Fallen Star (11 page)

“Geoffrey, this is Number One,” his voice squawked abruptly from the radio imbedded in the dash. “Do you read me?”

“Loud and clear,” Farnsworth said into his hand mike.

“Jayne, come in. Do you read me?”

“Loud and clear, Number One.”

“Number Two to Number One,” Farnsworth said. “Let’s check out on the engines.”

“I’m missing Wentz here,” Jayne said. “Hold it—they tell me he’s here. Evidently he slept here. All right, Geoffrey, call
’em off.”

They were as formal as airline pilots in calling in their oil temperature, magneto readings, and twenty other details, but
I was in no doubt that the instrumental ballet was necessary. It reassured me, a little. At last Farnsworth said: “All right,
Number One, it’s your lead.”

There was a moment’s pause through which the three snowmobile engines snarled
sotto voce.
Then Dr. Hanchett sounded his air-horn—a ferocious, inanimate bugling which made my scalp tighten—and his snowbuggy hunched
down and rolled out into the intolerable day. Farnsworth Shifted gears, our own engine roared, and I felt us begin to move
out after him.

“Here we go,” Farnsworth said detachedly. “You look a little nervous, Julian. Did you sleep poorly?”

“I was awake a good deal,” I admitted. “The wind was noisy.”

“Tcha. Here.” He produced a small round pillbox of transparent plastic, rather like a glass model of a young oyster,
from his pocket and handed it to me. It was full of little orange tablets.

“What are these?”

“Tranquizol, ten milligrams. Something Pfistner makes; good for the nerves.”

The hell with that; I handed it back to him. I had successfully resisted the antihistamine craze in the old days when they
were being boomed as cures for colds, and I meant to go right on resisting them now that they were being called ataraxics.
I don’t exactly enjoy my anxieties, but they are my personal property and I mean to keep them.

“I’m not tense, just tired. And I want to keep alert so l can report accurately. That’s why I’m here.”

“Very good.” He tossed one of the orange pills into his mouth without seeming to notice that he had done it, and stowed the
box away. Ahead, Hanchett’s machine crossed the boundaries of the airfield and began to wind north among the heaped drifts.
Farnsworth followed him closely.

“It’s a great adventure, Julian,” he said. “We’re coming closer every minute to one of the greatest riddles in creation. I
know we are. If we could actually solve it….”

“I admire your faith. You’ve even almost convinced me—and I’m a hard man to convince.”

“Want more facts? Julian, I have them by the thousands. You shushed me when I told the newspapers that we might find evidences
of life in any protoplanet fragments we brought up. Did you know then that somebody already has?”

“I didn’t know it,” I said, “and as a matter of fact I don’t believe it.”

“But it’s true. Bacteria were cultured from the interiors of meteorites, more than twenty years ago.”

“Oh, that. I remember those experiments. They were pretty well discredited. The sterile techniques the experimenters used
weren’t foolproof by any means, as I remember it. And the germs themselves turned out to be pretty commonplace—
Bacillus subtilis
, and some other almost universal Earth types.”

“But what do you want a meteoric bacterium to do—sing ‘Stars Fell on Alabama’, or show hotel stickers from Jupiter on its
luggage?” Farnsworth demanded. “I’d like to meet the taxonomist today who’d offer me money that those microbes were one hundred
per cent identical with
subtilis.
Doctor
Wollheim once told me that she wouldn’t certify the ancestry of any bacterial cell without a phage typing, and even then she
still wouldn’t be sure of its orthoclone, whatever that is. What did they know about bacterial genetics in those days?”

“So the experiment was inconclusive; sure. That’s all I’m saying. Ergo, it has no standing as evidence.”

Farnsworth sighed. “You’re indeed a hard man to convince, Julian. Maybe I’d best leave you alone and let you convince yourself.
When I try to convince you, you feel obliged to fight back.”

It was, I realized, a disturbingly accurate capsule analysis of how I think. Obviously Farnsworth was not yet done with surprising
me.

I never knew when we passed over the shoreline of Ellesmere and went out over the ocean itself. The pressure ridges in the
ice along the shoreline extended more than a mile inland, and nearly that far north, too, so that our progress through them
was long. It was not, however, monotonous, for these ridges are comparatively long-lasting, and so are sculptured by the wind
into sharp, interconnected statues and curious shapes full of oval holes, every one opalescent with captured sunlight. It
was like moving through an ocean made, not of water, but of transparent driftwood.

By the time we were facing the serrated ice-field that rolled without visible break over the horizon to the Pole, there was
no land under us at all—nor had there been any for several hours.

Here we were able to pick up speed. Hanchett’s snowmobile accelerated cautiously until he was doing about twenty miles an
hour, with occasional delays as he spotted some ridge or dip that might mean trouble. Alone, he might have been able to go
even faster; but in any train of vehicles there is a whip-crack effect as the last car in line tries to keep up; since the
driver of the last car never decides where it is that he’s going, he loses two or three seconds of decision-time on every
minor turn, and the only answer to that is speed. The result is that if the head car is doing a steady fifty, the rear car
may well be doing ninety at least half of the time—and one of these days we are going to lose a President to just this effect
of a motocade.

Hanchett’s machine, with its eternally revolving radar antenna, was the only thing to look at in the whole snow-bound
world now. What he could be using to relieve his eyes and keep his sense of perspective I could hardly imagine. Now and then
he spoke to us, but always only on business. There was considerable chit-chat back and forth by radio between Jayne’s buggy
and ours, which Hanchett must have heard—since the channel was always open—but he never contributed to any of the purely social
talk; the strain must have been tremendous.

How Farnsworth had managed to get two such different men as Hanchett and Wentz as his astronomers could not be riddled. I
kept thinking, with irritation at the irrelevance of the pun, that they were poles apart.

The sky was clear all day, without a trace of snow. A little spume blew off the surface of the ice, but the snow there was
too hard-packed to impede visibility much. At noon I went below to eat, and found even Harriet less pale. Our progress had
been so smooth that her ready fears were beginning to submerge, and she was parrying Sidney Goldstein’s deliberately outrageous
flirting with almost the old Madison Avenue gusto. By the time the three of us left the galley together for the bridge, we
were quite cheerful; Farnsworth was as pleased with us as a father.

“No news,” he told us, attacking the corned beef sandwich we had brought him with the tilting of the head and the sudden
snap
of a striking turtle. “Mm. I was hun’ry. Parm me.”

We settled into crannies and peered out the broad windshield. Farnsworth did for his sandwich in about five bites and drank
all his coffee. “I saw one of the patrol planes Colonel McKinley was talking about back at the airfield. An F-one-o-one. Elvers
says his dogs are all thriving, and that’s good for huskies. Ordinarily they get carsick within the first hour. Harriet, my
dear, are you still angry with me? You look beautiful. I think you’re beginning to enjoy yourself.”

“I’m not angry,” Harriet said. “I’m glad I came along, I’ll admit it. I just wish I believed you’re going to pay me when this
is all over, Geoffrey.”

“I swear I will. Believe me, Harriet; I give you my oath.” He looked at her with great earnestness for a moment, and then
turned back to his driving. Harriet glanced at me. I tried to convey that I thought Farnsworth meant it, though I was still
reserving judgment despite my growing admiration for
the man; but there are limits to what one can convey with a shrug and a half-nod and a one-quarter smile which tilts in the
wrong direction. Harriet resumed looking through the windshield, the hard violet glare throwing shadows into her eye-sockets
and under her cheekbones. The effect was rather like what happens to women’s faces under fluorescent lighting, but without
the tinge of sallowness; by God, it
did make
her look beautiful.

“Number One to Number Two. Geoffrey, we’re pulling up. There’s a long fissure dead ahead. It’s very heavily faulted. I think
we’d better have a sounding; is Sidney available?”

“Right here,” the cryologist called toward Farnsworth’s mike. “Available Goldstein, at your service.”

Farnsworth backed the snowmobile down into low-low gear and then braked it gingerly. Hanchett’s snowbuggy was immobile about
fifty yards ahead of us, its radar dish going round and round with idiot conscientiousness. I peered through the periscope
and saw Jayne’s machine panting into view behind us.

“Do you want to set off a charge here, Sid?” Farnsworth said. “There’s no reason why we shouldn’t start taking soundings now,
as far as I can see.”

“I want to look at that fault, first. I don’t want to risk making it worse; this is a tidal zone. If I think it can stand
it, why not? That’s what we brought the dynamite for.” He left to get into his parka.

Some ten minutes later, we saw him trudging away across the ice with his kit, absurdly foreshortened, towards Hanchett’s vehicle,
where he stopped and just stood for a while. Then he disappeared into the lead buggy.

We waited, listening to the snoring of our idling engine, while the high thin stillness of the top of the world piled in invisible
drifts around us.

“Number One to Number Two. Sidney votes against firing any charge here. We’ll go ahead about half a mile and stop there for
a test boring. Better sit tight until you pick up the concussion, or we report that there isn’t going to be one.”

“Right. Does it look serious?”‘

“Sidney says no. Maybe I’m being overcautious. But I think we ought to test, before we cross on to what may be thinner ice.”

“Right.” Farnsworth touched a button, and there was a
small muffled explosion underneath us: a shotgun charge, driving a piton into the ice. The piton would act as a sonar probe
to pick up the sound of Sidney’s explosion; the echo should offer a good index of the thickness of the ice at the point of
detonation.

“Jayne, are you set for Sid’s echo?”

“All set.”

Hanchett’s snowmobile began to crawl forward, almost imperceptibly. Its nose went up and then down, and then one rear wheel
lifted high on its independent suspension, as though the squat square animal had mistaken one of the ice-sculptures for a
fireplug. Then the vehicle was climbing up again, out of the fissure. On the other side, Hanchett halted for a moment, and
then resumed creeping.

“All clear,” Hanchett’s calm voice reported.

I was having difficulty in keeping the perspectives straight at this distance. Hanchett’s buggy seemed to be much harder to
see than it should be, at the snail’s pace at which it was moving. Furthemore, it seemed to be dwindling in reverse perspective,
the whiteness rising around its bottom, as though the horizon were intervening behind him and us. I looked at Farnsworth;
he was frowning, obviously as baffled as I was.

The snowmobile stopped again. Nevertheless, it continued to become more difficult to see. The sky was as clear as ever.

“What the hell?” Farnsworth said plaintively. “Doc, are you moving?”

“No,” the radio said. “We’ve developed a slight list. Hold on; we’re checking.”

The white horizon between us and the buggy rose again, with a marked jerk. Now I could see the list. Hanchett’s snowmobile
was tilted slightly to the right, and it was slewed that way a little, too. So was the impossible intervening horizon.

The fault was sliding. I tried to shout and found my throat filled with glue. Farnsworth had seen it, however. He hit the
transfer-case on our buggy into middle-low gear and we lurched forward, our wheels spinning and slipping despite their four-point
drive.

“Grapnels!” he bawled. “Lines! Everybody into suits! Jayne, get under way!”

I turned to beat it down below, but he caught me by the
wrist. “Not you,” he said. “I need you.” The buggy lurched into high-low.

By the time we reached the edge of the fissure, it had tipped entirely free of the pack. Hanchett’s machine rested with absurd
solemnity on the tilting floe for long seconds, like a fly on a wall.

“Hanchett! Back up, in God’s name!”

Hanchett’s rear wheels began to turn backwards, slowly. His machine slid downhill, turning in a slow circle. The ice-ridge
on our left screamed, broke free and reared skyward. Hanchett coolly turned his front wheels in the direction of the skid,
but he had no traction now. The buggy went down the flat slope like a hunaway roller-skate.

It struck the black water on the other side at right angles and fell over. The radio rang like a gong. The ice-cake, freed
of the car’s weight, caught it by the wheels on the other side and turned it over on its back, mangling it like a chunk of
taffy. Someone cried out—I shall never know who, for the sound came out of our radio in a great blare of unfocused despair,
impossible to identify.

Then the snowbuggy dropped straight down into the Arctic Ocean and was gone. There was a great blurt of an air-bubble as it
vanished, flinging up spray that went floating away as ice-crystals on the wind. The ice-floe heeled back toward us, heeled
again, rocked back, groaned, and was peremptorily frozen into place in the white world again, slightly out of true.

There was nothing left but ice, and a peculiar mechanical sound which I identified first, quite crazily, with the peeping
of Hanchett’s guide-beam as he sank. After I identified the sound properly, I felt crazier than ever, for it was not mechanical
at all. It was a human voice, coming from the cab in the buggy behind us.