Fallen Star
Page 19
Elvers was an adult albino. Human albinoes are doomed creatures who must stay out of the sun as much as possible. When they must venture outside, they have to wear clothing which covers as much of their bodies as possible, and their hands and faces must be coated with a carefully calculated equivalent of sun-tan oil, which screens out every scrap of ultra-violet light from the sunlight that reaches their skin. If they don’t observe these precautions scrupulously, they die in childhood, of cancer of the skin.
Elvers never took any such precautions. As Geoffrey had pointed out to me, even a normally pigmented man would have risked severe sunburn in the togs which Elvers wore at the Pole. What does this mean, except to prove further that the man was insane? I don’t know; but every time I thought of Elvers walking bare-legged and bare-armed under the Polar sun, I remembered that on Mars the sun gives far less heat than it does here on Earth, yet is far fiercer on the UV end of the spectrum because of the thinner air. No albino could have survived there who carried the skin-cancer gene, as all Earthly albinoes do—and as Elvers, going by his behaviour alone, just as plainly did not.
Elvers knew what the copper dawn was, and had a most appropriate name for it. To this day I have yet to encounter any reference to it elsewhere, even in the most likely places. How could Saint-Exupéry have missed it, for instance? But evidently he did.
There is a fair arsenal of additional small-shot I could bring into play here, but this is not a text. I could, I think, make just as good a case for the other side—that Elvers was not and could not have been a Martian. The oxygen tension on Mars appears to be too low to support any animal life above the level of a worm, let alone as complicated an organism as Elvers’ was. Similarly, Elvers was water-based, as we all are; how did he survive dehydration in an atmosphere as poor in water as Mars’ is? It is easier to see how he might have survived freezing—he knew how the Eskimos take shelter and husband heat—but no animal with normal lungs can breathe air which contains no trace of water vapour without being killed by it. And if Elvers was evolved to breathe the atmosphere of Mars, how could he stand our water-heavy air even at the Pole, let alone in muggy New York or Washington? And if he was so different from humankind that he did not breathe at all—after all, we have no autopsy, nor have I been able to run down any record of any physical examination he ever had in his life—then where did he get his energy? He could hardly have been a plant; there are all kinds of fundamental, ineluctable arguments against an autotrophic man.
But I never found any record of his birth, or of his past, until he turned up in the Bureau of Standards in 1950. The government’s habit of secrecy has protected his application papers and back-file from me; but where was he before he worked for the government? An adult albino ought to be a medical prodigy, fully documented in the literature—especially since the way to protect them against cancer sufficiently to allow them to grow into adulthood wasn’t discovered until two years. after Elvers went to work to Washington.
And, of course, there was the Lump.
I have no final answer, though I have been muttering in my beard about it for years. Last month, however, President Kennedy announced that the First Fleet will leave SV-2, the second manned satellite, for Mars sometime within the next six months. The science writers fumed; they hadn’t been told that any such fleet was a-building. I wish I had known about it earlier myself, but I’ve worked as fast as I could to get this all down: the story of the Second Western Polar Basin Expedition, as it happened, by the man whose duty it was to record it.
If Elvers was not, after all, insane, then the First Fleet may have a nasty shock awaiting it when it sets down on the Sinus Roris.
But, on the whole, I think it won’t. Whether Elvers was mad or sane is almost beside the point. I do not think it will be Martians who will bring us to the end of our tether; if we all die, next year or in a million years (give or take ten thousand), it will be by our own hands. Elvers was mad, but that did not make him imported; his madness was familiar.
If you suppose that he was just what he claimed to be, the answer is still the same. I think we will die by our own hands; I am certain that Elvers’ Martians are impotent to kill us. They can have no real idea of what they’re up against; men are not what Elvers—or Julian Cole—thought they were. They might, in fact, even let Elvers’ people live.
And you could call that revenge, if you like.
If you've enjoyed this book and would like to read more great SF, you'll find literally thousands of classic Science Fiction & Fantasy titles through the SF Gateway.
For the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy …
For the most comprehensive collection of classic SF on the internet …
Visit the SF Gateway.
www.sfgateway.com
Also by James Blish
A Case Of Conscience
A Torrent Of Faces (with Norman L. Knight)
And All The Stars A Stage
Black Easter
Doctor Mirabilis
Cities in Flight, comprising:
∼ They Shall Have Stars
∼ A Life For The Stars
∼ Earthman, Come Home
∼ A Clash Of Cymbals (The Triumph Of Time)
Fallen Star (The Frozen Year)
Jack Of Eagles
Midsummer Century
Mission To The Heart Stars
More Issues At Hand
The Day After Judgement
The Duplicated Man (with Robert A. W. Lowndes)
The Issue At Hand
The Night Shapes
The Quincunx Of Time
The Seedling Stars
The Star Dwellers
The Tale That Wags The God
The Warriors Of Day
Titan’s Daughter
Vor
Welcome To Mars!
Dedication
For
FIVE
forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit
James Blish (1921–1975) studied microbiology at Rutgers and then served as a medical laboratory technician in the US army during the Second World War. Among his best known books are A Case of Conscience, for which he won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1959, and the Cities in Flight sequence: They Shall Have Stars, A Life for the Stars, Earthman Come Home and A Clash of Cymbals (published in the US as The Triumph of Time). He also wrote almost a dozen books adapting episodes of the Star Trek television series, and the first original spin-off novel, Spock Must Die!
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © James Blish 1957
All rights reserved.
The right of James Blish to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2011 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book is
available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10406 8
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.orionbooks.co.uk
100%); -moz-filter: grayscale(100%); -o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share