Fallen Star (2 page)

“What does she want?”

“I think she’d better tell you that herself,” Ham said. “I don’t mean to be mysterious, I just don’t want to suggest more
than she may want to offer. But if you’re interested in a big, long-term job, she has one for you—that much I can tell you.”

“You pushed her a little, I’ll bet,” Midge said.

“Oh, just a little. I think she had Leonard Engel in mind at first, to be frank. But if you’re interested——”

“I’m interested,” I said promptly. “When do we start?”

Ham grinned at me and polished off his salad before replying.
“Why don’t you and Midge and I go to see her, say Friday night?” he said at last.

“Not me,” Midge said. “That’s too soon for me to get a sitter.” This was a black lie, since we don’t need a sitter; Bethany,
our eldest, sits for the other three, and without demur, since she’s paid for it. But Ham knew Midge well enough to be aware
of how dull she thought all talk about the sciences; he had included her in the invitation
pro forma.

“Well, it’d be just as well not to make a major engagement out of it, anyhow,” he said. “It will have to be pretty tentative.
If she gets called to Washington earlier than she expects, all bets are off. But unless you hear from me in the meantime,
let’s make it for eight-thirty Friday evening.”

“Where?”

“Oh, Ellen has an apartment in town; I thought you knew that.” He leered at Midge, took out his notebook, and wrote down the
address in his spidery mathematician’s handwriting, ostentatiously shielding it with his free hand. He tore out the page,
folded it once, and passed it to me under the tablecloth.

“Pelham, New York,” Midge said darkly. “Dr. Hamilton C. Bloch, noted atom-smasher and home wrecker, was found here today,
partially dismembered. The police, noting the large number of enemies Dr. Bloch had made, reported themselves baffled but
not surprised.”

“Many screen and television stars, advertising agency receptionists, and other professional beauties are reported to be in
mourning,” Ham agreed complacently. “A wreath bearing the legend ‘To Our Secret Prince’, rumoured to be from the entire cast
of the Rockettes up to number twenty-four from the left, is already hanging over Dr. Bloch’s favourite pencil, which has been
placed under glass by the National Society for the Preservation of——”

“I’m going to turn you into an artifact myself in about ten seconds,” I said. “Mercy, Ham. My curiosity-bump is killing me.
Is this project of Ellen’s solely a publishing matter, for Artz? Or does it have something to do with the IGY?”

“Peace,” Ham said solemnly. He lit a cigar and pulled on it gently between swallows of coffee. “Let us now discuss the anti-chronon—in
hushed voices.”

Midge got up. “Excuse me,” she said. “I have to put the brood to bed.”

I think that Midge did want to go, more or less mildly, to the meeting, if only to get a look at Ellen Fremd; but she didn’t
broach the subject to me, and by Friday morning it would obviously have been impossible anyhow. A record snowstorm had begun
to fall during the night, and was already well on its way toward tying up the entire East Coast; we had eighteen inches in
Pelham, and the New York Central train I caught at ten a.m. was the last one to get out of the town until late Sunday afternoon.

As for me, I loathe snow, so probably I should have seen what was coming—something with lots of snow in it. Oh yes, I believe
in the pathetic fallacy too; that’s the personal devil’s favourite trope.

Ellen Fremd’s Manhattan roost turned out to be a small, entirely charming apartment in the east twenties, with a high-ceilinged
living-room, a miniature kitchen, and a real, functional fireplace toward which I gravitated instantly, dripping as I went.
Ham had already arrived, and evidently had tipped Ellen off to my passion for ale. As soon as I was settled by the fire, she
brought me a quart of it, with a chilled mug, a bowl of potato chips and another bowl of some spread which tasted like whipped
Philadelphia cheese with minced clams and nutmeats in it. (I found out later that it consisted of dehydrated onion soup mixed
with sour cream; had she told me that beforehand, nothing could have persuaded me to try it. As it was, I bolted it down most
happily.)

We chatted desultorily while I ate and got my bones warm, saying nothing in particular, but re-establishing our lines of communication.
As I’d told Ham, I’ve always thought Ellen a wonderful girl, and she did not seem to me to have changed much. She was noticeably
slightly older, perhaps, but otherwise just as always: tall, willowy to the point of thinness but not a gram beyond that point,
and with a muted wit that vanishes entirely amongst strangers. She is also quite shy, which mystifies me. Why should a woman
with enough brains to be a historian of science, an editor, a Sarton Medal winner and a frequent contributor to
Isis
, and enough
looks and grace to pass anywhere for a high-fashion model, be shy with strangers and even with acquaintances?

From where I sat by the fire, I could see that there was a small office just off the living-room. My post gave me a direct
view of a magnificent photograph, about four by six, which was hanging over Ellen’s desk. It looked like a star caught in
the act of blowing up—as, in miniature, it was: the photo was an enlargement from a cosmic-ray emulsion-trace, showing a heavy
primary nucleus hitting a carbon atom in the emulsion and knocking it to bits, producing a star of fragment-traces and a shower
of more than two hundred mesons.

Nobody with any sense of the drama implicit in a photograph like that—a record of the undoing of one of the basic building
blocks of the universe, by a bullet that had travelled unknowable millions of years and miles to effect the catastrophe—could
have resisted asking for a closer look. Only afterwards did I begin to appreciate how devious Ellen’s shyness had made her.
She followed me promptly into the office with a fresh quart of ale, toured me around the room to look at the other pictures—all
of them of historic events in recent physics, captured in the traces left by the atomic actors themselves—and had me securely
seated at her desk, ready for business, before I had more than half eaten my way through the hors d’œuvres. I suspected that
Ham had been through this long before, for he watched me walking innocently into the web with a very small smirk, and took
possession of the potato chips and the spread the moment I got up.

Oh, I was a willing victim, I can’t pretend that I wasn’t. The notion of being entrapped by the number two editor of Pierpont-Millennium-Artz
didn’t repel me a bit.

“Julian,” Ellen said seriously while I opened the second quart of ale, “tell me what you know about the International Geophysical
Year.”

“That’s a sizeable task,” I said. “It started July first of last year, and runs to the end of this year, and scientists all
over the world are taking part in it; its over-all purpose is to enlarge our knowledge of the Earth; the projects involved
range all the way from Antarctic expeditions to the launching of satellite missiles. I wrote a piece for the
Times
about it that pretty well sums up my knowledge of it, except for a few pieces of specialized knowledge that weren’t suitable
for
a lay audience, or were of too limited interest for a general discussion.”

“I saw the article. That’s what made me ask Ham whether or not you
were available.
Frankly, the IGY needs competent science writers very badly.”

“Well, I’m certainly interested,” I said guardedly. “Geophysics isn’t exactly my best subject, though.”

“That doesn’t matter. Just about every science imaginable is involved in the project, and no one writer could cover it all
in anything short of a decade. What we need most are historians to cover specific areas of the Year. And we need a man to
write two books about the IGY for the layman.”

“Two
books?”

“Yes,” she said. “One isn’t really about the IGY
per se; I’ll
get to that one in a moment. The other is to be published after the Year is over, explaining what we originally hoped to
accomplish, and how well we succeeded.”

“An official historian, in other words?” Ham asked interestedly.

“No. At least not in the technical sense. The official history will run to a good many volumes, and it won’t be for laymen.
Probably we’ll ask Laura Fermi to do that for us. She has the qualifications, and she seems to be doing a stunning job on
the Fifty-five Atomic Energy Conference at Geneva. What we want is an interpreter.”

I worked on the ale while I thought about it. It took a good deal of thinking. If Ellen meant to offer the post to me, I couldn’t
accept it out of hand. It would mean my committing myself to this one project for some years to come, to the practical exclusion
of income from one-shot sources—the sources from which, ordinarily, I drew the money to keep a wife, four girls and a draughty
fourteen-room house in operating condition.

Finally I decided to say just that, and did. I suspected that Ellen might be a little repelled by the sheer crassness of such
an approach to science, but I was wrong.

“I can’t offer the whole thing to you anyhow,” Ellen said with a faint smile. “Ham reminded me of you——”

I looked a dagger or two at Ham. He blinked benignly at the fire.

“—too late for me to give you still a third book, one explaining what the IGY is for. But I think you may be just
right on the second one, the layman’s book on what we do accomplish. In the meantime, since the IGY can’t pay you a retainer,
I’ve made a tentative arrangement with Artz that will keep you paid until the Year is over.”

“Very good. How does it work?”

“Hold on to your bridgework,” Ham said sleepily.

“We want you to go with the Second Western Polar Basin Expedition,” Ellen said. “You’ll act as historian for it, on behalf
of the IGY; and after it’s over, you’ll also write a book about it for Artz. The expedition itself will probably pay you a
small salary—we aren’t sure about that yet—and Artz will give you an advance on the book. Since you’ll be at the North Pole
a while, you won’t have much need for spending money.

“Now, if you do a good job on the Polar Basin book, I think we’ll have no trouble selling the IGY publications committee on
hiring you to do the post-Year layman’s book. Artz will publish that too; and Pouch Editions will reprint both books. The
total sum involved comes to fifteen hundred dollars in advance from Artz, plus four thousand from Pouch, plus whatever Commodore
Bramwell-Farnsworth is willing to pay you as a salary. That won’t be much, I’m afraid, but it’ll at least be noticeable; the
Commodore likes to do his exploring in style. Call it sixty-five hundred to seven thousand all told. Could you do it for that?”

“Cripes!” I said feelingly. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t blame you for being cautious,” Ellen added. “Considering that the total is conditional. If Artz doesn’t like the
Polar Basin book, you’d be left with nothing but the one advance and the expedition salary.”

“Oh, that doesn’t worry me,” I said truthfully. “I can handle the job—science writing is my business, and I know I can do
it, just like a riveter knows he can rivet. But—the North Pole! I hate winter, Ellen. Let me think a minute. How long would
I be away?”

“About four months,” Ellen said, smiling, “Bramwell-Farnsworth thinks he’ll be ready to leave in late April, and with luck
you ought to be back early in September. That isn’t so bad—you’ll miss the summer, but it isn’t like being stuck in Antarctica
for two years. But it depends partly on the earth-satellite programme. If a satellite isn’t launched successfully by September,
you may have to wait for the
first successful shot. One of the expedition’s purposes is to monitor that shot over the Pole.”

“I see. What else will they be doing?”

“Quite a bit. There’s a lot we need to know. There’ll be fourteen in the party counting yourself, mostly oceanographers; also
astronomers, a radiologist, a cryologist, and, of course, a meteorologist.”

The roster made sense. The northern ice cap does not lie over a continent, as the Antarctic ice cap does; instead, it’s only
a sheet floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean, with no land under it at all. A fully equipped expedition there would
need to take daily depth soundings, to record the fluctuations of the ice cap above the ocean bottom—a procedure that would
not only yield valuable information for studies of gravity, but might also be a life-or-death matter for the expedition itself,
providing new knowledge about the currents in the cold depths, and new knowledge of where crevasses in the cap could be expected
to become numerous at various times of the year. The astronomer, of course, would track the earth satellite. The radiologist,
working with him, would make cosmic ray observations and study the aurora borealis. The meteorologist would in part be there
for the survival of the party itself, but he would also bring back data on the polar weather of immediate practical value
to outfits like Scandinavian Air Lines, which run transport routes, and to the U.S. Air Force to boot. The cryologist, I supposed,
would be interested both in charting ice movement and in studying the chemistry of everything in sight under conditions of
permanent cold.

“It sounds interesting,” I said cautiously. “Also somewhat familiar, Ellen. Wasn’t there some talk in the papers about this
expedition last year? A name like Bramwell-Farnsworth’s sounds familiar at any time, of course, but——”

A peculiar expression which I could not then read—a combination, perhaps, of impatience and enforced suspension of judgment—flickered
over Ellen’s face and was gone.

“They tried to start last year on their own hook,” she said. “All kinds of things went wrong; I think they were under-financed.
But with IGY support they should be able to get better sponsors this year.”

“Why didn’t they have IGY support last year?” Ham asked_

“They didn’t want it, Ham. We offered it, and they turned it down. They said they’d turn their results over to us after the
expedition got back, but they didn’t want to follow the programme we’d laid out for them. They had other researches that they
wanted to prosecute instead, and above all they wanted to go in 1957, not this year. Now, since they didn’t make it last year
anyhow, they’re willing to go along with us.”