by E. K. Jarvis
A Home Among The Stars
By E. K. JARVIS
Copyright © 1957 by E.K. Jarvic
This edition published in 2011 by eStar Books, LLC.
www.estarbooks.com
ISBN 9781612103037
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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This drama — bitter and deadly yet tenderly beautiful — was played against a backdrop of icy mountains by a race returned finally to Earth from
A Home Among The Stars
By E. K. JARVIS
If murder were done, there would be none to know.
Harder was still a quarter of a mile away when the converted DC-3 took off.
He didn't stop running forward. Running was purely reflex now, and behind the reflex was the grim fact that Hardens life depended on reaching the plane before the jato take-off bottles sent it racing forward across the snow on its runners and up into the cold Antarctic sky.
Harder staggered to where the plane had been. He could smell the jato in the cold air, and at once he was engulfed by a swirling backlash of Antarctic snow as dry as confetti. For a while as Harder had covered the last few hundred yards, it had looked as if circumstances, for once, were on his side. He had come on foot across twenty miles of Antarctic wilderness to the U. S. Geophysical Year base where the last converted DC-3 of the expedition waited. He had no notion how long it had taken: time ceased to exist in a world of terrible cold, fierce winds and blinding flurries of ground-snow. Then, at last, he had seen the DC-3. Mather, he knew, would be the pilot, the last pilot of the last plane before Antarctica became snowy wilderness once more, waiting changelessly for the next expedition. And the plane seemed to stand still, as if it were going to wait for Harder. But the propellers were spinning and the jato bottles emitted exhaust plumes. For one long moment the DC-3's runners were stuck fast in the snow; then in a blinding, explosive roar, all the remaining jato bottles were fired simultaneously, the two-engined plane shuddered like a stricken animal, the runners broke free and the plane roared forward swiftly and was airborne in a few seconds. It streaked out of sight.
Harder waved frantically although he knew it was useless. They would never see him in the swirling backlash of snow.
He was marooned at the bottom of the world.
He stopped waving when the plane was a small dot against the immensity of Antarctic sky. With surprising objectivity he wondered how long he could survive alone. Cold, of course, would be his problem, for although the insulated Quonsot huts hadn't been disassembled, there probably was no oil for the heaters. There was plenty of food which had been left, as it always was, for the next expedition. And water was no problem with five million square miles of snow all around him. But the next expedition wasn't coming for two years — and, Harder thought with a wry smile, by then he would be quite dead and as perfectly preserved in the cold dry air as the sides of beef which had been left behind.
At least if I knew why, Harder thought, walking toward the nearest of the Quonsots. The door wasn't locked: there were no marauders to lock out in Antarctica. Harder went inside but did not remove his insulated parka. The dim interior of the Quonsot — Harder saw that it was Major Mather's flight head quarters — was deceptively warm. But it was warm only by comparison with the minus fifty degrees outside. A thermometer on the inside wall, the line of mercury pale in the dim light, gave Harder his death sentence. The mercury stood at five degrees above zero, and it was going down.
Harder went to the oil heater first. The fuel chamber, as he expected, was dry. He spent a fruitless half hour searching for oil, but didn't find any.
So that's it, he thought. The end of Jim Harder, meteorologist. He sat down, wondering how long it would take for him to die. The big danger, of course, was sleeping. If he went to sleep he probably would never wake up, despite the insulated parka, because the insulation of the parka was designed to keep in body heat generated by activity. A day? A week maybe, with all the food he wanted? The strangest part of it was, he didn't feel very cold. But he could explain that: he was a weather expert. He didn't feel cold because the humidity stood near zero — and dry cold can be killingly deceptive.
Yet he couldn't just surrender to the inevitable — it wasn't his nature to do so. He spent several thorough hours searching the six other huts in the compound. There was plenty of food as he had expected. There was absolutely no oil. There was no point in leaving behind oil which would become as sluggish as molasses in the fierce cold.
Harder sat clown in Major Mather's flight hut. He should have been exhausted from his trek, but wasn't. Restlessly, he got up and prowled around from one corner to another.
Not expecting to, he was surprised when he found Mather's log. Then he decided it wasn't so unusual after all: Mather, probably, had sensibly made a copy, deciding to leave the log here in the event that anything it contained could be of value to the members of the next weather expedition two years from now.
Idly, Harder flipped the pages. The log was typed on loose-leaf. One entry toward the end stopped him cold. He read :
"Scoby came back from the weather station on Byrd Peak today. He wasn't very lucid. Exposure had nearly got him, but Doc says he will be all right. He told a grim story, and thank God he was lucid enough to tell it so we wouldn't have to send out a search party after Jim Harder. Poor Harder died in a snow fall.
It happened just under Byrd Peak, Scoby says. A word of warning to those who come after us: these snow avalanches are pretty nearly soundless and can fall without warning from the slopes of the steeper mountains.
"Funny, if I had to name one member of this expedition who seemed damn near indestructible, it would have been Jim Harder. There was something about the man— I don't know what." Harder smiled as he read: he had not realized Major Mather was so observant. He read on: "For one thing, Hardens of that vanishing breed, a loner. According to his Form 20 card, he doesn't have any relatives. And, while he isn't anti-social, he hasn't been as close as the other men. If he had one friend down here, it was Scoby, but even Scoby more than once told the base psychologist in the routine interviews that it was difficult to find anything under the surface in Harder. Anyhow, he was killed under Byrd Mountain, buried alive by snow. He was a strange sort of fellow, and lonely— but a good man. The world needs more of his type." The last pertinent entry on that page made Harder smile grimly. It said:, "Scoby was quite broken up by his death."
There was one more relevant entry — on the final page of the log book. By then the letters of Major Mather's typewriter were faint, but since it was the last entry he hadn't bothered to change the ribbon. Harder read:
". . . leave in about thirty minutes. I still can't stop thinking about Jim Harder's death. At least about the circumstances. It isn't Harder that bothers me: Harder's dead, and there's nothing more you can do for a dead man. It's Scoby. Harder's death affected him strangely. Scoby doesn't remember. Oh, it would be understandable enough if Scoby merely forgot the incidents of Harder's death, for Scoby, so he told us when he first came back, very nearly died out there himself.
"But — Scoby has forgotten Harder completely! It's as if, as far as Scoby's concerned, Harder never existed at all. He remembers taking a dogsled out to the weather station near Byrd, but he thinks he went alone. I asked him about Harder, a
nd he said, 'Harder? Who is Harder?' I didn't press it. When we reach Tierre del Fuego, though, I'm going to ask the psychologist to have a look at Scoby. Poor guy, he must have some kind of repressed guilt feelings, or whatever terms the headshrinkers use. But of course neither Scoby nor anyone in the world could have helped Harder in a snow avalanche. The DC-3 . . ."
Harder closed the book. His fingers were numb with cold. His smile was bleak: so that was Scoby's story, and, conveniently, Scoby had forgotten it.
What, actually, had been Scoby's motives? Harder couldn't answer that question, and since his life was already forfeit, the answer hardly mattered. If he had to guess, though, he would have said that Scoby just didn't have any motives. As Mather had written, Harder was a loner, the last of a dying breed. He liked Scoby as well as he liked any man, but he had never formed any close alliances. He was too busy searching.
Searching — all his life. He never knew for what. But he was restless, he couldn't remain long in one place, he wasn't happy unless he was constantly on the move and, instinctively, as soon as he reached a place he knew this wasn't the nameless thing he had been seeking. The searching, which dominated Hardens life and which finally had killed him because it had brought him down to Antarctica on the geophysical expedition and now he must surely die, was compulsive. If he had a specific goal it was in his unconscious mind: he had never been able to ferret it out. Yet he had had to go on. Looking, looking . . .
But Scoby's story amazed him as much as Scoby's behavior, for it hadn't happened that way at all —
But they had cleaned out the small weather station near Byrd without too much trouble. Scoby a young New Englander, had seemed cheerful enough. It was hard to tell in the cold, for faces were reduced to eye-slits and breathing holes, but at least Scoby hadn't seemed sullen. Nor, certainly, had he reason for a grudge against Harder. It had all happened utterly without motivation.
"About finished, huh?" Scoby had said cheerfully inside the small weather-hut.
"Just about," Harder had replied. "Think the dogs're hungry?"
"Brother, aren't they always?"
"0. K. You check the gear on the sled, Scoby, and I'll go feed Fido."
Feeding Fido, as Harder had termed it, was a job. The frozen cakes of dogfood which the huskies ate, for one thing, had a rotten-fish smell which became apparent as soon as the cakes began to thaw. Also, Fido — a collective term standing for the team of fierce huskies which pulled their sled — could be mighty unpredictable during feeding.
Harder finished the job and went back to find Scoby, who had been busy at the unharnessed sled. The sled was packed and ready to go — but Scoby wasn't there.
Harder frowned. "Scoby ?" he called. "Hey, Scoby, where are you?"
Then, instinctively, he looked up. He saw the ice gleaming buttress of Byrd Mountain, the vane atop the small weather station, the dazzling white expanse of snow — and a shadow.
The shadow stretched out along the snow with the low slanting rays of the sun— this was the beginning of Antarctica's six month long summer, for the weather expedition had been a winter one — and then the shadow moved. Harder whirled and saw Scoby.
But he did not whirl fast enough.
If he lived another fifty years, which certainly didn't seem likely, he would never forget the look on Scoby's face. Almost, he wished it had been a look of hatred or malice. But it wasn't. There was a dreamlike look on Scoby's face, the vague, troubled but not unhappy stare of the sleepwalker.
Then Scoby struck with the locking bar of the weatherstation door. The door was locked because it was exposed to ninety-mile-an-hour winds; the bar was ten inches of hard black steel.
For Harder the world exploded with the dazzling whiteness of eons of Antarctic snow.
When he regained consciousness, Scoby was with him. They were inside the small weather hut, and Harder was bound hand and foot. Scoby still looked — dreamily happy.
"What the hell kind of crazy stunt was that?" Harder roared, straining at his bonds.
"I'm really sorry, Harder. It wasn't my idea."
"No? Then just who the hell's was it?"
"I don't know," Scoby said promptly and almost cheerfully.
"You're going to leave me here?"
"You'll be all right. You ought to be able to free yourself of those ropes in a few hours. But by the time you walk back to the base, we'll all be gone."
"You've gone Arctic-batty," Harder said. The snow and the isolation, he knew, could actually destroy a man's mind. But the expedition's psychologist, in his weekly checkups, was supposed to find and eliminate weak spots . . .
"Oh, no," Scoby contradicted him coolly, as if leaving Harder bound and helpless near Byrd Mountain didn't matter. "I'm not crazy. It isn't me doing this, you see. I've been ordered."
"Who by?" Harder asked sarcastically. "Major Mather?"
Scoby hadn't answered him. He got up, zipped his parka, and opened the door. The winds howled. "Well, this is goodbye, then," he said, extending his mittened hand as if he were going for a short vacation trip, and then withdrawing it stiffly, almost with embarrassment.
"At least tell me why," Harder had urged.
"I — it's orders. I don't know why."
"Whose orders?"
"I don't know whose orders."
"Nor why?"
"No, nor why."
"Scoby, I feel sorry for you. You're sick."
"No. I'm not sick. I'm under order. I know that much."
Then the door had closed and faintly Harder heard Scoby giving his orders to the dogteam. After that the Antarctic silence closed in. Except for the keening of the wind, there was nothing.
It took Harder six hours to release himself, and another hour to restore the circulation to his arms and legs. Then he started out in Scoby's tracks . . .
To arrive moments too late at the base, in time to see the final plane take off without him.
Now, in Major Mather's hut, Harder smiled bleakly. He was thirty-one years old, healthy and strong, and he enjoyed life although — or perhaps because — his had been a strange one.
He had packed a great deal of living into his thirty-one years. He was an orphan and had absolutely no relatives that he knew of. He had never formed any attachments which could keep him from his strange quest: strange because although he was compelled to search, knew that the search, somehow, was the meaning of his life, he never knew what he was searching for. He knew this, though — when he found it, whatever it was, he would know. He would know.
For a moment he thought of Scoby. In a way, Scoby leaving him to die had been like that. Scoby had no motive, yet Scoby had acted from some strange — inner? — compulsion. Like the compulsion which had been driving Harder all his life . . .
He remembered it all now, as if this were the moment before death. World War II. The beaches at Guadalcanal. The Japanese prison camp. Then, after the war, the back pay he had put into a secondhand sloop and the months of labor which had made it seaworthy and the years spent in the South Seas, exploring, beachcombing, searching . . . Papete, Santa Ana, Tahiti, Mau, New Caledonia, the tawny bare girls on glistening coral beaches, the whisper of the wind through palms, the incredibly clear tropic nights, the stars, the brief languid times which always preceded a renewal of the strange search . . .
And then Korea. He had volunteered, of course, almost as if the thing he had been searching for was death. But death didn't claim him and the war, like all wars, had ended.
Harder's quest hadn't. After Korea, he had wandered around the Orient. A year in Hong Kong and Macao, another in Japan, then finally the unexpected decision that it was time he settled down, at least to some kind of profession. For some reason he couldn't fathom, he had selected meteorology.
And once, six months ago, the reason had seemed clear. It had excited him. Meteorology was one of the few professions which could get him down to Antarctica: he might wander the world over and never see Antarctica otherwise; it was as if the lifelong search, in
credibly, had been leading him there. He'd been assigned by the Government Weather Service to the Geophysical expedition, and for the first time in his strange life he had really been excited, thinking — and not knowing why — that the long, so far fruitless search would end at the bottom of the world.
But the six months with the expedition had been a fiasco. Antarctica was snow, cold, endless night, endless waiting. It had been, Harder admitted ruefully to himself, a mistake. He had been angry with himself, too. The long endless wait in Antarctica, the enforced inactivity for weeks on end, with only occasional jobs to do, had left him with too much time for thinking. His search, he decided, was an unconscious ruse: he wasn't searching for anything. He had spent his years seeing the world — and avoiding life. The search had ended in Antarctica, all right, and Harder thought he at last knew why he'd never been able to glimpse the goal. Why he couldn't even come close.
Because, ironically, there wasn't any. Harder had been avoiding responsibility, and that was all.