Fallen Star (17 page)

“They won’t.”

“I know they won’t,” she said, sitting up again with sudden energy. “They’ll laugh him to death—maybe even get him up before
an inquest for losing the people in the snowbuggy. But he just doesn’t give a damn. I know how he is when he’s cut off from
home, and finds something he thinks is going to make him a publicity saint—or thinks he’s found something. He won’t listen
to me, let alone anybody else. Once he sees the limelight coming around in his direction, he breaks his arms elbowing everybody
else out into the wings. He can’t stand sharing the glory; he’s wild for
it—all
of it.”

She shook her hair out and glared at me as though I were responsible. I was awake again, but I could think of no suitable
response, or indeed any response at all. The fumes in the air were making it hard for me to think coherently in any direction.
After a moment, Jayne sighed and leaned back on her elbows again, and the number two gripper on her union-suit gave way under
the strain with hardly a sound. The first one had been undone when she had emerged from her snow togs.

“We won’t even dare mention that goddam protoplanet when we get back,” she said in a low voice. “Not unless we can make a
save on the satellite, and get ourselves back in the IGY’s good graces. I’m on your side a hundred per cent now, Julian I’m
only sorry it took me so long.”

“Glad to hear it. I hope it isn’t too late.”

“I really don’t think it is. We’ve got to change Geoffrey’s attitude somehow. Or if we can’t, we’ve got to change the whole
tack of the expedition—over his head if we can’t manage it any other way.”

Wentz stirred and coughed harshly, making my own lungs ache in sympathy. Jayne crossed her feet and got up, losing the gripper
just over her navel in the process, and strode over to him, but he was asleep again. She knelt, her broad rear encased as
tautly as a sausage, and took his pulse.

“How am I supposed to manage that?” I said thickly.

“I don’t know,” she said, coming back and sitting down beside me. “But it’s got to be done somehow. I’m finally getting sick
of the son of a bitch, Julian, I’ll tell you that. I’m nothing to him when the chips are down. He doesn’t even know I exist.
I’m just a publicity-getting machine—until he’s gotten where he wants to go, and then I’m not even good for that any more.
I’m no use to him as a woman even at home; he just laughs at me. God knows I do everything I can, but if he notices, he just
thinks it’s funny. Once I tried to pay him off in Coquilhatville with our head bearer, just to see if he had any reactions
left at all. Jesus, that was awful. I only meant to punish him, but I got more than I bargained for in the boy—it’d been a
long time, anyhow. I suppose they heard me cooing all over the camp. Geoffrey laughed his fat head off.”

She put her hand to her throat and just breathed for a moment, her breasts outlined under the absurd red cloth as though the
suit had been sprayed on her. Then she said : “What I want to know is, what’s in it for me? Sure, I get publicity too, and
I won’t pretend I don’t lap it up. And it keeps me around him most of the time; what the hell, I still love him, I suppose,
though I can’t figure out what for any longer. But it isn’t enough.”

I was frozen to the spot. I knew what she was talking toward now, all right, and the fact that she seemed pathetic to me had
melted the barrier of revulsion I had felt toward her phoniness and her fleshly extravagance. It wouldn’t take much to call
forth from me the answer she was seeking. I tried to remember that it was only another bad means, and that with the Farnsworths
even the ends seldom turned out to be worth much—but that only reminded me in turn that the situation might be even worse
if I ducked, and that in any event I could hardly go on ducking for the rest of the summer without creating a real explosion.
And there was Midge, too, a wavering, blurred image on another planet millions of years in the future….

At the same instant, the pressure lamp’s hissing sharpened suddenly and then quit, and with it went the light, obliterating
everything. I felt Jayne move beside me, and then her hand just above my
knee.
In a last grasp at straws I tried to think of Harriet, but I could not even remember her name.

I went over like a tree, into a wriggling, smothering fury of arms, legs, breasts, and popping. grippers. Her ample mouth
found the angle of my jaw first, and then it was devouring mine, and she was forcing my hand down with hers. In the sudden
darkness it was like being attacked unexpectedly by some completely unknown animal, shaggy and merciless___

Then came the sound, and I panicked completely. It was a long, jagged gasp, loud and inhuman, up in the middle of the stifling
black air. I stiff-armed Jayne brutally back into the bedding and scrambled to my hands and knees, my arms trembling with
strain.

“Jesus Christ, what was
that?”

“Nothing! I don’t care!” She clutched at my shoulders. “Julian, don’t go away

It came again, louder and more awful than before. I broke free and reeled toward the lantern, striking my forehead stunningly
against its base. Somehow I found it and turned the valve up, and got a wooden match out of my pocket. The lamp lit with a
sodden thump and I backed it down to a safe level with shaking fingers.

Wentz was writhing like a figure in slow motion, thumping at his breastbone with his closed fist. His face was a deep suffused
violet. Jayne took one look and surged to her feet in a single smooth lunge, suddenly as oblivious as I was to her three-quarter
nakedness.

We got a tube down his windpipe as fast as we could, and when we turned him over he projected almost a pint of blood-streaked
phlegm on to the floor. But it wasn’t good enough. What he needed was oxygen. But there was none, anywhere in camp. We held
his head hopelessly, trying to make him cough again.

It was all over in less than five minutes.

J
UST
before the war, if you can remember that far back, the Northern Lights made an excursion all the way down the east coast
of the U.S. into New Jersey—an event unusual enough to make the evening news reports on the radio, and to send me and Midge
piling out of our apartment (there were no kids then, and no Pelham house either) to look for them. We saw them, but for all
the impression they made on us, they might just as well have stayed home: they resembled nothing but far-distant, uncertain
anti-aircraft searchlights, far outclassed by the nearer ones being used to the south to attract customers to cut-rate clothing
stores on the Jersey meadows. I was disgusted; Midge, who had expected nothing, only shrugged.

I never saw them again, for of course they’re invisible even at the Pole in the summer. We buried Joe Wentz, instead, under
a day magic to which no writer on the Arctic has ever bothered to give a name, though it is almost always visible if the sky
is clear. It is also often visible from commercial airliners in any latitude, I have since discovered. That morning, I asked
Elvers about it.

“Yes,” he said. “Copper dawn. There is a legend about it. Tell you, some day.”

The term was certainly odd, but I saw the justice in it. The effect is not really a dawn, for it can be seen at almost any
time during the day, just as we saw it at the Pole; but it looks like one. The sky must be blue and open, except for a few
high feathers of ice-crystals; and the ground—“ground” in the painter’s sense, whether it be a polar ice-field or an underlying
layer of heavy cumulus at 9,000 feet—must be white, with hummocks of shadow. Then, on the horizon, you will see low-lying,
tenuous clouds which glow like metal heated in a furnace. They are the high ice-feathers reflecting
back to you the light of the sun overhead, making a false dawn, or a false sunset, in the very midst of daylight.

It had been our first intention to build Wentz a cairn, but Elvers advised against it. He could not guarantee, he said formally,
that any cairn would be dog-proof, let alone bear-proof. The only alternative was to wrap the body in weighted canvas and
bury it “at sea”, through a hole cut in the ice. We cut one some distance from the camp, though actually its location made
no difference whatsoever. We only felt that it did.

We gathered, the five of us …
my God; is five
that
much smaller a number than six? …
without any exact notion of how we were to proceed, or what to say to each other. Jayne and I stood as far apart as possible.
Elvers brought the body, on a sledge pulled by five dogs led by the marten-masked face of Chinook: he and Farnsworth sawed
out the hole in the ice. Then there was a long pause.

“I’d better say something, I suppose,” Farnsworth said.

Nobody nodded. I at least felt that we were a long way from God. Farnsworth pushed his hood back and looked nervously at the
black hole in the ice. Then, slowly, almost whispering at first, he said:

“This is Joseph Wentz, who came here with us to learn something more about the world he was born in. If there is a God and
He’s listening, He made this man. Through him He learned something new about Himself. Now we give Joe to His care, and we
hope it will be better care than we gave him. We did not love him well enough, and we suspected that his Creator did not love
him at all. We hope we were wrong.”

Farnsworth paused and for a moment I thought he had finished; he was quite immobile. But then, his breath white around the
rime-caked fur beside his mouth, he said:

“If You exist, God of the monobloc, and if You are still thinking about men, think of Joe Wentz. He admired Your fine workmanship
in the stars, and never reproached You for spoiling him. We commit his body to Your ocean, in Your name. Amen.”

Farnsworth lifted his head and nodded once to Elvers. The dog man, however, did not seem to get the signal; he was looking
down at the body. For quite a long while we simply stood there, unwilling to speak, while the sun remained suspended in the
blue sky, enswathed in brilliant haloes.
Then, one by one, we began to stir and look resentfully at Elvers.

“There is no God,” he said suddenly, in an empty, even voice. He had not even cleared his throat; he simply began to speak.
Farnsworth took a step forward, but obviously he was as stunned as the rest of us.

“There is no God,” Elvers said. “We know this, because if there were a God, the Divine Hand would have fallen long ago, and
made an end. There is only
das Unaufhoerliche;
it does not permit itself to be understood, and its name is also unspeakable. Here is a man who died because he tried to
speak it.”

“This is no time for a course in German metaphysics,” Farnsworth said harshly. “Do your job, Elvers. You’re here to bury him.”

“If a God made the monobloc, He is surprised and alarmed at what has come out of it,” Elvers said, still looking at the ground.
“He is an epicurean God, fleeing from what He has made; has been gone for aeons; cares nothing for His work; wants nothing
but rest; has never heard of justice. It is proven: He never punishes crime; He cares nothing for stars; why should He care
about men? Joseph Wentz is what we all are, a dog He has turned out into the streets to starve. This God has left us His whole
world on our doorstep.
Bury it,
He said before He left,
before My other dogs shred it.
It
is
only fishheads and seal-blubber and carrion; bury it. And bay at the moon, if you like.”

“Elvers,” Klein said hoarsely, “if you don’t shut up, I’ll kill you where you stand.”

Fred had spoken for me—I certainly could not have spoken for myself. Though I am not religious, I was sweating with fright
as well as rage.

Elvers did not seem to hear; but with a quick, awkward surge of his back and shoulders and arms, he took hold of the horns
of the sledge and heaved them up. The shrouded corpse lurched, slid board-rigid under the rumps of the two drawboard dogs;
and went silently, feet first, into the hole in the ice. For a moment it seemed to want to float; then the canvas around the
chest gave up a blurt of air, and in an instant Wentz was gone, like a child who had never even been born.

“Amen,” Elvers said. He seemed to be subsiding inside his
chafing-suit, like a melting wax statue; with Wentz gone, all the awful boldness of his speech was running down into his shoes
and leaking out on to the ice; he looked, now, even more nondescript than he had looked the first time I had seen him. Fred
Klein, who had been within an inch of smashing his teeth in, pulled back uncertainly.

“Down,” Elvers said, looking up at Fred. “Down he goes. I meant no harm. Fred, I’m your friend. He’s gone; I did my part.’
Didn’t I?”

“You son of a bitch!”

“No, no, not me. He’s gone. Down.
Au secours,
man-god.
Hjaple,
god-dog. Go down and hide; end as a thing that’s how it goes. Please? Have I misunderstood? I didn’t mean; he was dangerous.
Please?”

“Elvers,” Farnsworth said in a scalding whisper, “get out of here. I give you fifteen seconds.”

Elvers straightened to attention like a model soldier. “Of course, Geoffrey,” he said obediently. Then his whip cracked, making
me start violently; the lash seemed to have issued straight out of his sleeve. Chinook bawled, and the other four dogs in
the team lunged to their feet with snarls of alarm.

“Hi!” Elvers shouted. “Mush! Mush, you blubbertubs! Gee! Gee! Mush!”

The sledge was dragged in a great half-circle and went away, picking up speed. Nobody moved until Elvers’ cries to his dogs
were almost drowned out by the wind. Then Fred Klein drew a long, shaky breath.

“Christ, Geoffrey,” he said. “There’s another man gone. What are we going to do now? Lock him up? We can’t—we’ve got nothing
to keep him in, and we can’t spare anybody to mount guard on him.”

“Besides.” I said, “we need him to get back, when we’re through.”

“I can drive dogs,” Geoffrey said grimly. “He’s having a spell, that’s all. I’ve seen it before.”

“Never like this,” Jayne said, her lips white. The Commodore didn’t contradict her. Elvers was now out of sight in the glare,
but his voice suddenly came blowing back over the contorted ice.