Fallen Star (15 page)

“What the hell,” he said disgustedly.

I didn’t really know what to say, but keeping my mouth shut is not one of my talents. “As a matter of fact, Geoffrey,” I said,
“I think your luck’s been excellent, for this early in the game. Two tektites and two possibles in one sampling operation——”

“Shut up,” he said suddenly. “I’m sorry, but by the living Buddha, look at this. And it was right under my nose all the time!”

“What? What is it?”

He ignored me; suddenly, he was all arms. He took a hardness test on the pebble, and swore at the scleroscope for not being
a Rockwell tester. He sampled his pebble and ran chemical tests, and swore at his reagent shelf for not being
the complete warehouse stock of Otto Greiner & Co. He rubbed grains off it and scowled at them through the microscope. At
one point, he put a drop of something or other on the pebble and
smelled
it, which made him sneeze and swear like a top sergeant.

Then he sat down and just stared at the pebble. By this time, I was holding my breath, but he didn’t seem to know I was there.
He just turned the pebble over and over again
in
his fingers.

“Geoffrey, what the hell? What is it?”

“It’s what I’ve been looking for—or part of it,” he said in a husky voice. “It’s the last bit. the inner core, of a meteorite
made of
sedimentary
rock. It’s the very first such meteorite ever discovered. When I think of how long it’s been lying down there, dissolving
away …”

His voice traded off shakily. He got up, opened the Sterno can and lit it again. “It goes into a paraffin block, right now
—no, there’s too much helium in paraffin. Let’s see; better make it ordinary ice. My God—cosmic history in an ice-cube ! What
a break !”

I was just about to say,
Are you sure?
when I realized that
I
was sure. I said instead, “But what does it mean?”

“It means,” Farnsworth said gently, “that meteorites come from some place in the solar system where there was once a large
body of water in the liquid state. Ergo, the asteroidal protoplanet—or one of them—was Earth-like at one time. It supported
seas, over a long geological period. It was warm then, warmer than Mars—which means that it had an atmosphere too, and a thick
one, as thick as Earth’s; so it must have been bigger than the Earth. And it means that it was destroyed within the lifetime
of man.”

He looked at me levelly for a moment more, and then added:

“It also means, Julian, that there’s more of it down below, where there’s been less water in the soil—but still quite close
to the bottom. I’m going to bring up some substantial bits of it on the first grab. What are you going to tell your friend
Ellen Fremd and those pinheads at the IGY? Or the newspapers, for that matter?”

I didn’t know; I had to spread my hands helplessly.

“I can suggest a headline,” Farnsworth said. “ ‘Shot At Stars Is Dribble’ would be standard, wouldn’t it?”

It was at that moment, I think now, that I really began to hate him. I had no other choice; he was getting too close to home.

S
INCE
I couldn’t talk to Harriet without the whole world hearing what we said, at least potentially, I had to sweat it out all
by myself. As it turned out, I had plenty of time, for that night the overcast sky turned to mud, and it began to snow. The
fall took less than half an hour to turn into a blizzard, and the blizzard went on for nearly a week, as’ though the whole
notion of snow had just been conceived and the Powers wanted to know how far it could be pushed. At long last I had darkness
aplenty.

During the first three or four hours of that howling maelstrom, I thought of nothing at all but what I was doing, and I’m
sure nobody else had any time for philosophical questions, either. The tents were ballooning alarmingly in the wind, which
ran up to forty miles an hour even then, and we had to secure them with deep-driven pitons along every margin, and rig new
guy-wires to keep their telescopic masts from toppling. The coring and grappling rigs were too heavy to be in danger from
the wind, but they were going to be buried in the snow, and there was nothing we could do about that but spike tarps over
them; we simply lacked the manpower to heave them into any sort of shelter, and we couldn’t hitch up the dogs to help us on
this short notice. Staggering it the gusts, leaning against the wind when it was steady, almost totally blind, we got everything
inside that would go inside, and after that there was nothing we could do but wait it out, nursing our raw faces.

Wentz and I spent that night in the same tent we had been sharing since we had arrived, but it was no longer a tent; it was
a huge and menacing jellyfish. The walls of it fluttered like eardrums; the wires howled and sang; the mast thrummed. The
heat-reflective aluminium foil-cloth lining was almost no good at all, because it was impossible to keep the wind from blowing
around the edges of the entrance-flaps and carrying the radiant heat off as fast as it accumulated. Only the Davy stove kept
us from freezing that week, along
with the pressure lamp we lit when we got up in the morning. That burned kerosene and put out considerable heat—enough to
make it go off like a bomb if we goaded it too far. But it was better than the flying ice and snow, no matter how dangerous
it was. Outside, the temperature was minus 34° and still falling. Had the tent been ripped away over us while we slept, we
would have frozen without waking, as fast as
a
Birdseye flounder.

And so I had nothing to do but either prepare myself for death—a project I could not advance one inch before having to abandon
it to a blind determination to see Midge and the kids again—or else think about the portentous pebble at the heart of Farnsworth’s
ice-cube. The noise and the slashing cold made it impossible to talk to Wentz except in snatches of two or three words, and
he seemed to begrudge even that: I don’t think the storm bothered him much, but something was on his mind; we lived through
that siege like deaf-mutes So I huddled, and thought.

I got nowhere. Like it or not, I believed Farnsworth’s protoplanet notion now, and it didn’t matter that I was beginning to
dislike him personally. That pebble in the ice-cube was
important—it
was, in fact, a great discovery, and there would be confirmation to follow if we all lived through this inferno of ice. And
it was up to me, as the closest thing the expedition had left to a reputable observer, to report the discovery back——

—which would cut my throat, ruin the expedition finally and completely, and insure that the discovery itself would be added
to the long list of historic scientific hoaxes: Piltdown Man, the Cardiff Giant, bioflavenoids for colds, dianetics, the Moon
Hoax, whatever it had been that Wentz had pulled, the Haeckel scandal, the saucer craze, Lysenkoism, ESP, antihistamines for
colds,
Salamandra,
Orson Welles’ Martians, scientology, the chlorophyll boom …a long list, and due to grow longer as the years grew. There would
be no sense in contributing another term to that open-ended series, even if the term were indeed a fact.

No reputable scientist would dare to believe a word out of Farnsworth’s expedition now. The best that he could hope for was
to become another of the Fortean Society’s pre-lost causes. Bad means had totally corrupted good ends.

And yet, and yet … Farnsworth’s discovery was important.
If I failed to report it back, I was through—not at home, but inside my own skin. As for home, wasn’t I through there already?
I couldn’t possibly serve as historian to the IGY for an expedition that wasn’t IGY any longer; nor would Pierpont-Millennium-Artz
be likely to accept a book about the expedition from me now that the IGY tie-in was dead. The second book Artz might have
taken was of course already out of the question, and so was any marginal income I might have made from magazine and newspaper
articles about the trip. Most of the periodical space had already been soaked up by the public relations shops of Farnsworth’s
sponsors, and that was all free copy; I couldn’t hope to get paid for more of the same, unless I told the truth, which would
destroy us all. The best that I could hope for was to get back home more than seven thousand dollars in debt—and I knew better,
now, than to hope to get off so easily.

I slept badly.

The snow slackened off at the end of the second day of the storm, but that was hard to detect for a while. The wind kept on
blowing, picking up the little needles and pouring them in horizontal torrents along the white air. We were still pinned down,
and our kerosene was almost gone; we gave up the pressure lantern and lived in darkness, nursing the oven. It was so cold
that we couldn’t even smell each other, though we both stank mightily, as I was reminded by the puff of air out of my neckline
each time I sat or lay down. On the third day, the wind dropped abruptly to about fifteen miles per hour, the temperature
rose to five above zero, and it began snowing all over again, great fat flakes like those common in temperate-zone winters.

I found that I could talk to Wentz again, and I took full advantage of it to tell him what was on my mind. His face was sallow
as he listened; now and then he coughed.

“I can’t help you,” he said when I was through. “Maybe later. We’re out of fuel, Julian; we can get to the radio igloo on
a line, if you want to try it.”

“Sure. Right away. I’ll be glad to get out of this trap. But, Joe, I’ve got one more question—and you can tell me it’s none
of my damn business if you want to. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was pertinent.”

“I don’t know,” he said, his glance straying slowly to the floor. “I’ll try, Julian. That’s the best I can do.”

“Good for you. What I want to know is: What was Wentz’s Runaway Giant? Was that what they cashiered you for, and why they
took away your degree? Was it
really a
hoax, or did they frame you?”

He looked out from under his hood at me with suffused eyes, and the most frightening expression I had ever seen.

“Hands off,” he said. “It was no hoax, but …
Hands off,
that’s all.”

Good advice, and I should have taken it—but I may never learn to keep my mouth shut. I said, “Then it’s a real star, Joe?”

Wentz coughed until he choked and had to turn away. After a second or so he said in a strangled voice, “It’s not in the catalogue.
Let me alone, can’t you?”

“Sure, Joe, I’m sorry.” I put myself together and pulled my goggles down over my eyes. “Hold the fort; I’ll be back.”

He nodded, still without looking at me, and got his pack out from behind his bedding. He was still working on the straps when
I ducked out into the whirling snowstorm.

I found the line that led to the radio igloo after only a minute of groping, but in that minute I came close to dying. There
was no East or West, no North or South, hardly any up or down—there wasn’t even any time out there. Every atom of the whole
world was in white motion around me, and I had the illusion that I could feel it turning on its axis underneath me. Without
the line, I would have staggered in circles until I froze.

Once I hit it, I crawled along it as blindly as though I were an aerialist sliding down a wire, suspended only from a rubber
bit between his teeth. I knew damn well I shouldn’t be trying it by myself, not even over this short a distance and on a guide-line;
but Wentz certainly had made no move to go along with me, despite the fact that it had been he who had made the initial suggestion,
and I wanted to talk to Jayne too badly to wait his mood out. The trip lasted only a little short of for ever.

Then I was emerging inside the igloo, on my hands and knees. It was warm and light in there, but I was going to have no chance
to talk to Jayne. Her husband was with her, and so was Fred Klein, who was Farnsworth’s tentmate—I did not then know why.
Both the Farnsworths were wearing
earphones and intent expressions; Fred was standing on a packing box, inspecting the circuits on my Minitrack antenna. He
saw me first.

“Here’s Julian now,” he said, climbing down. “You did a good job here, Julian. I can’t find anything wrong, at least. There
just wasn’t any damn satellite to track—that’s the answer.”

“No satellite? But Joe Wentz___”

“God only knows what Wentz saw. Pink terns, maybe.”

“That,” I said, “is a damn lie, Fred. He’s off the stuff entirely. If he says he saw it, he saw it. Hell, he even got pictures
of it !”

“Have you seen them, Julian?” Jayne said grimly.

“Yes. Well, I haven’t seen anything but the plates; he can’t develop them here. But what’s going on here, anyhow? I thought
we were all through with that satellite hassel.”

Farnsworth took off the earphones and gave me a long look. “I don’t really think it makes a nickel’s worth of difference anyhow,”
he said. “But Joe missed it clean, Julian. Look here.”

He handed me a piece of paper torn from a scratch pad. I was getting to hate those chits—and sure enough, this one carried
the same kind of bad news that the one I’d gotten from Harry Chain had, back at the base camp. It said :

ATTN
2
WPBE COMMANDANT STOP FIGURES YOU SUPPLIED FOR TRANSPOLAR SATELLITE TRANSIT CORRELATE CLOSELY BY CHI-SQUARE TEST WITH ROUTE
OF DAILY STOCKHOLM-TOKYO FLIGHT INAUGURATED
1955
BY SCANDINAVIAN AIRLINES STOP NO VISUAL OR MINITRACK OBSERVERS AVAILABLE TO CONFIRM INSIDE EMERGENT CONE THIS UNPREDICTED
TRAJECTORY STOP PLEASE RECONFIRM AND VERIFY WITH PREDICTIONS IF POSSIBLE SIGNED WHIPPLE IGY VANGUARD

My heart sank. I had, I knew, been expecting something of exactly this sort … and yet at the same time I couldn’t even begin
to believe it.

“This can’t be Joe’s fault,” I said. “He picked the thing up just where they said it would cross over us. And he had the telescope
on it all the way—he
couldn’t
have mistaken an airliner’s lights for a celestial object. Airliner riding lights blink, for Christ’s sake—and why would
an SAS plane be flying riding lights in the summer here anyhow?”