geoffrey jumped him too. So did I. But my God, Julian—he stood up with all of us on top of him. He swung the gun and…. It was the dogs. They turned on him. I got the gun away from him and hit him on the head and he went down and the dogs came pouring in and—Julian, Julian, my God, they ate him ——“

  I put out my hand to her, and, by accident, found her. I held on until her sobs began to subside slightly.

  “He had it coming,” I said. “Can you help me up? l’ e got a bad foot. And I—think there’s gunpowder in my eyes.”

  After a moment, I felt her arm under my shoulders. She helped me gently to a sitting position.

  “Julian,” she said. “Why did you do it?”

  “I knew he wouldn’t shoot me,” I said, dabbing at my burning cheeks. “He had to leave somebody alive. If he’d been going to kill us all, he wouldn’t have bothered to tell us his crazy story.”

  No, that was no good; I still couldn’t see. I tried to wash my eyes with snow.

  “So he picked me,” I said, wincing. “But he had the gun on Geoffrey. I had to jump him to give Geoffrey a chance. I thought it would spoil his aim. I—I’m sorry it wasn’t enough. He didn’t look so strong.”

  The snow didn’t work, either. I got painfully to my hands and knees.

  “I know what you did it for,” Jayne said quietly. “But you still didn’t say why you did it.”

  I felt her hand. She guided me to the entrance tunnel and I crawled. After a while. I began to see a little, but only a dim wash of light, without any definition. I lifted my head; since I didn’t bump it, I straightened up. In a moment she was outside beside me and was helping me to stand.

  “I don’t know,” I said. A line came out of my memory, and without thinking, I said it: “E se to mai nel dolce mondo reggi.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know what that means,” she said. “You’d better lean on me, Julian. It’s uphill from here for a while.”

  I began to limp along beside her. I’d been about to say, Nobody knows what that means; but suddenly, I wasn’t sure it was true.

  My hearing came back. My eyesight did not improve at all, and the pain got steadily worse.

  Jayne helped me to stump about the silent ruins, bound my ankle, tried to treat my eyes. She did not want me to walk, but I had to. We were hardly able to speak; but then, there was nothing to say. The debacle had spared nothing.

  Chinook had been killed in the last struggle—whether by Elvers or not we could not decide. Most of the other dogs who had broken free, as Elvers had known they would, to join the carnage in the igloo, were either dead or wounded beyond salvation. Those that had not been hurt were too starved even to howl any longer, and we could not feed them. I was glad I could not look into their eyes. Long ago I would have claimed that their suffering was not my fault.

  Now I knew that all suffering was my fault. The personal devil is not a joke. If you believe in him long enough, he will open your eyes. God doesn’t dare.

  Jayne led me to the last remaining parts of the Lump, and under my direction we destroyed them, with thermit. The intense blue-white light was almost cheerful; while it lasted, I could even see Jayne, as a sort of candle-flame made of shadow. She looked impossibly graceful, and the heat of the thermit bomb struck deeply into my bones, like a blessing. As for the Lump, the ice under it did not melt even under that ardour, but I was satisfied; no eye would ever make sense of the puddle of slag that we left there. Geoffrey’s pebbles and tektites we simply threw out into the snow. When we were through, we had emptied both Geoffrey and Elvers of any meaning their deaths might have conferred upon their lives.

  Then we called for help. I didn’t try to talk to Harry Chain; by then I was in a white universe of pain almost ecstatic in its purity. I heard his voice, and then Jayne’s, and then, I think, Harriet’s voice sobbing hysterically. After that, Jayne and I bedded down together in the radio shack.

  Perhaps we made love. I don’t remember. I would like to think that we did.

  The planes came for us in the “morning”. Word had been going out all night long on the air, warning of a rescue mission, and threatening war and worse if anyone interfered with it. We could have heard that, had we been awake and listening for anything so trivial. But we knew nothing about it until we heard the planes arriving—a huge Paisecki helicopter with a fighter escort—and staggered out.

  The air was full of whirling and roaring. I was taken by both arms; somebody else thumped me on the back, I suppose to encourage me, or maybe even to congratulate me.

  “Jayne! Jayne !”

  I heard her voice somewhere, but the noise drowned out the words. I was propelled gently up a cleated ramp.

  But they did not take off right away. As I found later, they loaded everything that remained: all the torn tents, all the live dogs, the useless apparatus, the sleds, the records, the guns, the trash…

  …and alas, the frozen bodies of Geoffrey and Fred. We had not done with climbing that mountain yet.

  Fourteen

  I AM not going to talk about anything else that is on the public record. That would be senseless. If yo
u like to go to trials, the newspapers and the magazines and the transcripts remain for you to read.

  They won’t tell you, for instance, about the first thing that I saw after I was taken off the Pole. The doctor on the whirlybird looked at my face and said, “Jesus Christ”, and from there on I was in isolation for many weeks. Evidently he knew exactly what it was that he was seeing, and told the radioman, and the radioman told Alert; and so they held us all up—not just me—in Alert, while they worked to get the gunpowder out of my festering eyes.

  During all that time I spoke to nobody but doctors and orderlies, all of whom either did not know the answers to my questions, or would not tell me. Of course, sometimes I asked the wrong questions. Once while the pain after the operation was becoming distracting again, I asked my surgeon, “where are the kids?” I meant Harry Chain and Harriet, and perhaps he would have told me if I’d been able to put it more sensibly; he surely knew that both of them were right there on the base. But the poor booby thought I meant my own children, and he said they were fine, just fine, and I’d … see them in a little while; and of course I forgot Harriet instantly and wept, which upset him terribly. I was not supposed to weep for at least a week yet; it was bad for my eyes.

  But I couldn’t blame him. He was more interested in those grains of gunpowder. If I’d told him that I hadn’t wept for twenty-five years, and that if I waited to weep one more day I would dry up for ever, he would have thought I was crazy.

  And to give them credit, when the bandages came off I really did see pretty well. Things were a little foggy, that’s all, and I’m used to that. Any man who has worn glasses since childhood knows that the world goes foggy when he takes them off, and comes to think of the world as a naturally foggy place. When he finds that the glasses don’t disperse the fog, he shouldn’t be greatly surprised.

  It was the habit of seeing that gave me more trouble. For several days I saw, but I couldn’t interpret what I saw. The doctors and orderlies helped me, most patiently, out of my initial despair. Much sooner than I had hoped, I began to be able to turn all those blobby geometries into nurses and doctors and orderlies and ward-boys and walls and floors and the rest.