Fallen Star

by James Blish

  But as it turned out, it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference in what order we got off the plane. It was Jayne they wanted, and it was Jayne they got, despite the half-hearted efforts of the field’s military police—who after all had no reason to suspect the pushing civilians of any hostile intent. My attempts to spoil their shots only resulted in their getting several pictures of Jayne and me together, which of course was one of the things they most wanted.

  In some other respects they did not make out well at all. Jayne was hollow-cheeked, sunken-eyed, and still without make-up; a good many newspaper readers were going to find it hard to believe that she was Jayne Wynn, even with “before” portraits for comparison. Nor would she, nor any of the rest of us, say anything but “No comment”. We said it over and over again, scores of times at least, and at long last we managed to bore the boys—otherwise we might be there still.

  On the train to Pelham I had a chance to see what the first editions did with the story. It was not pretty reading. Furthermore, there were so many holes in the background material that I suspected—accurately, as I found later—that we had already been in the papers for a good many consecutive days.

  The story that I read did include about half the text of Lieutenant Church’s release, which was a model as retractions and exonerations go—I could see Col. McKinley’s hand in several of its key phrases—but of course such things never make as good copy as the original allegations do. The Church handout was hooked to the jump of the story, as a three-em shirt-tail. The jump, of course, was on page 36, back with the horoscope and Little Orphan Annie.

  Midge was on the phone in the hallway when I opened the front door. She slammed the handset into its cradle unceremoniously and ran when she saw me. She ran my way.

  In that instant, I knew that I was home.

  “Julian, Julian,” she crooned when she got her breath back. “My God, I was terrified. Are you all right? Are you really all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said shakily. ‘I had all kinds of luck. Where are the kids?”

  “Out in the park. I didn’t want them here, not yet. My God, I still can’t believe it.”

  I held her tighter, and we didn’t say anything for a while.

  Finally I said huskily, “Let’s have a drink to celebrate. I’ve got to sit down or I’ll fall down. It’s hot in here.”

  “No it isn’t. It’s just right.”

  We sat down on the living room couch. I had already forgotten the drink.

  I looked around.

  “It’s different.”

  “I moved some furniture. It gave me something to think about.”

  “Who was on the phone?”

  “The L.-C. They want your own true life story, by-line and all. Ten instalments, ten thousand bucks.”

  “They’re mighty free with the old man’s money now that he’s dead,” I said. “Speaking of which, who’s president now?”

  “We don’t know yet. The hospital isn’t talking.”

  “Oh? He’s sick again?”

  “That’s what they say.” She looked at me. “Julian——”

  “That’s me.”

  “No it isn’t,” she said, and burst into tears.

  I held her and waited. There is never anything else that you can do.

  “It’s me,” I insisted gently, when I thought she could hear me. “Midge, it’s all right. I’m not hurt, and I didn’t shoot anybody, and everything’s going to be all right, and the L.-C. can go drown in its own filth for all I care.”

  “I don’t care about the goddam L.-C.,” she sobbed, clinging to me. “Except for the kids. You should hear what gets said to them. Oh, Julian, Julian, what happened? Is it true about that bitch? Was it all good for anything?”

  “What happened was simple and very ugly,” I said sombrely. “We lost some of our party on the first day out, an unnecessary accident. Another man, one of the best we had, died of pneumonia. And we had a madman among the survivors; he killed Geoffrey, and Fred Klein, and would have killed Jayne too if the dogs hadn’t turned on him.”

  She was looking at me strangely, her eyes wet.

  “And is that all?” she said in a level voice.

  “It’s all that I know for sure, Midge. if you mean Jayne, she’s no bitch—and I probably did sleep with her. I’m not sure about it, but I hope I did. I turned her down once when I shouldn’t have. If I failed her the second time, on the last night, I was a zombie without a drop of compassion in my whole body. I only hope it isn’t so.”

  “Because she’d lost her husband?” Midge said.

  “Because she had lost him years ago.”

  She crossed her hands on her knees and looked at them for a long time. Then, without looking back at me, she said: “I’ll get the drinks.”

  She went into the kitchen. I found that I couldn’t sit still. I got up and walked around the room, touching things. On the mantel above the fireplace, my book on tracer medicine was open to the hard chapter, Operation REScue, the one about Dr. Snell’s basic research on the reticulo-endothelial system.

  It takes a whole history to know what will move a man deeply at any instant in his life. Until my return to Ellesmere, I had not been able to cry since childhood, when I realized that I would never be spanked again after the day I failed to howl about it; but I gained nothing by so crippling myself—nowadays my nose runs instead, which is even more undignified for a grown man. That open book made me snivel as no Polar wind had been able to do. In it I could see Midge, who was bored by the simplest scientific matters, trying to reach me through the nearest thing she could find to my voice, no matter how dull, no matter how remote from the world as she saw it.

  I picked up the book and went back to the couch with it, where I sat turning the pages in a kind of stupor. What comfort could she have gotten from all that stuff about the molybdenum fraction of xanthine oxidase, the potentiation of micrococcal toxicity by mucin, the carbon-14 labelling of metabolic precursors in reticulocyte generation…. What comfort had anybody been able to get from it, for that matter? It was only magic.

  I heard Midge’s toe strike the kick-plate of the swinging door between the dining-room and the kitchen, and then she came in with a jingling glass in each hand. It had taken her a long time to prepare two simple highballs; her eyes were quite red. But she was not crying now.

  She came into the living room and sat down quietly on the floor, leaning against my legs. I took a glass from her. The Scotch smelled good, and though I thought of Joe Wentz as I lifted it, it tasted good too.

  “I thought about it,” Midge said huskily. “And I was right: it isn’t you any longer. You never used to notice other people enough to know what they needed, most of the time. That answers the other question I asked.”

  “What question?”

  ”Whether anything good came out of it all. I—I’m glad you slept with Jayne. I’m glad you went. It’s going to be hard to get used to, living with another man. But I think I’ll like it. A touch of adultery helps make Suburbia go around.”

  “It’s not another man,” I said, baffled. “It’s just only me, Midge.”

  She turned and leaned her arms across my knees. She was wearing her gamin grin.

  “Don’t tell me,” she said. “And I won’t tell anybody else. As far as I’m concerned, you’re an impostor—but it’s a secret between us. Wait till we go to bed tonight. You’re going to have your work cut out for you; my husband hasn’t been officially reported dead yet.”

  And then she burst into tears all over again. I leaned over and kissed the back of her head. I was far from sure that I knew what she was talking about, but I was content to wait. I could hear the four girls coming up the walk.

  The telephone was hardly silent a minute. It was easy enough to shuck off the newspapers; they were still getting nothing out of Jayne, and Harry and Harriet’s marriage gave them something new to write about which drew their attention further away from the expedition rather than closer to it, although I�
��m sure that’s not the way they thought about it. Neither bride or groom told them anything either; and when Jayne gave them half of her salvage money, they vanished, on a honeymoon to some place the reporters were unable to trace. (Only, I suppose, because by that time the whole subject was running rather thin, so the reporters had given up trying really hard.)

  The other calls were harder to take. Most of them were from colleagues in the science-writing racket. Their questions were penetrating and hard to parry;, their commiserations were even worse. Almost uniformly they wanted to know what I was going to do for a living now—which of course I couldn’t answer except by telling the truth, which was none of their business—and What the Hell Really Happened, Anyhow, Julian?—which I couldn’t answer either. Hardest of all to take was the universal assumption that I was passing them on the way down that mountain.

  I could not argue that; furthermore, I didn’t want to. I had already been to see Ham and Ellen Bloch. From then on, my erstwhile colleagues were plucking at the wrong bleeding tree.

  “What the hell really happened, anyhow, Julian?” Ham said, pouring me a tall Pilsner glass. “I went over your man Wentz’s figures a dozen times, and I couldn’t find a thing wrong with them. I had a hard time convincing the IGY, even with Ellen to help, but I wasn’t in any doubt about it myself. Wentz accurately reported an unbelievable event— that’s what it seems to come down to. But can you go on from there?”

  “No,” I said. “I have a theory, Ham, but I’m bound not to tell it. Maybe sometime later—but I can’t promise even that.”

  Ham sat down by Ellen and leaned forward earnestly. Over his shoulder, I could see the plate of the meson explosion in his wife’s office; it made him look as though he were wearing a star-cluster for an epaulet.

  “Are you in trouble, old scout? There’s been a lot of loose talk. The Artz books are by the board—you know that. Not even Ellen could rescue them now. We know; we tried.”

  “You shouldn’t have,” I said, my nose filling. “The whole Second Western Polar Basin Expedition was a preposterous fiasco, and I couldn’t possibly write any book about it anyhow. I just have nothing to say that anybody would believe—let alone anything of any scientific merit to report.”

  “As bad as that?” Ellen said.

  “Just that bad.”

  “I’d believe you,” Ham said gently. “Julian, if you can’t trust me, who can you trust? I am your friend. If you tell me not to say a word to anyone else, I’ll obey completely. But I would like to know what it was all about.”

  I thought about it, turning the Pilsner glass in my hands. I had thought about it before, and nothing new occurred to me now.

  “Ham,” I said, “I’ll tell you before I tell anyone else. And that’s as far as I can go. I’m not concealing any crime, except perhaps in the historical sense—and don’t ask me to explain my qualification. I’m not in trouble with myself. I’m not holding out anything that the IGY ought to know—or at least I think I’m not. I’ll promise this, too : if another satellite disappears, then I’ll open up right away. But I can’t now. I am the only man left in the world who can choose to speak or to keep silent about this, because I’m the only man left who saw—what I saw. And I choose to keep silent, for what I think are good reasons. I can’t say anything else.”

  Ham lit a cigarette, and watched the smoke rise judiciously.

  “You are also the only man in the world,” he said suddenly, “who could satisfy me with that answer. Ellen, what do you think?”

  She only smiled at him. I will never forget that smile.

  “I owe you something,” Ham added, as though there were some connection. “Do you want a job? I’m thinking of chucking the university—it’s up to its ears in weapons development anyhow—and going into the instrument business. I could use a writer—somebody who could write specifications and manuals on the one side, and sales fliers and advertising on the other. I couldn’t afford two men, but one man who could do both jobs would take a big load off my back. And you could advise me on trends; I’m too specialized to watch them, most of the time.”

  Ham had invented his instrument business right there on the spot. If I hadn’t already known him well enough to suspect it on my own, one look at Ellen’s expression would have convinced me.

  “Thanks. No,” I said huskily. “I don’t want to be in the instrument business, at least not on the producing end. I’ve got too many other things to think about.”

  “But, Julian,” Ellen said. “You must be rather short of money.”

  “I’m a little short. It doesn’t worry me; I’m running too large a plant, that’s all. I’ve known it for years, but this is the first time I’ve gotten up the courage to do something about it. Ham, you could help me there, I think.”

  He inclined his head attentively. I took a deep breath.

  ‘I’m going into astrophysics,” I said. “I’ll have to go back to school. I can keep myself and the Pelham crew alive—we’ll sell the house for a starter—but I can’t cover the tuition. Could you help me get a scholarship?”

  “Julian, you crazy Apostate bastard!” Ham said, his eyes glittering. “Of course I can. How is your calculus? Never mind, I’ll teach you that myself; it’s easy. Do you know what you’re getting into? You couldn’t make it into a graduate school, Julian. You’ll have to start way back—maybe even as a freshman. Some of it may have to be done nights. I can bung you into Tech like a shot, but after that it’ll take years of work on your part—maybe ten years. Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure,” I said steadily. “I’m all through with the second-hand stuff, Ham. I want the real thing. I’m starting all over again. That’s how it’s going to be.”

  Ellen got up. “Excuse me,” she said, with great dignity. “I am going to cry.” She vanished into her office.

  Ham’s eyes were like furnaces. “Have you told Midge?” he said.

  “No, not yet. First I wanted to hear what you would say. You could have said that I hadn’t the talent.”

  “Every man,” Dr. Hamilton C. Bloch said to me, “is born with a talent for the truth. It’s not his fault if the people around him teach him to hate and fear it. But it is his fault if he likes it that way, and teaches it to his children. If Midge doesn’t see it that way, you send her to me, and by God I’ll tell her it’s so.”

  “No, Ham,” I said. “I’ll tell her. I’d better go and do it right now. I’m sorry I upset Ellen——”

  “You’re a crazy man,” Ham said gruffly, standing up. “Ellen was way ahead of me. She’ll never forgive you, and neither will I. You say you’re starting all over again. How many growing thirty-six-year-old boys do you know that that’s happened to? Great God, man, don’t you know that we envy you?”

  No, I hadn’t known; and I was not sure why they should. Even from the top of the mountain, it looked like a long road still ahead. But I put my first foot down on it across Ham’s and Ellen’s doorsill, on the way back to Pelham, and somehow I was in no doubt whatsoever that tomorrow—though that be only the next day after today, or the end of the world—I would be walking among the stars.

  Fifteen

  I WAITED a long time to break silence, even to Ham, and I thought I had good reason, just as I’d told him at the beginning. The reason had nothing to do with the fact that I could hardly have gotten anybody to listen to me during the first years. In the fullness of time, Jayne had after all found a third man to love, a man who had been silently in love with her for God knows how many years—young Faber himself; it was the last headline she ever made. I could easily have broken what I had to say through the Faber chain, had I felt urgent enough about it to risk bringing her back into a limelight she no longer either wanted or needed. Or, I might have risked Ham’s reputation; his endorsement, not necessarily of what I had to say, but of my credibility, would have made news all by itself, and insured me an audience among the science writers at the very minimum.

  But I kept silent, because throughout th
ose years I was unable to convince myself completely that Elvers had indeed been only a crazy man who ran about on the Arctic ice-cap in shorts, and thought he was better with dogs than he turned out to be in the pinch. Each time I would settle uneasily back on to that comfortable conclusion, a sharp point came out of it and nipped me.

  Most of the stings were small, but their effects were cumulative. Out of Elvers’ “legend” about the destruction of Nferetet and Infteret, for instance, I remembered that Elvers said the Martian atmosphere had been thinned, until the high ice-clouds were as close as sixty miles from the ground. Sixty miles is a figure that, as a chiropodist whose madness had taken a form suggested by Geoffrey, he would have had to have plucked out of nowhere at random. Yet it happens to be the precise depth of the Martian atmosphere today, as ultra-violet photography shows it. He got the figure from Geoffrey? No, because Geoffrey rounded figures, Elvers never did. Geoffrey placed the diameter of Ceres at about five hundred miles; Elvers said that the moon of Nferetet was 480 miles in diameter, which happens to be—if “happens to be” really summarizes the situation—the precise diameter of Ceres.

  In Elvers’ “legend”, there were two asteroidal protoplanets involved, not counting Ceres. From the point of view of celestial mechanics, two is the minimum number. Geoffrey, the protoplanet bluff, hadn’t known this; how could a chiropodist have hit upon it? For that matter, I have checked the dynamics of such a system, and I’ve asked another man to check me; in particular, I asked my expert at what date two such planets would naturally collide. He placed the date at “about a million years from now, give or take ten thousand.” The agreement with Elvers’ date is good; Elvers’ is just slightly outside my expert’s margin of error.

  (And don’t take my figures for it. My expert is the only expert there is on this subject; if you know the subject, you’ll know just where to find his name in the preceding pages. If you don’t, I have no intention of attaching that very eminent name to so irresponsible a series of speculations as I am engaged in here. I am speaking alone, to myself and for myself.)