Fallen Star (14 page)

The rest of us got at the thousand-headed chore of just keeping the camp in operation. There were no real hitches. Even the
satellite’s flight over the Pole was unremarkable, though it did cause a brief flash of alarm. I never saw it, of course,
but what was more important, I never did get any signal from it, though Cape Canaveral reported it launched on schedule, orbital
height 676 miles, etc., and Harry Chain got every necessary figure to us at the Pole within minutes after he received the
relay from Alert. I ran the figures to Wentz, and tracked along them faithfully myself, but no signal came through.

Full of apprehension, I ran back to Wentz’s igloo. He laughed in my face.

“We got it cold,” he said. “The radio transmitter in it must have cut out, that’s all. Nine gravities of acceleration are
hard on instruments. But it came right up over the horizon, right on schedule, going like a bat out of hell, and I had it
dead centre in my field of view for about forty degrees. I would have had more, if I’d been able to run the ’scope outdoors,
but not in this wind; there would have been too much tremble. The seeing was lousy as it was.”

“Did you get the figures?”

“Sure. Here they are—send ’em on.” He grinned suddenly. “I also got five plates. There’s nothing we can do with ’em here,
but once we got back to Farnsworth’s snowbuggy we can develop them and nail the thing down to within three seconds of arc,
maybe closer.”

“Well, thank God. Good for you, Joe. I was scared for a minute there. I never got a peep out of it, and I was tracking it
along the same co-ordinates, I’m positive.”

“Radio astronomy,” Wentz said solemnly, “will never replace the horse.” And again he tapped his own chest.

“What are you going to do next?”

“I’m going to start spotting emulsions all over the snow around here. We’ve lost Hanchett, but
somebody
has to do the cosmic-ray work. Who knows, maybe there’s an anti-chronon
or two scooting around here waiting to be trapped. I’m a little rusty at that stuff; time I got back into practice.”

He pinned the tarps back up very carefully, put a dew-cap over the business end of his telescope, stowed his oculars away
in their velvet-lined cases, and began to unpack foil-covered photographic plates out of a small, lead-lined box. I doubted
that anything would come of this operation, for the plates couldn’t have been part of Hanchett’s equipment; and if they were
Wentz’s, they were old, and hence useless. Emulsions for cosmic-ray work preferably should be prepared on the spot and used
within twenty-four hours; cosmic rays, especially the heavy primaries, go through an ordinary lead lining as though it were
cheese. Nevertheless, I was more than satisfied, and I left Wentz happily programming his experiment.

I went back to the radio igloo and had Jayne put Wentz’s figures on the air toward home, and then walked the necessary half-mile
to see what Farnsworth was up to. He was out in the open, squatting over a glistening fifteen-foot cylinder about four inches
in diameter, which he was splitting longitudinally with an ordinary paring-knife. It was, of course, a core—a thin cylinder
of oozes and clays brought up from the ocean floor. It was remarkably colourful, each layer of sediment carrying its own chalky
whiteness, or mustard-yellow, or mauve or brick-red or blue; here and there, too, a layer was marbled with another colour.

Farnsworth didn’t seem to notice me, so I watched silently. He was now cutting the core like a long loaf of bread, into a
series of chunks, each one representing one stratum. He had almost reached the bottom end of the core when he grunted like
a man who has been struck. The blunt nose of the paring-knife dug into the stiff mud and flicked something out into Farnsworth’s
hand. After looking at it a moment, he rolled it energetically in the snow to clean it, and then held it up to the sun.

In so doing, he saw me. “Hello, Julian. Did we get the satellite?”

“Joe Wentz got it. I missed it clean. I don’t think it was signalling by the time it went over us, but Joe got photos. What
have you got, Geoffrey?”

“Jackpot. Take a look.”

When I was young, a girl I was going with shocked me
profoundly by quoting at a party the article in the old Britannica about the testicle, which it described as being “about
the size and shape of a plover’s egg”. To a chorus of outraged laughter, she had said: “Well, now we know how big a plover’s
egg is.”

The object Farnsworth handed me was about the size and shape of a plover’s egg. It was made of dark brown glass, and its surface
was etched into a series of crawling, rounded ridges, like copulating worms. I had never seen anything like it before, but
I knew enough now to be suspicious of odd bits of glass. I said:

“This is a tektite?”

“Right,” Farnsworth said. “I pulled this core from about seventy-five feet below the surface of the ocean bottom. Evidently
there’s never been a turbidity current this far north; I haven’t found any traces of sand or gravel, so the bottom can’t have
been silted over under the ice-cap since the cap last re-formed. This is a part of the original fall, just as I’d hoped.”

I turned it over in the unvarying sky-glare. “What are these worms all over the surface of it?”

“Water erosion. That’s what all tektites look like if they’ve been imbedded in wet soil since they fell. The glass is slightly
soluble, you see.”

He was elated, that was obvious. I could hardly blame him.

“What next?” I said.

“Well, I’m going to have to date it pretty closely. I get only a rough date from the clay-layer I found it in. With the microscope,
I can check the matrix for shells, but I’m not enough of a biologist to learn much from that; I’ll take photomicrographs home
and let the experts do that part of the work. Maybe they can get a better date by Libby’s radio-carbon system, too. But above
all, I want more tektites, so I can be sure there was a major fall here when the protoplanet broke up. That much, at least,
is a certainty.”

“Why?”

“Because I found this one so quickly,” Farnsworth said patiently. “The odds are hugely against my hitting one this early,
unless the substrata around here are literally riddled with tektites. If I get confirmation, I’ll drop the grapple and see
what we can bring up with a really big bite out of the bottom.”

“You’d do that anyhow,” I pointed out.

“To be sure,” he said, grinning like a small boy. “But it’d be pleasant to be doing it with some assurance that there’s something
down there to grapple for. Come now, Julian, you’re more than three-quarters convinced already; admit it. You could even give
me a hand, if you like.” He stood up. a little creakily.

“Euer Gnaden, zu Befehl.”

“Eh? Oh. Very good. Let’s take some of these sections into the igloo.”

So I got down on my hands and knees and crawled. Unfortunately, there is no other way to enter an igloo. Farndsworth pocketed
a number of the oozing hemi-cylinders he had cut from the core and came huffing down the truncated entrance tunnel after me.

The light inside the igloo was dim and just barely adequate, for only enough light from the overcast sky was transmitted by
the blocks of compressed snow to provide a sort of pearly twilight inside. On a low bench, Farnsworth had a few basic tools
set up a microscope, a scleroscope, a balance, some small bottles of reagents with etched labels. There was also a tripod
with a pot sitting on it, under which a can of Sterno flickered with dismal blue-violet. I pointed to it.

“Coffee?”

“No, just water. It won’t stay liquid otherwise, you know.” Well, I’d have realized it if I’d thought about it a moment longer,
I suppose. The trouble, of course, was that I was still not used to thinking in terms of permanent sub-freezing temperatures,
indoors and out. Farnsworth spread his core-sections on the bench, and then chucked the one in which he’d found the tektite
into the pot.

“Like to screen these?” he said. “What you can do, Julian, is to keep stirring that mess until the matrix is evenly dispersed.
Then pour it all off through the mesh here, and give me anything that stays behind. Then you put a chunk of ice in the pot
and we do it all over again with the next segment.”

He heated a short length of metal rod over the flaming jellied alcohol until it was glowing, and then plunged it at an angle
into the wall of the igloo just above the bench. After three such operations—each one producing a screaming hiss—he had holed
through, and there was a little patch of unobstructed daylight on the surface of the bench. I continued
to stir, watching puzzledly until he slid the microscope into a position where he could catch the incoming light on the instrument’s
substage mirror.

“Have to do that almost every hour,” he said abstractedly. “Just breathing in here makes the bore frost closed.” He heated
a slide briefly, pipetted a few drops of the sludge from the pot on to it, and slipped it on to the microscope stage.

“What’s to keep your little puddle from freezing?”

“Well, it’s got sea water mixed in with it, of course,” he said. “But it’ll freeze soon enough, all the same. Hmm…. Globeriginae.
That’s logical. Wish I knew them by species.”

My own mud-puddle seemed to be completed now, so I picked up the pot with a pair of tongs and poured the contents into a slop-bucket
through the piece of fine screening Farnsworth had indicated. Sure enough, several small solid bits remained on the screen.

“Geoffrey?”

“Mmm?”

“You’ll have to pardon the implication, but—you seem to know pretty well what you’re doing.”

His head came up from the microscope like a shot at that, and I got the benefit of a 250-watt Farnsworth glare.

“What the hell, man,” he said. “I’ve been all over the world, and all my treks have had
some
scientific purpose or other—sometimes many at once, like this one. Do you think people hand out such jobs to total idiots?”

“I guess I thought so until pretty recently, in your case at least,” I admitted. “You do act like an idiot, when you’re not
at work.”

“The world is full of newspapermen whose attention can’t be captured by anything else,” he said. “If you don’t act like an
idiot they’ll turn you into one anyhow. I remember an incident back in the thirties, when the high-and-mighty American Rocket
Society was still in its infancy. They ran some kind of a proving-stand test on a small engine, out on Long Island, one Sunday
afternoon. It yielded quite a lot of data. But all the ARS members in those days were just dedicated amateurs, for all that
many of them were engineers—they had to be amateurs, because there wasn’t any such thing as a profession of rocketry in those
days, at least not in this country.

“So the next day, the New York
Ledger Columbian
gave the test a two-column box on its front page, headlined, ‘Shot At Moon Is Fizzle’. Of course, it wasn’t a shot at the
Moon, or at any place; the engine was tied down to the proving-stand. The text of the story was supposed to be funny. That’s
the kind of reporter whose attention I have to capture—because it’s publicity that pays for my expeditions, and because the
projects I try to investigate are just as off-trail these days as rocketry was back then, so I’m not respectable. I have to
make a fool of myself to keep the press from making fools of my sponsors, and making a mock of my projects. And for what?
Do you think that reporter ever went back to Larry Manning and Ed Pendray and the rest of that little hard core of rocketry
experimenters and apologized for that verminous story? Did it enter his mind when the V-2s began falling on London? Of course
not. That same reporter is probably now yellow-paging one or another of those same men as suspected ‘Reds’ who
might
give away vital rocketry secrets to Russia. That’s the kind of paper he works for, and that’s the kind of reporter he is.”

He stopped and looked down at the little pool of mud on the microscope slide. Even from where I was standing, I could see
that it had turned a dirty yellow; it had frozen while he was talking. He looked back at me.

“What’s more,” he said through his teeth, “you’re another.”

I stood there and took it. The National Association of Science Writers might have expected its past president to make him
a rebuttal speech about how much more responsible science reporting has become since the thirties, but it never even crossed
my mind. Because, you see, I knew he was right.

And suddenly, paradoxically, I wasn’t sorry any more that I’d been at the North Pole when the greatest science story since
nuclear fission had broken. Right here in this Sternostinking foggy little igloo, standing in my sweaty furs, melting a lump
of ice to make another mud-puddle like the one that had stained the ice in brown spatters around the slop-bucket, I was beginning—just
beginning—to learn my trade.

Evidently my expression must have been openly stricken. Farnsworth took the slide from under the microscope’s stage clips
and set it aside. “I can melt the damned thing again,”
he said gruffly. “Let’s see what you’ve got there on the screen. Here’s another chunk for the pot.”

We swapped. I put the new piece of core in the pot, and he set the screen on the bench and turned the small irregular objects
on it over With a pencil-point.

There was quite a long silence; and then, almost under his breath, he muttered:

“Sorry.”

“Forget it,” I said hoarsely. “Find anything?”

“No. These are just ordinary igneous rock, very much water-worn. There are two little shards that might be tektites, but they’re
too small to identify except chemically. And that’s all. Let’s try it again.”

We tried it again, and then again. Nothing came out but pebbles, until the fourth try, when we found one other inarguable,
wormy-surfaced tektite, about half the size of the first. Farnsworth was mildly pleased, but he grumbled all the same; it
could have been a coincidence.

After that, his luck appeared to have deserted him completely, and after the ninth or tenth sample had come out of the pot
he snuffed the Sterno can and just sat in front of the bench for a while, poking moodily at the motley collection of pebbles.
He seemed to have a pet hate among them: a pock-marked, forlorn bit of rock about as big as his first tektite, but not half
as pretty. Finally he picked it up and glared at it, as though attempting to will it out of existence. It seemed so lost in
the palm of his heavy glove that for a moment I thought he’d gotten his wish.