Fallen Star (13 page)

He wasn’t pleading. He continued to look at me from under his shaggy eyebrows with an expression that was almost fierce. I
knew that the best thing I could do would be to tell him that I trusted him to do the job by himself, but I was too moved
to play the all-father, especially to this man who was twice as old as I was and who commanded so many skills I could only
admire, never command for myself. There are times when what you know is right feels all wrong, and this was one of them. I
said, “Sure, Joe.”

And so I spent part of my first “night” on the surface of the Arctic Ocean helping to tend a nearly invisible blue bonfire.
It was indeed a party, but such a party as I’ve attended neither before nor since—half solemn and half gay, like a combination
of High Mass and a saint’s-day festival on Mulberry Street. We made a puddle first and lit that, and then we took to tossing
the bottles in whole, with only the caps off. They would whistle like little rockets until the glass cracked, and then there
was a soft explosion as all the rest ignited at once, and the blue fire would rise high enough to make the sky waver.

After a while, Elvers came over from his nearly-completed igloo and squatted down between us, looking at the growing depression
in the ice with slow-blinking curiosity. He made my skin crawl, but you don’t exclude celebrants from this kind of ceremony.

“Hot,” he said at last. “What’s the purpose?”

“None at all,” Wentz said. His hollow eyes were gleaming. “We just thought we’d like to see a fire.”

Elvers nodded, and then went on nodding for what seemed to be a long time, as though his head, once put into motion, had,
forgotten while he thought about weightier matters. Then he got up and went away. Though the wind was rising, he was still
bare-legged.

“That guy,” Wentz said, “gives me the creeps. But he’s good with the dogs, I’ll give him that.”

He uncapped the last bottle and threw it into the fire. The sun had stopped setting and was hovering in the west: midnight.
The bottle went
fffffooosh-plink, phung! We
watched until the flames began to die; then we shook hands and trudged back toward our respective snowmobiles.

Behind us, Elvers was carefully settling into place the capstone of his igloo. It would have no dogs in it after tomorrow.

We had managed to put well over a hundred miles of ice behind us before the disaster, but that left us with nearly four hundred
still unaccounted for. Without really stopping to think about it, I had imagined that getting the rest of the way travelled
by sled would need weeks, all of them filled with privations I would rather not anticipate. Most of these unformed apprehensions
turned out to be wrong, based as they were on nothing more than how much I didn’t know about dogsleds and the North.

It’s true that a team of dogs makes heavy going of dragging a heavily loaded sled into motion, especially if the sled is carrying
not only many full packs, but also a heavy, useless bundle of flesh named Julian Cole. Their blunt claws slip and scrabble
and nothing seems to be happening. Once it is actually under way, however, a sled is the closest thing in the world to a frictionless
vehicle. As soon as its inertia has been transformed into momentum, pulling it is no problem for seven strong dogs, because
it runs not on ice, but on the thin film of, water its weight melts as it passes over the ice.

We had not been sliding forward more than two minutes before Wentz had to trot to keep behind the sled. At this point he stepped
on to the left runner with one foot, still holding on to the high grips at the back, gave a few pushes with the other foot—for
all the world as though making a scooter go—and then was only an additional passenger.

“Mush!”

In all, we did seventy miles on the first day of travel, in
three stints of four hours each, with frequent stops of five minutes or so. This, as I found out thereafter, was an unusual
distance, and due entirely to the fact that the dogs were fresh; but we made the entire run from snowmobiles to Pole in six
days, which by my figuring means that the dogs averaged about seven miles per working hour, or a little better than that.

Oh, it was a cold, miserable trip, and inexpressibly dreary. In contrast to what I had been expecting, however, it was almost
a pleasure, and I would have passed out Dog Yummies every night if I’d had any with me. It was just as well that I didn’t.
The dogs got fed once a day, after work, and that was that—and they didn’t get any igloo to sleep in on the way, either. They
slept staked out, well separated so they couldn’t get at each other and start fights.

When they weren’t working, they were a savage lot, snarling even at Elvers upon very small provocation. He concentrated on
keeping on terms of armed truce with the three lead dogs, apparently realizing that it was hopeless to expect the whole pack
to be obedient. Even then, in the morning it was Elvers’ team that got hitched up first, and then the others. As long as the
two trailing teams knew Chinook was leading on the first sled, the subordinate lead dogs would obey Farnsworth and Wentz well
enough—especially if they had a chunk of ice thrown at them now and then, and got roared at every few moments. Both Elvers
and Farnsworth also had whips, but Elvers seldom used his; as for Wentz, he wouldn’t have known how.

The strangest aspect of all this is that the dogs liked it. When Elvers would kick them awake in the morning they would skulk
and snarl and snap, but they would head for the first sled all the same, and stand stock still while the traces were being
hitched to them. If they tried to take a piece out of Elvers’ ear in the process, he cuffed them—and instead of taking his
hand off, they would lift a foot to allow a chest strap to go under, or show some other astonishing flash of co-operation.
Farnsworth bullied them unmercifully, and they took it, and were working better for him at the end of the six days than I
would have imagined possible on the first day.

It was quite different with Wentz. He had no whip, he seldom cuffed, never kicked, never threw things at them. He never had
to, because they were afraid of him on sight.
If they were co-operative with Elvers and Farnsworth only because they knew they’d be beaten if they didn’t, then it’s impossible
to account for how they behaved with Wentz. They were afraid of him most of all—and they worked very badly for him, constantly
nipping at each other’s hocks, pulling free of the traces, ignoring orders, and turning surlily mule-like when we least expected
it. When that happened a few good kicks in the ribs from Elvers not only brought them back into line, but somehow made them
seem more cheerful (if it’s possible for a Malemute to be cheerful).

I think now that, for the dogs, it was a question of knowing who the boss was. Elvers and the Commodore always smelled the
same, but Wentz, in the grip of his abrupt withdrawal from alcohol, was untrustworthy: a different man every day to their
condemnatory noses.

These dogs are almost all that I remember about our push to the Pole, and I remember that partly because I had my eyes closed
against the wind much of the way, and partly because all the fiction about the North I had read when I was a kid had never
told me how incredibly noisy a dog-team is while it’s working. Eskimo dogs begin to yap and holler the moment they put their
shoulders into the straps and start pulling, and they keep it up all day long, no matter how hard the going is. Such a team
“talks” like a roomful of Siamese cats, until you wonder how it has any breath left. When I think back to those six days,
I “see” very little—a few anonymous men pitching or striking tents, the shapes of sleds, an anomalously hot sun that never
went away; but my God, how incessantly that memory barks and barks and barks !

We made it about noon. We had paused to eat somewhere around eleven, and Farnsworth showed his compass around; it was pointing
almost due south by Wentz’s reckoning. That meant that we were nearly on the plumb line with the magnetic Pole, and couldn’t
be far away from the geographical Pole. Wentz consulted his clock and his log and did a little quick figuring.

“About ten miles to go,” he said.

W
E
were tired, but not exhausted. After another raid on the E-rations, we got busy putting up the tents and cutting ice. I was
assigned to help Wentz build his igloo, about which he had special ideas: he wanted it so ventilated that it was always as
cold inside as it was outside, but at the same time protected from wind and snow. I thought this a most peculiar taste, and
I said so.

“You don’t understand telescopes,” Wentz said, chipping away at a block which he was holding, tailor-fashion, in his lap.
“It isn’t good for them to change temperature rapidly, for one thing, and for another, they don’t work at all unless they’re
at the same temperature as the air they’re looking through. If I allowed my observatory to warm up inside, I’d just have to
cool it down to the outside temperature when I wanted to work—and the drop here would be so sharp that it might ruin the optics
in the process.”

So we built Wentz’s igloo with two crossing slits in it, each one interrupted, necessarily, by the one keystone ice-block
at the summit. Tarps kept the wind and snow out, except when the instrument—a six-inch Newtonian reflector—was in use.

“The transpolar satellite must be near launching now,” I said. “We didn’t exactly intend to get up here this late. Aren’t
they launching it tomorrow?”

“Yes. But she won’t get here until the evening, presuming that she gets into her orbit all right. The equatorial missile was
supposed to have been launched four days ago—maybe Harry Chain’s heard how that one made out.”

“What interests me more is how you’re going to see the one that’s going over here, with the sun up all the time.”

“Oh,” said Wentz, “I’ll see it, providing they get the coordinates up here on time. The trick is partly just knowing
where to look. That’s up to you; you stick to Jayne until those figures come through and then rush ’em right over to me. What
about Minitracking? Is Jayne going to do that?”

“No, I am. I’ll get the antenna set up tonight.” I paused a moment and then added, “Joe, I don’t mean to needle you, but you
know how important this is, don’t you? We can’t afford any flub on it.”

Wentz gave me a long, steady look. His trip across the ice had changed him in a great many ways, but individually I found
it hard to define them. He looked a little more leathery, a little more alert, a little less sardonic, a little less bloodshot
—small changes, and I could not say what it was that I thought they added up to, let alone how well his alcoholic’s soul was
taking to abstinence. One thing was certain : whatever it was that he had been trying to drown by drinking was back full force,
and it was hurting.

“I know what’s at stake,” he said, and tapped his own chest gently three times. “I don’t suppose you ever heard of Wentz’s
Runaway Giant. A star discovered by another man named Wentz. He’s been out of circulation for years. I think I know where
he is.”

I had blundered, I could see that. That was a button I hadn’t meant to touch again; and I made a bad job of pretending I hadn’t.
I gave him a salute, said, “Roger,” and got the hell out of there.

A great deal of work got done during the rest of that day and the succeeding night. You would not believe what eight men and
one woman can accomplish in primitive surroundings, and with too few tools, when their lives and their pride depend upon it.
No less than four igloos, each of specialized design, were built, and the equipment each was to receive un-packed and installed.
Three tents were erected and anchored. Of course, we had no engineer-mechanic any more to man the grapples and the corer,
nor any oceanographer either, but we got the igloo built, and the corer and the grapple and winch set up beside it. That would
be Farnsworth’s baby. The radio shack was for Jayne, and for me; atop it was the dish antenna with which I would catch the
satellite’s identification signal and feed the co-ordinates into the Minitrack system, if I could; Jayne checked my circuits
for me. She turned out to be very good at it, not to my great surprise. The fourth igloo, of course, was for Elvers. It was
standard in design,
but it was the biggest of the lot, and the strangest noises of the whole expedition came from it.

Wentz took movies of some of the building operations and of the completed camp, and Jayne struck a few poses, but she didn’t
seem to be enjoying it much, and I’ll bet that that stuff would have looked ghastly had we ever gotten around to printing
it up. We tried the radio and found that the equatorial satellite had indeed been launched and was a howling success, now
circling the Earth at roughly a thousand miles straight up, in an orbit which varied rhythmically between 40° N. and 40° S.
latitude. The Minitrack net along the seventy-fifth meridian was checking it in on schedule.

Mankind had taken the first step into interplanetary space —and where was Julian Cole, science writer, at the time? Why, at
the North Pole; where else?

In Florida, the Naval Research Laboratory crew was ready to flash us the co-ordinates of the transpolar moon as soon as it
settled into its orbit, which would be about ten minutes after it took off from Cape Canaveral. Harry Chain would then get
them to us, and I’d rush them to Wentz in time for him to set them up on his telescope drive.

Harriet was fine, and there was no news. We dossed down.

I was awakened in the morning by the snoring of the grapple engine, and discovered again one of the singular advantages of
sleeping in virtually unheated surroundings in a permanent winter: you never have to get out of bed into the cold. When you
get up, so does the bed—you’re wearing it.

I wandered into the radio igloo, where Jayne had managed coffee; everyone was there, except Elvers, who was so often absent
from such gatherings that I had almost stopped noticing it. It was warm enough inside for me to slip my hood back, and we
all talked at once—I don’t remember about what. Then Farnsworth left to resume his blind groping on the floor of the Arctic
Ocean. He had already brought up two cores, but apparently they had contained nothing exciting; I recall his remarking that
he’d used them to fill our quota of soil samples for Pfistner. The mention of Pfistner reminded me belatedly of another loss
that we had sustained with the first snowbuggy: a bundle of first-day covers that Pfistner’s Will Claflin, an ardent philatelist,
had consigned to
us for cancellation at the Pole. Claflin had put up the money out of his own pocket, and had published an article about it
in one of the major collectors’ magazines. Obviously there was no point in bringing this up now; in fact, it even amused me,
for stamp-collecting has always struck me as only the next best thing to lint-picking.